How was your Groundhog Day? Ours was quite embarrassing and we owe some folks an apology. Yesterday Film Georgia published an inaccurate “alert” to our Facebook page, informing our followers that one of our State Representatives had introduced legislation which might negatively impact Georgia’s undeniably effective tax incentive for the film industry.
This report was absolutely inaccurate. If you check you’ll find that there’s NO bill on the floor of the House to that effect. You can check the list of House bills for yourself on the Georgia General Assembly’s website. It was a whisper of a rumor that should never have made it onto Facebook, especially from us.
The alert was issued third-hand, and was not verified with the office of House Majority Leader, the Honorable Larry O’Neal, who we named in our Facebook posting. Please do not contact Representative O’Neal’s office and please tell your friends and colleagues they can stop trying to write their protest songs. They were never very good in the first place, and honestly, nobody likes the ukelele.
Today we would like to issue our sincere apologies to Representative O’Neal (and his staff), and would like to thank Representatives Ron Stephens and Butch Parrish, both of whom have worked to strengthen Georgia’s film industry, for rightfully castigating us for the inaccurate posting. Rumors have legs and may run far, as in back to the Studios which decide whether they’ll be shooting in Georgia.
We’re going back to doing what we do best, which is to simply be cheerleaders for the State of Georgia and the magic of filmmaking. If we ever publish a political alert in the future you can be assured that it will have been verified from multiple quoted sources. We’ll leave the inaccurate Facebook posting on our wall, because it is important that people see the mistakes of lazy reporting.
Speaking of lazy reporting…
In 1948 The Chicago Tribune ran the infamously inaccurate headline “Dewey Defeats Truman”. It took them awhile to regain their readers’ trust. While our very public faux pas was seen by a much smaller audience, it’s important that we take our lumps and hope that our elected officials will forgive our people if we get a little excited about the film industry. It’s a pretty neat business.
And making more business for Georgia is what we’re all here to do.