SCA wrongfully named News Corp journalist as alleged perpetrator of violent attack on police
Six separate news bulletins across Southern Cross Austereo’s stations in Adelaide incorrectly reported that a journalist with The Advertiser had allegedly committed a serious crime and was on the run from police.
Southern Cross Australia has launched an internal investigation to determine whether human error, or a failure of its AI-fuelled news gathering processes, were to blame for the wrongful naming of a News Corp journalist as the alleged perpetrator of a violent attack on police officers.
On Friday morning, six separate news bulletins across Southern Cross Austereo’s Triple M and SAFM stations in Adelaide incorrectly reported that Dylan Hogarth, a journalist with The Advertiser, had allegedly committed a serious crime and was on the run from police.
“A huge police search is underway across Adelaide after a man charged with attacking officers with a hammer broke free from custody at Queen Elizabeth Hospital wearing a hospital gown,” began one of the offending stories aired on Triple M’s top-rating breakfast program, Roo, Ditts & Loz. “Thirty-six-year-old Dylan Hogarth fled on foot last night. Police say if you see him, call triple-zero immediately.”
Hogarth, a breaking news reporter who has worked for The Advertiser for three years, had filed a story for his masthead earlier on Friday about a police hunt for the wanted man.
Hogarth’s byline was at the top of the story, but somehow, when the SCA-owned stations lifted details from his online story, the radio news teams inserted his name into their bulletins as the alleged fugitive.
Hogarth began to receive a flurry of text messages from friends who had heard the report, and within an hour, the radio stations were issuing online corrections to their mistake.
Robert Iannazzo, executive general manager of SCA’s Western Australia and Adelaide divisions, said an internal investigation into how Hogarth’s name made it into on-air bulletins would begin on Monday.
“Our initial finding is that it was human error,” Mr Iannazzo said, but conceded he could not rule out that the mistake was the result of information sourced by AI. Like many radio stations, SCA uses AI in the production process of its news bulletins.
Advertiser editor Gemma Jones described the wrongful naming of Hogarth as “egregious”.
“It has long been the case that both Triple M and SAFM lift stories broken first by Advertiser journalists without credit and, in this case, in their haste to take our journalist Dylan Hogarth’s work they mistakenly named him as an alleged criminal on the run,” Jones said on Sunday.
“It is mind-boggling that this was simply human error and, while I do accept Austereo has apologised and taken the error seriously, in future I expect Advertiser work to be credited – either by their human employees, or their AI bots.”
Hogarth wouldn’t be drawn on whether he would take legal action over the incident, but said his primary concern was how such an error could make it to air in the first place.
“In an era of misinformation and disinformation, it’s critical for news organisations to be vigilant with the facts and to be careful before they publish,” he said.
In October, a graphic designer on the Nine-owned Sydney Morning Herald was falsely named on Google’s AI Mode as the kidnapper and killer of Cheryl Grimmer, a three-year-old girl who went missing south of Sydney in 1970.
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