The title at Mashable is perhaps the best out there for this facepalm of a story.

Pointergate! How a local TV station became a national laughingstock

via Chris Taylor at Mashable

When a local TV news segment gets widely shared on social media, it usually means one of two things: either a journalist swore on air or a cute kid interrupted a live broadcast.

But in the case of Minneapolis station KSTP, it seems, there's a third way to get noticed: produce a scoop so outrageously thin on reporting you can hear the howls of laughter from thousands of miles away.

Here's the substance of KSTP reporter Jay Kolls' Thursday night scoop: the mayor of Minneapolis, Betsy Hodges, was photographed with a young black man on a get-out-the-vote drive, Navell Gordon. The two are pointing at each other. That's it.

But in Kolls' ominous report, the pointing became throwing gang signs, and the police become outraged that the mayor was somehow referencing a particular local gang, and thereby somehow endangering law enforcement.

No matter that the chief of police was standing right next to the mayor at the time of the pointing, and had no problem with it (a fact that goes unmentioned in Kolls' report; the police chief is cropped out of the photo). No matter that Gordon isn't a gang member. No matter that the mayor has been photographed countless times before with the same awkward pointing gesture (also unmentioned).