One of those days I'm glad I no longer work in journalism

First, as I'm walking to work, I see a banner headline on the LA Times about a gun battle at NBC's studios in Burbank. I stop and do a double-take. It's actually a full-page, wraparound ad, done in the same style as the Times's actual front page. Not sure what they were advertising — I assume it was a new Fall show, or maybe an elaborate joke about the devastation wrought by Jeff Zucker in his tenure at NBC — but I got one clear message from it. Any credibility the LA Times owned is now puddled around its ankles, like a clown dropping its pants for cheap laughs. (The fake story was especially moronic in light of the actual gun battle that took place in LA yesterday.)


Then CNN reveals that James O'Keefe — the guy who made the heavily edited videos of himself as a fake pimptried to "seduce" and videotape one of its reporters while she was doing a documentary on the new conservative activism. One of O'Keefe's confederates apparently got an attack of conscience about the Joe Francis method of journalism and tipped CNN. I don't feel that CNN is off-limits, by any means.  They're one of the outlets that helped create O'Keefe by turning him into a flavor-of-the-month. But what O'Keefe planned was pure ugly — A blindfold? Fuzzy handcuffs? — and the fact that this little snot has a national platform is a sign that the gangrene infecting our media has gone too far; it's time to amputate.



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Published on September 29, 2010 09:33
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