It’s journalism basic training: If you grab a file story to fill space, or in this case, airtime, make sure the time and other important elements of that story get an update. Failing that, the outlet looks foolish and the audience endures the disservice of misinformation.

CNN this morning reaired a Susan Candiotti segment from last fall, passing it off as new. The report focused on Bodies: The Exhibition, a display of plasticized cadavers at Tampa’s Museum of Science and Industry, which my fiancee and I saw in December.

Anchor Susan Hendricks teased to the segment for a half hour and, by way of introduction, said something to the effect of, a “new” exhibit at a Tampa museum has fierce critics. New? I didn’t find the opening date on the MOSI Web site, but National Geographic reported it as August 18, 2005.

New? The segment was temporally wrong on all counts. Candiotti begins with an exhibit “scheduled to open at a Tampa science museum…” Did I mention that today’s March 25, 2006 - more than six full months after the exhibit’s opening?

Wait, it gets better. “Wednesday, the Florida Anatomical Board voted down the museum’s right to open the exhibit,” Candiotti continues. Um, that’d be Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2005.

And that’s how the segment ends, on a cliffhanger.

The sloppiness of filling airtime with dated material removes another block from trust in the CNN name. I don’t know what CNN’s Saturday morning audience is, but suppose for argument’s sake that 10 million people saw that segment. How many of them do you think were in the Tampa area, and knew the report was hopelessly dated? Maybe 25,000? Maybe 10,000? Whatever the number, I’d wager a paycheck that it was an infinitesimal slice of the viewer pie.

The rest? They now have two incorrect “facts”: that the exhibit is “new” and that the Florida Anatomic Board shut it down before it opened. (For the record, it’s not clear the Anatomical Board has the legal authority to shut down a museum exhibit so their vote, in effect, served as a protest.) The reality is that the traveling exhibit opened last fall, and that its popularity led to at least one extension of its tenure at MOSI.

Believe only half of what you see - the half that’s not on CNN.

PS: Hopefully, I’ll get more frequency to my posts. I’ve been balancing real-world concerns with my recent dedication to getting off my butt (rather than sitting on it, pecking on a laptop).