Bill Shaw, the president and general manager of Tucson NBC-affiliate KVOA, has admitted that his station erroneously reported the death of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the moments following the shooting on January 8.
“When we reported it, NPR, FOX News and CNN had already reported it,” Shaw told the Arizona Daily Star.
He said that KVOA, realizing their error, retracted the report within 10 minutes.
It appears that the reports of Giffords’ death stem from NPR, which had based its report on two unidentified sources.
An NPR spokesperson told the Arizona Daily Star that NPR Capitol Hill correspondent Audie Cornish heard it from a congressional source and Mark Moran, news director of Phoenix public radio station KJZZ, heard it from a source in the Pima County Sheriff’s Department.