Salt Lake City TV News Chokes on Hot Coffee Story

KUTV-2 News in Salt Lake City might have won an award for its Hot Coffee coverage - if it ran at this time last year.

The station's consumer reporter, Bill Gephardt, did a story yesterday on the FTC's recent ruling in the Hot Coffee investigation.

So far, so good, except Gephardt's report makes it sound like Hot Coffee is happening now, instead of last summer. Check out these lines from Gephardt's story, and note the continual use of the present and future (but never past) tenses.

News anchor Mark Koelbel starts the story on its downhill slide when he intros Gephardt with, "Bill Gephardt is here and he says there is a loophole in a kid's game that could actually allow players to see... porn?"

Gephardt follows up with:

"The game is Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. The Federal Trade Commission says the game has a tricky back door area... With a click of the code-word 'Hot Coffee' players can view nudity and play sex games. The Feds say ads and packaging for Grand Theft Auto are misleading..."

"Game-makers Take Two and Rockstar have agreed to make a new version of the game that really is 'M'. That will cost them twenty million dollars to fix this..."

Nice, Bill. Except all of that stuff happened - and was fixed - last July.

We're sure Gephardt does a fine job with those stories about barbecue grill recalls and wedding photo scams, but he certainly fell into a time warp with this one. And, yes, GP does get frustrated with the mainstream media's tenuous grasp on what games are all about. Is it that obvious?

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