Yesterday I watched a local (San Francisco) television news program mention how the SF Giants missed out for the second time when they failed to sign star player Carlos Correa. They then showed a tweet from some random person condemning this failure and mentioning that the first failure, a few days earlier, was in not signing “Arlon Judge.” The correct name is Aaron Judge.

In case you don’t follow baseball (I don’t), Judge is probably the best batter in the major leagues now and the best-known. He’s a Yankee outfielder and just set the all-time American League home run record, beating Roger Maris’s old record. He was voted the AL’s most valuable player.

Right after showing the tweet, the anchor (female), weather reporter (female), and co-anchor (male) filled the final thirty seconds making chit chat about missing out on Correa and “Arlon” Judge. They repeated the wrong name at least three times. Now I don’t expect everyone to be a baseball fan, but what disturbs me is that so-called news professionals don’t follow the news themselves. They appear to be mere news readers. I would expect someone in that line of work to make a point of paying attention to the sports guy and to national news as well, if for no other reason, so they can pronounce things correctly.

More than that, it shows that behind the scenes the writers and researchers are sloppy and don’t check the facts. Those who write the news at the very least should follow it and not select erroneous tweets or other dubious claims off the Internet as news.