A Thousand Words On the Media

This is maybe as embarrassing as it gets for cable television. They send a reporter to Greensburg, Kansas to track down what's happening "on the ground" in the aftermath of the vicious tornado that wiped out the town, and... he ends up reading news out of the newspaper. On TV.

They did this on the local news in 1957. This is 50 years later.

And actually, I'm glad there's a visual confirmation, because this is all most cable news producers do before they feed words into the mouths of their anchors anyway. CNN was probably too cheap to send a producer out there for this empty suit, so he had to read the paper. On the air.

Unlimited resources, the full weight of corporate synergy behind them, and this is what CNN delivers and calls it news. Part of it is tight budgets, but most of it is laziness. And a complete atrophying of the principles of newsgathering. A couple reporters on the teevee understand that, you know, talking to a couple people and figuring out the real story might make a more compelling angle than READING THE WICHITA EAGLE LIVE. Not this guy.

I don't think there's any more iconic an image about what is wrong with our media than this one.

CNN: the most trusted name in reading other people's news.

...one could counter-intuit this and say "Isn't this what bloggers do?" The answer, of course, is "No," and any blogger who does this consistently is actually liable under plagiarism laws. The other thing is that 99.9% of all bloggers aren't paid to produce the news. This guy, the guy who's reading the newspaper on the air, is.