The news business

A common theme on the Babalu Radio hour (Reminder: Tonight, 8:00 PM) is frustration with the news media. Beyond their obvious bias, I am frustrated with their lack of originality. A true maverick could do a whistle blowing story on Cuba that would be epic. There's so much material there from the political prisoners, to fidel's actual health, to the tourist apartheid, to harboring terrorists and fugitives to drug trafficking and human smuggling. A veritable treasure trove of interesting stories from a country 90 miles away which has only enjoyed the most superficial of coverage and most of that has been regurgitations of the regime's propaganda.

Well NBC News, one of the biggest culprits of willful blindness, just had a defector. A former reporter on Dateline, John Hockenberry penned a piece for Technology Review where he basically validates some of my criticisms:

This was one in a series of lessons I learned about how television news had lost its most basic journalistic instincts in its search for the audience-driven sweet spot, the "emotional center" of the American people...

Among the greatest frustrations of working in TV news over the past decade was to see that while advertisers and entertainment producers were permitted to do wildly risky things in pursuit of audiences, news producers rarely ventured out of a safety zone of crime, celebrity, and character-driven tragedy yarns.

Lemmings I tell you. Read the whole thing.

H/T: Michelle Malkin

Posted by Henry Louis Gomez at January 3, 2008 02:02 PM