DATE: Saturday, August 9, 1997              TAG: 9708090354

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA 

SOURCE: BY CATHERINE KOZAK, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   54 lines

NBC'S FALSE CLAIM ABOUT FOUL WATER MAKES WAVES NETWORK CORRECTS ERROR (AGAIN) OVER CAPE HATTERAS SLIGHT.

Outer Banks beaches took another shot in a national news report Wednesday night.

But a state senator fired back.

And NBC-TV national news on Friday corrected information in a Wednesday report on its evening news that said Cape Hatteras was one of several vacation spots that did not test its swimming waters.

``I'm shocked at the irresponsibility of your reporting,'' State Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight wrote to NBC Thursday. ``I have two major concerns: First, Cape Hatteras and all North Carolina coastal waters are tested regularly. And second, Wednesday's broadcast marks the second time your organization has made this grievous error.''

Still bruised by inaccurate July reports across the nation that the Outer Banks had dirty water, angry North Carolina viewers called state officials to complain about the NBC story. Basnight responded with the letter and calls to the station, and asked NBC to ``correct the error publicly.''

Shortly before 7 p.m. Friday, the network retracted the report, stating that ``contrary to what we reported, Cape Hatteras does routinely monitor its water.''

In Wednesday's broadcast, reporter Bob Arnot said that many beaches are polluted by raw sewage. ``And many communities don't adequately monitor their waters. A recent survey of beach closings shows some favorite vacation spots . cited as one of three examples.

Like a bad dream that won't go away, the most recent misunderstanding came from a report released July 1 by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a non-profit environmental lobbying group.

To publicize its annual report ``Testing the Waters,'' a survey of state water-monitoring programs, the NRDC assembled a ``Beach Bums'' list of the top five regions that don't monitor their waters. Even though Dare County has had a monitoring program since October 1995 and North Carolina implemented a statewide program in June, the Outer Banks was listed as one of the ``bums.''

And by the time the list had reached the national networks, including NBC, bad was made worse. Somehow, the NRDC information, which had nothing to do with water quality, was twisted into a report stating that the ``Beach Bums'' had dirty water.

The group later included an addendum to its report that Dare County and North Carolina had monitoring programs.

Basnight spokeswoman Julia White said Friday it was unfair that, even as the Outer Banks is still licking its wounds from July - the height of the tourist season - NBC repeated the same mistake. And the network had even issued a correction after its July broadcast, she said.

``It was wrong the first time,'' she said. ``It was twice as wrong the second time.'' KEYWORDS: NORTH CAROLINA NBC BEACH BUMS WATER POLLUTION

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