Saturday, January 07, 2006

All the King's Networks and All the King's Anchors

In response to the mass outrage regarding the inaccurate reporting of the West Virginia miners, which Nilo was good enough to blog about, news broadcasters have become anxious to assure the general public that THEY will not do anything so stupid as report that someone is alive when in fact that someone is dead.

I submit to you the latest commercial for KHOU 11 News (that's the local CBS channel here in Houston), which used a mere ten second spot to claim it's moral superiority. "KHOU. Reporting the news ethically and responsibly."

"Oh, Sleepless Mama, you're reaching." Am I? They certainly hadn't said that kind of thing before, not on a ten-second ad. In fact, I highly doubt any CBS local anchors have wanted to say anything of the kind since Dan Rather disgraced himself with that whole fake military document thing. But now, after Gerald Rivera made a fool of himself on Fox, my local CBS is all "Oh no, we'd NEVER do anything like that. We always report the truth, and we never get out of line."

Granted, Dan Rather was not a local anchor. He was national. The local guys are basically trying to keep their own credibility. I guess I can understand that.

But really, it's hardly necessary. ANYBODY looks highly credible compared to Geraldo Rivera. Hell, Geraldo makes Maury Povich look like Honest Abe.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm going to resist the opportunity to pull the soap box out and rant about the media today, other than in a culture where "shock value" seems to be the "in" thing right now, it's sad to see so many newspapers and news stations trying to outdo each other.

It's one thing for a prime-time show to stoop to that level, but to feed on the pains of real-life people is completely digusting, and I hope that this all comes back to bite them in the ass

/2 cents worth