When one accepts an award, it is usually polite to thank or mention the major players who helped you get there and whoever else such as your Mom and Dad, maybe your significant other, your dog, etc. If you lack for class, you might make an oblique remark about your competition or make some half-assed political statement.
If you are CBS News, what you lack in class, you make up for it with crass. This being the network of Dan Rather and the infamous phony and forged memos as you may recall and it's also the network that suffers from the lowest ratings of the three broadcast network news organizations.
All of that notwithstanding, they won the Edward R. Murrow Award for Overall Excellence. Good for them, congrats, nice job, way to go. Andy Heywood, the president of SeeBS News accepted the award with a few unkind things to say.
From Inside Broadcasting: (subscription required)
CBS News President Andrew Heyward said TV news' outstanding coverage of Hurricane Katrina proves mainstream media isn’t losing its place to emerging Internet news sources. “No one on the Internet could match what the network and cable news did,” Heyward said at the RTNDA/UNITY and Edward R. Murrow Awards dinner Monday night in Manhattan.
Heyward said some news executives joked that “network news assignment editors should have been running FEMA, and I agree.” Heyward accepted CBS’ Murrow award for overall excellence. During Katrina, he said, “Journalists had the courage to speak truth to power.”
I don’t think anyone, on or off the internet, could match the crap we got from the networks. Nobody bothered to get dirty and fact check anything. Nagin or some idiot on the street would rattle off some wild-eyed rumor and it was headline news. Speaking truth to power? Hell, they first have to speak truth! If they ran FEMA like they ran Katrina coverage, the only aid any one would get would be Kool-Aid! Grape Kool-Aid. It would make for a bigger story.
Frankly I couldn’t care less if SeeBS won an award. It’s all self-congratulatory crap any way. Most of the time it’s based on whose turn it is or who has the better PR blitz.
There are two catch phrases you need to be aware of. The first is “Reality-Based Community” and the other is “Speak(ing) truth to power”. Just be aware when you see or hear those two phrases in a story, the person using them is probably out of touch and wouldn’t know the truth if it walked up and kicked them in the shins.
If Katrina was an example of the best of broadcast news, it’s no wonder they are slowly losing any relevance as their ratings continue their slow march into the toilet. Bloggers may not always have the resources to get the scoop and cover a large story as the broadcast networks and Cable, but within 24 hours, they’ll usually have it fact checked and served back to the networks in a cold dish.
Hat Tip to Orbusmax and News Busters
VW
The only thing the MSM is good at is congratulating themselves. If they were anything but totally clueless, they would be trying to downplay their dismal performance after Katrina. Their race-baiting, class-warfare rhetoric was irresponsible and asinine. Their willingness to swallow whatever hysterical lies New Orleans' mental case police chief felt like feeding them was pathetic.
Posted by: Van Helsing | Wednesday, October 19, 2005 at 14:22