NBC's Local Affiliates Don't Understand How Spoilers Work, Either

On Monday NBC inadvertently spoiled the result of a race they had yet to broadcast by showing its winner celebrating in a promo for the following morning's Today show. It seems its local affiliates aren't quite getting how to play the tape-delay game, either. Here's a clip from last night's 6 p.m. broadcast on KXAS, the Dallas-Fort Worth NBC station, in which viewers are told to "mute the TV" if they didn't want the results of that day's action revealed to them. Then the station showed a fullscreen revealing how Michael Phelps had performed earlier that day. (Okay, so they didn't reveal in which race Phelps won which medal, but still. We cut out about a minute of sports anchor Newy Scruggs talking about the men's basketball team.) We're told KXAS pulled the same blunder today, by showing swimmer Dana Vollmer with her medal from the 4x200 free relay, but we don't have video of that.

Regardless, somebody ought to tell KXAS that hitting mute only works on the audio portion of a TV, though we'd welcome a similar function to blank out the video—it could come in handy whenever Dick Stockton's face appears onscreen.

h/t to John

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