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January 4, 2006
Read The Comments
I was pointed to this article via the corner. It's from Brian Williams blog and he asks the question:
In the light of day, media types and civilians alike were asking a question last asked during Katrina: Weren't they (officials) WATCHING the coverage on television?
It seems to me the subtext of the question is:
Why didn't you have on a TV, because if you did, you would have seen us reporting all this erroneous information and you could have stopped it.
The whole concept seems backward, to me, and the attempt to deflect blame away from bad coverage is simply cowardice, after all, isn't it the media's responsibility to get the story straight before it's even put on the air?
Apparently, the commentors, or at least the majority of them, agree with me:
Whatever happened to FACT checking? I listened, and not one cable outlet tried to confirm anything. Instead the headlines read "12 Miners Alive" - where did that come from? Just Rumors. How sad.
Then there's this:
This mine tragedy has brought into sharp focus for me just how truly awful today's cable "journalists" are... every one of last night's cable anchors (Anderson Cooper/CNN, the awful Rita Cosby/MSNBC, or Bill Hemmer/Fox) should either go back to journalism school and learn how to check facts before going on air, or else be fired. They were all an embarassment to television news.
And this:
Apparently no lessons were learned from Katrina, when histrionic reports of babies being raped and other atrocities (all of them untrue) went unchecked and unrecanted, all because the MSM outlets were racing to get there first. That's what's unforgivable here: the media's continued devolvement into entertainment and out of journalism.
Still more:
Clearly this is media jumping into the rumor mill. No journalist should make statements regarding anything until they've confirmed it through a primary source in the case of "breaking news" such as this or through thorough vetting through corroborating accounts and documentation of past events
Read them all.
Posted by Jonathan at January 4, 2006 3:45 PM
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