Welcome ACLU & Friday's New Column
It didn't take this new blog long to attract the right kind of attention ... while checking the stats Friday morning, I learned that someone from the ACLU dropped by to read my column, "The ACLU's Wiretap Shuffle." Welcome, ACLU! I look forward to educating you further in the future. As you can see, whoever came to read the column did not leave any comment, which is too bad. God, I can only hope it's a matter of time before I'm being slandered by Media Matters.
Here's today's column. A full update will be coming later in the day Friday.
"Media Driven Irritation"
Remember in 1992 when that senseless child asked Bill Clinton about his underwear on MTV? In The Unabrian Manifesto, I wrote that this was the moment Mature America rolled its eyes, knowing it had just witnessed the end of civilization. I couldn’t have been more wrong. As it turned out, the actual end of civilization came a couple weeks ago when The Wall Street Journal reported about hymen reconstruction surgery on its front page.
“For her 17th wedding anniversary, Jeanette Yarborough wanted to do something special for her husband,” reported the Journal. “In addition to planning a hotel getaway for the weekend, Ms. Yarborough paid a surgeon $5,000 to reattach her hymen, making her appear to be a virgin again. ‘It’s the ultimate gift for the man who has everything,’ says Ms. Yarborough, 40 years old, a medical assistant from San Antonio.”
Trust me, it takes a lot of reading about Best Buy’s stock performance and the 1918 influenza pandemic before “hymenoplasty” shakes loose from the front of your consciousness. Finally, that irritation was replaced with others, all involving the West Virginia coal miner story.
Near as I could tell, Anderson Cooper was the first to report that 12 miners had died while one had lived, not vice versa. Cooper was interviewing a woman named Lynette Roby, who was in a nearby church as Governor Manchin and the miner’s families were informed of the awful misunderstanding. After spending a few minutes trying to get his head around what he was hearing, Cooper turned his microphone toward the nine-year-old girl at Ruby’s right. Was she in the church, too? Oh, yes.
For this, Cooper ought to be drummed out of the Society of Pointless Television Personalities. The first rule of television journalism should be that you never – never – interview a child when it has borne witness to a tragedy, not even if that interview lasts five seconds. Child interviews are for stories about dogs who are lost on vacation and somehow traverse the 500 miles home, or nauseating games and fads, not when they’ve seen people’s lives fall apart. Unlike her brother, who horned into the conversation near the end, this girl was merely standing there … in a perfect world, she wouldn’t be standing there at all, but Anderson Cooper should know better than to break terrible news across small faces.
About three o’clock Wednesday morning, International Coal Group (ICG) President Ben Hatfield gave a press conference and tried his best. After reading his statement, Hatfield took questions from the assembled press and was asked how he was feeling (as though it mattered). Hatfield said the media was witnessing the worst day of his life, but not long after, one of the McJournalists asked: Well, if this is the worst day of your life, how do you think the families are feeling?
Hatfield couldn’t have uttered the proper answer (“I would imagine a damn sight worse than I am, you ass”) without causing an uproar about “corporate insensitivity” and “managerial thoughtlessness,” or whatever popular vernacular media uses to describe spontaneous bursts of honest reaction.
But the popular vernacular somehow always becomes credible, which is why fewer and fewer people still know the difference between lies and mistakes. This was spectacularly displayed by the man who said “[ICG] straight out lied to millions of people watching. And the families here, as you can tell, there’s probably 20,000 people waiting for good news and we got it. And it was nothing but lies.” No one batted an eye.
Now, no reasonable person believes the report of 12 living miners should have been leaked, and no reasonable person believes ICG was right to wait nearly three hours before correcting the misconception. But reasonable people absolutely cannot say ICG lied to the families; not as long as they know the initial misunderstanding took place between a first responder in the mine and those closer to the surface.
Meanwhile, who will accuse the Washington Post of lying to its readers Wednesday morning? “At St. Joseph’s Hospital, a second-floor wing was cleared in anticipation of the surviving miners’ arrival, spokeswoman Lisa Turner said. She said the miners were first being seen by emergency medical workers in a heated tent near the mine’s opening. There, oxygen levels were being measured, IVs for hydration were available and blood could be drawn for testing.”
“Were” or “would have been”? When it was Mitch Albom, this type of lie mattered a great deal. But when it’s the Washington Post, hardly anyone notices. Above everything else, that’s why I’m irritated.
“For her 17th wedding anniversary, Jeanette Yarborough wanted to do something special for her husband,” reported the Journal. “In addition to planning a hotel getaway for the weekend, Ms. Yarborough paid a surgeon $5,000 to reattach her hymen, making her appear to be a virgin again. ‘It’s the ultimate gift for the man who has everything,’ says Ms. Yarborough, 40 years old, a medical assistant from San Antonio.”
Trust me, it takes a lot of reading about Best Buy’s stock performance and the 1918 influenza pandemic before “hymenoplasty” shakes loose from the front of your consciousness. Finally, that irritation was replaced with others, all involving the West Virginia coal miner story.
Near as I could tell, Anderson Cooper was the first to report that 12 miners had died while one had lived, not vice versa. Cooper was interviewing a woman named Lynette Roby, who was in a nearby church as Governor Manchin and the miner’s families were informed of the awful misunderstanding. After spending a few minutes trying to get his head around what he was hearing, Cooper turned his microphone toward the nine-year-old girl at Ruby’s right. Was she in the church, too? Oh, yes.
For this, Cooper ought to be drummed out of the Society of Pointless Television Personalities. The first rule of television journalism should be that you never – never – interview a child when it has borne witness to a tragedy, not even if that interview lasts five seconds. Child interviews are for stories about dogs who are lost on vacation and somehow traverse the 500 miles home, or nauseating games and fads, not when they’ve seen people’s lives fall apart. Unlike her brother, who horned into the conversation near the end, this girl was merely standing there … in a perfect world, she wouldn’t be standing there at all, but Anderson Cooper should know better than to break terrible news across small faces.
About three o’clock Wednesday morning, International Coal Group (ICG) President Ben Hatfield gave a press conference and tried his best. After reading his statement, Hatfield took questions from the assembled press and was asked how he was feeling (as though it mattered). Hatfield said the media was witnessing the worst day of his life, but not long after, one of the McJournalists asked: Well, if this is the worst day of your life, how do you think the families are feeling?
Hatfield couldn’t have uttered the proper answer (“I would imagine a damn sight worse than I am, you ass”) without causing an uproar about “corporate insensitivity” and “managerial thoughtlessness,” or whatever popular vernacular media uses to describe spontaneous bursts of honest reaction.
But the popular vernacular somehow always becomes credible, which is why fewer and fewer people still know the difference between lies and mistakes. This was spectacularly displayed by the man who said “[ICG] straight out lied to millions of people watching. And the families here, as you can tell, there’s probably 20,000 people waiting for good news and we got it. And it was nothing but lies.” No one batted an eye.
Now, no reasonable person believes the report of 12 living miners should have been leaked, and no reasonable person believes ICG was right to wait nearly three hours before correcting the misconception. But reasonable people absolutely cannot say ICG lied to the families; not as long as they know the initial misunderstanding took place between a first responder in the mine and those closer to the surface.
Meanwhile, who will accuse the Washington Post of lying to its readers Wednesday morning? “At St. Joseph’s Hospital, a second-floor wing was cleared in anticipation of the surviving miners’ arrival, spokeswoman Lisa Turner said. She said the miners were first being seen by emergency medical workers in a heated tent near the mine’s opening. There, oxygen levels were being measured, IVs for hydration were available and blood could be drawn for testing.”
“Were” or “would have been”? When it was Mitch Albom, this type of lie mattered a great deal. But when it’s the Washington Post, hardly anyone notices. Above everything else, that’s why I’m irritated.
06 January 2006
posted by Brian S. Wise | 8:17 AM
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