The Today Show Leaves Trail of Misinformation

It’s said you should never expect too much from a car built on a Friday. Maybe the same is true for morning television shows.

NBC’s Today Show has left town after its Friday show at Embarcadero Marine Park near Seaport Village in San Diego. If Bryant Gumbel is still writing memos, he should have plenty to complain about.

For openers, the show spent more time talking about Tijuana and looking at Coronado than dealing with San Diego, good, bad or indifferent.

Balboa Park, the Old Globe, the bio-tech pioneers, downtown renaissance--forget it. Problems with water pollution, a dangerous airport, the debate over a proposed border ditch--not interested.

The show started with Jane Pauley herding Maureen O’Connor, Helen Copley and Joan

Kroc into a joint interview with a pointless premise--San Diego is run by women! Women who know each other!!!

It got worse.

A listless Top Gun segment, Willard Scott clowning at Sea World, Jane and Bryant doing a Johnny Carson schtick with zoo animals, and a carping interview with the University of California president about Asian-American enrollment. The symphony helped but not enough.

Among the gems of misinformation:

- UC will soon have an enrollment where minority group students make up the majority (Gumbel). Dead wrong.

- There are no fences along the U.S.-Mexico border (Pauley). Oh, really? Tell that to the Border Patrol.

- Tijuana has a population of about 500,000 (Pauley). Try three to four times that many.

- La Jolla is a charming community close but separate from San Diego (Scott). Arghh.

Monkey Business at Zoo

There are monkeys at the San Diego Zoo. And jackasses, too.

When four Colombian spider monkeys arrived from Venezuela in February, a monkey handler named them Adolf, Mengele, Eva and Frieda. The four had been hiding in the South American jungle, get it?

The names were put into the computer inventory system and the animal file cards, although the names were never displayed to the public.

Since a reporter’s inquiry last week, the names have been erased and three zoo employees are in hot personnel water. Zoo officials had been unaware of the names.

“This is not acceptable, not funny and will never happen again,” said zoo spokesman Jeff Jouett. He declined to identify the employees or say what will happen to them.

Real Life, but Not Hers

Jean Alliece Colston told a gripping tale at the San Diego Crime Stoppers luncheon last week of how her son and daughter were killed by drug gangs in Southeast San Diego.

The room grew quiet and Colston’s voice filled with emotion. Her son was slain in the streets, and her daughter, pregnant with twins, was fatally shot while riding with her in the car, Colston said.

The audience gave a standing ovation as Colston, 46, chairwoman of the newly formed MAGIC (Mothers Against Gangs In Our Community), called for an end to the plague of violence.

People rushed to Colston to offer condolences and admire her courage. She was quoted in news stories about the luncheon, where Sharon Rogers and Joyce Knott also spoke.

There is a problem.

Colston, a resident of Southeast and director of the San Diego College of Retailing, doesn’t have a daughter and her sons are alive and well. She has never had a family member killed by gangs.

Colston told a reporter the day after the speech that she had only been trying to dramatize for her audience the real-life stories that she was told by the mothers of gang victims.

She said she thought her audience would realize what she was doing.

“I wanted to jar people awake, and maybe I did it too well,” she said. “Next time, I’ll either say something at the beginning about these being stories I’ve been told, or make one of those statements from the Crime Stoppers television spots: This is a reenactment.”