San Antonio Zoo CEO rips local TV station for inaccurate report about porcupine’s death

San Antonio Zoo CEO Tim Morrow scolded a local TV channel on social media Sunday for inaccurately reporting that the city’s beloved zoological park was responsible for the death of an escaped porcupine.

Over the weekend, WOAI-TV, also known as News4SA, ran a story incorrectly stating that the San Antonio Zoo had been cited by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture after an escaped female porcupine was found dead.

“You falsely reported that [the San Antonio Zoo] was cited by USDA for the death of a porcupine,” Morrow wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “This was not San Antonio Zoo. It was an aquarium located in Leon Valley. Please correct and update public.”

As first reported by the Current last week, Leon Valley roadside attraction the San Antonio Aquarium — not the San Antonio Zoo — was cited for the death of the porcupine in August.

“Housing facilities must be structurally strong and maintained in good repair to protect animals from injury and contain the animals,” the USDA wrote in its San Antonio Aquarium inspection report.

Monday morning, roughly 12 hours after Morrow asked for a correction, News4SA Assignment Desk Editor Rocky Garza Jr. responded to the tweet.

“Everything is all fixed,” Garza wrote. “Sorry about the hiccup! It’s been running correctly since our 4:30/5 AM shows.”

Although Morrow appears to have accepted Garza’s apology, other social media users weren’t as kind about the news outlet’s blunder.

“Lazy fact-checking and copywriting,” X user @BNicholas commented.

“These local TV station newsrooms aren’t exactly rigorous,” @elevatorpjtch chimed in. “Factual errors, spelling and grammar errors, bungled graphics, miscues with the on-air people… it’s a lot of cringe.”

It’s not the first time News4SA has taken flak on social media users. The outlet’s parent, Sinclair Broadcast Group, was heavily criticized in 2018 for requiring anchors nationwide to read the same corporate-written condemnation of “fake news” circulating on social media.

“It’s attacking fake news, but really what it’s doing is it’s kind of like the Fox ‘fair and balanced’ slogan,” CNN commentator Brian Stelter said at the time. “It’s a way of saying ‘we’re fair, but everybody else is biased,’ and taking a page out of Trump’s playbook.”

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This article appears in Sep 6-19, 2023.