Well I've been on jury duty. Actually now I'm on a jury. So haven't been on the radio for a week and won't be until next week. I'm on a case. Can't write about it. Yet. Will when I can.
This 60 Minutes thing is a big stink up. Few people are taking the side of CBS News that the letters they showed are real. Putting aside the information content the beef is with the actual memos and if they were created in the time period mentioned. I can't add anything to the real or fake arguement here just a few thoughts on big old news media.
I don't think there is a mastermind plot at CBS news to dump Bush. And yes I have read Biased. I just think a news story sometimes starts to take over and momentum drives it to the air.
Here are a couple of things to chew on.
There are really good reporters. They are a huge part of what is so good about this country. A free press and hungry reporters are a good combination.
But Dan Rather is not what I would call a reporter. OK sure he reports the news, by that I mean reads the teleprompter. Hey he might even write some of what he reads. But is he pounding the pavement? Making phone calls to track down things? No not much. He is just the face of what happens behind him. He has to spend too much time in makeup to do all the reporting. I'm not knocking him for it I'm just saying that's how it is for tv news. Remember the movie Broadcast News? The reporter is in the field, and makes and sends in video for the anchor to voice over? I've seen it here where one reporter does a story on a noon news show then at night a bigger name does the voice over on the same video.
I like Dan. He is pretty funny when he goes to a location to anchor his newscast. He gets that grim look on his face, and wears his fly fishing vest, in case you know a mayfly hatch breaks out...he must keep his trout rod near by...
So behind the scenes there is a whole group of real reporters digging and working hard. If you get your story on the air it is a good thing. If you are told "find me something on this giant squid attack" and can find some details, get an interview and some documentation, well your looking good. The story gets aired and you are flying high. If you don't get the story you've failed. Fail too much and you're fired.
Stay with me here this is going somewhere...
Working in a news room is fun. It is NOW, exciting and fresh all day and all night. When big stories break, there is just a huge rush about getting the most information you can and putting it together and getting it on the air first and best.
In this rush and momentum to get the story on things can go wrong. Maybe the story is good but not great. It needs more impact. Like say NBC Dateline and GM trucks. Remember?
Here read this (from this Google Cache):
"Probably the most publicized example of fake news in recent times is the case of NBC's faking a crash test in a story about trucks made by General Motors. The story, labeled "Waiting to Explode?," first appeared on "Dateline" which was then cited as the source for the "news" story on NBC and other networks. In explicit video, NBC "proved" that GM trucks with gasoline tanks mounted outside the trucks' underframe are prone to explosion when hit from the side. In the NBC demonstration video, a GM truck burst into flames after being hit from the side. A man identified as Byron Bloch, safety consultant, went on the air and described the fire as a "holocaust." NBC reporter Michele Gillen claimed that the crash had punctured a hole in the gasoline tank. No mention was made of the fact that NBC had attached toy-rocket engines to the truck's fuel tank and then detonated the rockets by remote control at the moment of impact. Nevertheless, even when this fact became known, Michael Gartner, president of NBC at the time, said: "The segment that was broadcast on 'Dateline' NBC was fair and accurate." Harold Pearce, GM's executive vice-president and general counsel, didn't think so. He called the NBC program "outrageous misrepresentation and conscious deception."
"The truth about the fake news came about due to the investigative journalism of Pete W. Pesterre, editor of Popular Hot Rodding magazine, and GM itself. For reasons unrelated to the faking of the story, Pesterre had criticized the "Dateline" show in an editorial. A reader called him and told him of a firefighter, fire chief Glen R. Bailey Jr., who was at the scene and thought the test was rigged. GM hired its own investigators who asked NBC to let them look at the trucks used in the tests. NBC refused. The investigators checked 22 junkyards before they found the trucks, but the fuel tanks were missing. Bruce Enz, who calls himself a "news gatherer," was president of the consulting firm hired by NBC to do the crash tests. He had given the tanks to a neighbor. GM got the tanks but Mr. Enz wouldn't answer any questions about the faked test, claiming he had First Amendment protection from interrogation. So, with little or no help from NBC, GM discovered that the fire that was described as a "holocaust" was a small, 15-second flame; that a non-standard gas cap was used and it blew off at impact, releasing gasoline that caught fire; and that X-rays showed no puncture in the gas tank. It cost General Motors nearly $2 million to investigate a piece of faked news. Who knows what it cost NBC to fake the story. But the visuals were captivating!"
and from here:
"NBC had to eat two separate helpings of crow: first for producing the rigged video, then for holding out far too long in its defense. In doing so, it was led astray by its outside experts, especially Bruce Enz of The Institute for Safety Analysis, hired by NBC to conduct the crash tests, and Byron Bloch, interviewed as an expert on the "Dateline" segment and active at the crash-test scene:
Enz's group rigged the truck with hidden incendiary devices, detonated by remote-control radio. Later, Bloch and others defended the idea. This was "among accepted test procedures," noted Clarence Ditlow of the Center for Auto Safety, raising the eyebrows of many safety researchers.
Enz and Bloch assured NBC that the fire was actually set off by the filament of a broken headlamp, which conveniently meant there was no need to tell viewers about the Mother's-Little-Helper rockets. (According to Automotive News, GM scientists found in a super-slow-motion video analysis that the fire started near the rockets, not the headlamps.) The network also cited the experts as its source for having told viewers that a "small hole" had been poked in the GM gas tank at impact. Later tests showed the recovered tank fully intact.
And so forth. The use of a wrong-model, ill-fitting gas cap (it apparently popped out on impact) would have been noticed beforehand, if at all, presumably by those who groomed the truck for its big moment on film. NBC reporters would probably not have relied on their own direct observation to come up with what were later shown to be serious underestimates of the actual crash speeds. One bad decision was presumably wholly NBC's to make: showing only a brief snippet of the fire, which in fact burned out in about 15 seconds, after it exhausted the fuel ejected from the truck's filler tube. NBC's camera angle also made it hard for viewers to see that flames were not coming from inside the truck itself, as might have been expected had its gas tank really burst.
Given a fuller look, viewers might have concluded that you can get a fire from just about any vehicle if you bash it in a way that forces gas out of its filler tube and then provide a handy source of ignition."
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And from the same source remember the Audi 5000's that would just take off and accelerate on their own?!
"CBS, for one, may want to revisit its 1986 "60 Minutes" segment on supposed "sudden acceleration" in Audi 5000s. That show featured real-life footage almost as riveting as that on "Dateline": An Audi was shown taking off like a bolt without a foot on the accelerator -- seeming proof that the vehicle could display a malignant will of its own. Ed Bradley told viewers that, according to a safety expert named William Rosenbluth, "unusually high transmission pressure could build up on certain model Audis causing the throttle to open up....Again, watch the pedal go down by itself."
Frightening stuff, eh? "What the viewers couldn't watch," wrote Peter Huber in 1992's "Galileo's Revenge," "was where the 'unusually high transmission pressure' had come from. It had come from a bottle. Rosenbluth had drilled a hole in the Audi transmission," through which he'd pumped in air or fluid at high pressure. (CBS still defends its segment.)"
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More on the Audi story
So how does this happen? How do these people get their stories? Again from the same source:
"For years the networks have relied on a small circle of outside experts to shape their coverage of safety issues. Most of these experts turn out to be deeply involved in the business of suing the companies and institutions targeted by the adversary coverage. And the result is likely to be a widening circle of embarrassment for the media."
"Audi, too, had one of the best crash records on the road; eventually a government probe confirmed that the reason cars suddenly accelerate is that drivers mistakenly press the accelerator. (Rosenbluth, of the "60 Minutes" hidden-pump escapade, was an expert witness against Audi too.) Definitive vindication for any defendant, however, is rare; more often the cloud never really goes away."
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It becomes a big deal, and is investigated by safety officials. Seems they find nothing. Nobody wins their lawsuit against Audi.
Damage done to Audi. No apology from CBS.
Pretty much the same thing with with the GM trucks. Story brought to NBC's attention, NBC looks into it and get a little carried away as they put explosives on the truck and modify the tank to go boom. NBC said well the tanks did explode we just jazzed it up a little.
The common thing here is what often happens in news. "Here is the story (giant squid, Audi 5000, blowed up trucks) go get it." You look for details to fit the predetermined story. As a lowly reporter that is your job. If you come back and say well thar ain't no giant squid, it is not as good an answer as "this guy says hell ya there is a giant squid".
Instapundit linked to an article that interviewed Gary Gygax, the guy behind Dungeons and Dragons. He caught a lot of heat from fundamentalist nit wits and others after a 60 minutes interview he did here is what he says:
GameSpy: Looking back now, can you be a little more philosophical about it?
Gygax: In many ways I still resent the wretched yellow journalism that was clearly evident in (the media's) treatment of the game -- 60 Minutes in particular. I've never watched that show after Ed Bradley's interview with me because they rearranged my answers. When I sent some copies of letters from mothers of those two children who had committed suicide who said the game had nothing to do with it, they refused to do a retraction or even mention it on air. What bothered me is that I was getting death threats, telephone calls, and letters. I was a little nervous. I had a bodyguard for a while.
GameSpy: That just sucks. How do you feel about what's happened in the years since the controversy?
Gygax: Well, I'm glad that most people have been able to separate the fantasy of the game from the reality of real life -- games have nothing to do with real life. There are no real dragons, there's no real magic, no real magic swords, and certainly no real treasure...or I would have retired at home by now."
Again Ed Bradley wasn't doing a story on DnD, it was on the Evil DnD. That was the working angle. The giant squid if you will.
(I remember Chuck D of Public Enemy so fed up with being mis-quoted that he put a sign around his neck for an MTV interview saying this must be an unedited interview and MTV had to show the whole thing as is.)
It can be really easy to fool a news outlet. A local band Negativland were able to fool lots of media into thinking they were part of a midwest murder case (real) after announcing they had to cancel their tour and could not comment on the case. It drove people nuts and Negativland played it perfectly. They documented it all on a release called Helter Stupid where they say:
"We all swim in an ocean of mass media that fills our minds with people and events with which we have no actual contact at all. We commonly absorb these media presences as part of our own "reality," even though any media experience consists only of one-way, edited representations of reality Negativland uses this electronic environment of factual fictions as both source and subject for much of our work, keeping in mind that to experience a picture of a thing is not to experience the thing.
Our lie was intended for and directed to the media, and it proved very effective in exposing the unreliable process of cannibalization that passes for "news." Negativland chose to exploit the media's appetite for particularly sensational stories by becoming a subject they couldn't resist -- the latest version of a ridiculous media cliche which proposes that rock song lyrics instigate murder. Common sense suggests that murderers purchase records that appeal to them, just as they purchase the weapons they use.
"Helter Stupid" is about the media menu of illusions we all eat from, as well as an attempt to materialize our perception of Negativland as a bogus subject of the voracious media meat grinder."
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The 60 minutes Bush memo story was caught by bloggers. The internet was on it right away. It happens all the time now. This might be the biggest one, but there have been others. It is pretty funny that speculation runs from a Kerry guy planted it to make Bush look bad to Bush planted it to make the Kerry guys who might have planted it look bad, to it is apart of the CBS/Viacom master plan to dump Bush to...oh the list goes on and on.
It's a new world. With internet searches, easy to update blogs and web journals, the experts are really "everywhere" of course so are the bogus plants. But now we get to look and see for ourselves where the truth is.
We are now the Anchors of our own 24 hour news cast. We are even the producers and editors as we can pick our stories. We rely on fellow reporters (just like Dan) look up tips and can do research.
And we report and update in our pajamas, and don't have to wear a fly fishing vest when we go on location. Unless say we are blogging from the Lower Sac.
The MSM (mainstream media) isn't dead or won't go away. It just is time to change. That Audi 5000 story, the exploding trucks, the sliced up interviews, and faked memos are not going to fly anymore.
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