A viewer watching WCAU looked a little too closely at a wide shot the station was airing during its coverage of the shooting of two Phildelphia police officers on Independence Day
While the station showed an apartment complex where police were searching for suspects, one local man zoomed in to show what was going on in the individual apartments—and came across a couple making their own fireworks in a way the FCC would not have approved. He then tweeted it out.
“Breaking news. Wait till you all see this,” the person called Ty on Twitter said as he zoomed into a closer look of the apartments being shown on air. “Do you see this?” he asks as his shot settles on a couple. “This is supposed to be breaking news. This is supposed to be breaking news right now. Are you kidding me?”
Ty’s tweet has over 100,000 likes as of this writing.
A quick check of TVEyes showed the station stayed on the shot for about 30 seconds before going to b-roll of the shooting scene. In the station’s defense there’s little chance they saw what was happening.
*To be clear—the station was on a wide shot the whole time. The guy who tweeted the NSFW video shot it off his TV screen. That’s how he was able to capture the zoomed in view. The close up shot alone never aired.