The Southern Ontario/WNY Radio-TV Forum / Huge Snafu Hits CFTO's 6 PM News Friday

**Posted by RadioActive** May 23, 2025 7:45 pm

Still not sure what happened on Friday's 6 PM show, but in the middle of a story, anchor Michelle Dube suddenly stopped, seemingly lost her place and then struggled to continue, finally completing the rest of the copy after a long silence that felt like it went on forever.

After that, the newscast continued until about 5 minutes or so later. Dube was on camera again, telling viewers, 'we're going to take an early break so we can deal with some issues.' And then to commercial.

The problem here was that the CFRB simulcast was not ready for the sudden change of schedule, leaving some dead air before the radio went to its own spot break. But because it wasn't their regularly scheduled out-time, the spots on the radio continued long after the TV show had resumed. Listeners heard the show come back on in the middle of a story and had no idea what it was about.

Not sure what happened, but it had to have been something serious to totally interrupt the show that way and lead them to such an early, unscheduled and awkward time out.

**Posted by Muffaraw Joe** May 23, 2025 8:54 pm

Was it a health issue, or a tech issue in your opinion RA?

**Posted by TomTV** May 24, 2025 12:18 am

It was definitely a tech issue. The anchors kept talking even though the screen had gone to white (the CTV logo was still on the bottom-right corner though). They finally went to commercial as Radioactive pointed out when it was becoming obvious that they needed to do a reset to get their system working properly again.

**Posted by haydenmatthews14** May 24, 2025 11:44 am

I don’t know if anyone watched CTV London’s newscast this past week. But something similar happened with their teleprompter. During the first part of the newscast Carlyle Fiset had to read the news script from a piece of paper instead of the teleprompter. From my guess is ether they had glitches with the teleprompter before going on air or they had to rush quickly to find some local news stories to fill in. But after the first break. They were back to using the Teleprompter for the rest of the newscast. Last night’s CTV London’s newscast had no problems.

**Posted by zed** May 24, 2025 6:14 pm

haydenmatthews14 wrote:
I don’t know if anyone watched CTV London’s newscast this past week. But something similar happened with their teleprompter. During the first part of the newscast Carlyle Fiset had to read the news script from a piece of paper instead of the teleprompter. From my guess is ether they had glitches with the teleprompter before going on air or they had to rush quickly to find some local news stories to fill in. But after the first break. They were back to using the Teleprompter for the rest of the newscast. Last night’s CTV London’s newscast had no problems.

I saw that too and Carlyle was very smooth using the paper script when he had too, A paper script back up is a necessity... I anchored for 20+ years and while the prompter was very reliable there was no doubt it would go down every now and then and you had to be ready in a live television situation.