Posts Tagged ‘CBS’
Something’s Missing
I’ve written in this blog about how CBS, under long time anchor Dan Rather, pioneered the idea of using maps as part of stories. The reason, at the time, was because studies showed American kids were terrible at geography. It was an attempt to make news not only inform, but provide basic education. It was decades before the Internet.
Fast forward to about 2009 when the New York Times starts making it easy for web users to define certain words and phrases in its online version of stories. Users who let their browsers hover over unfamiliar terms see a thumbnail description. Later, the site would underline those same words and phrases with hyperlinks to make it even easier to quickly get an in-depth explanation of those unknown somethings.
Maybe news departments have come to believe that because the Internet is so ubiquitous, people will know to look up something they see or hear that they don’t understand. And so, maybe that was the reason why KOIN’s Ken Boddie, in reporting an accident at an Oregon gun range involving the substance “tannerite”, didn’t explain what tannerite is.
Tannerite is the brand name of an explosive sold mainly for making targets on gun ranges blow up. A listener might wonder why something that has the potential to accidentally explode would be used on gun ranges. Wikipedia says tannerite is a combination of two powders that is stable until hit by a hammer blow, a low-velocity shotgun blast or dropped.
Clearly, a complete description like that is more than a news director might feel such a story needs. But that missing detail, for someone who doesn’t spend their time on gun ranges or in gun stores, was just glaring enough.
In the end, I did look it up. But for a completely different reason.
What Time is it Really?
We have all been conditioned to believe that when a TV or radio program begins at the “top” or “bottom” of the hour, it means the program is starting at exactly 1 p.m. or 5:30 a.m. or whenever.
But it’s not that simple.
First, understand that official United States civilian time is maintained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado. Those are the people who are responsible for ensuring the official weights and measures for the US, including time. And precision is important to these folks. Time, i.e. the length of a second, is determined based on the vibrations of Cesium 133 atoms. This was represented by a clock NIST called the “F1”. But in 2014, they supplemented the “F1” clock with the “F2”, which unlike the previous clock, will not lose one second in 300 million years, making it three times more accurate than the F1.
Meanwhile, US time is synchronized with the rest of the world via something called Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), although it used to be commonly referred to as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Greenwich, by the way, is a real place. It is the location of the Royal Observatory in a municipality of London. GMT was the international civil time standard until recent years when there has been a hot debate about what GMT is and whether it deserves to be the standard it has historically been.
These two may not seem to have much in common; the measurement within time versus coordination of the World’s clocks. But they are intimately connected. To demonstrate this, imagine hearing a band playing Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”. Then imagine another band starts playing it, but is one beat off from the first band. The beat within both songs is the same length but the starting point of the song is different. Which beat should each group of musicians keep time to, their own or that of the other band?
That can be a problem for time keepers and, coincidentally, broadcasters. For decades, FCC regulations required holders of broadcast licenses to announce who and where their stations are before beginning a program. If you are watching KOIN in Portland, Oregon, when the previous program ends but within a minute of so of a new program, you see promos for upcoming local and network shows. Then, there will be a graphic somewhere on the screen that says you are watching KOIN 6 in Portland, Oregon. Or, if you’re listening to KOPB, you’ll hear promos, then the list of affiliate stations of Oregon Public Broadcasting and their individual locations. By law, you must see and hear these very close to “top” of the hour.
Then the next program begins, supposedly, “straight up”. But if you open the NIST’s time widget before the stations identify themselves, you notice that neither the radio or the TV program starts at the NIST’s official “top” of the hour. In the accompanying video, the CBS and NPR networks the locals go to are about 12 seconds behind the NIST. Twelve seconds might not seem like a big deal. But since billions of dollars are invested in advertising, technology and legislation for time to be both accurate and consistent, why isn’t it a big deal? Otherwise, why have a standard at all?
From simply an economic standpoint, how can stations afford to be off by up to 12 seconds an hour considering how important every moment is for generating revenue from commercials. I blogged about that a few years ago.
Anyway, I’ve had the larger question since my amateur radio days when I used to “DX” WWV, an NIST radio service that used to broadcast official time. If the NIST is the “official” US civilian timekeeper, why don’t broadcasters follow it?
*Accompanying audio and video are used under the Fair Use doctrine for the purposes of criticism, comment and news reporting.
Journalists Do Good Work Until They Don’t?
The flap with NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams is not unique to Brian Williams, to broadcasting or to the 4th Estate. The halls of journalism are littered with pockmarks from shots taken at reporters for not upholding the standards to which they supposedly pledge themselves. Cast your memory back a few short weeks and it was CBS 60 Minutes reporter Lara Logan and questions not only over her reporting of a 2013 story on the US Embassy attack in Benghazi but her return to on-air reporting at the network.
About Williams, he claimed more than 10 years ago that he was in the second of four helicopters that was attacked in Iraq. That seems to be mostly true. The question is how it was attacked. When he first told the story, he said the lead chopper was hit by a Rocket Propelled Grenade but both were taking small arms fire. Over the years (and masterfully explained by NPR Media Critic David Folkenflik – http://www.npr.org/2015/02/05/384119679/brian-williams-criticized-for-exaggerated-iraq-story) the story changed to William’s chopper being the one that was hit by the RPG.
Brian Williams has been sitting in the NBC anchor chair since 2004. He began his career in 1981 at KOAM-TV in Pittsburg, Ks. From there, he worked at WTTG in Washington, DC, then WCAU in Philadelphia. In 1987, he began broadcasting from WCBS in New York where he remained until 1993 when he joined NBC News. Wikipedia says he anchored the Weekend Nightly News and was chief White House correspondent before serving as anchor and managing editor of the News with Brian Williams, also broadcast on MSNBC and CNBC. His career has been extensive and his climb up the network ladder has been long.
But this is in no way a defense of Mr. Williams, Ms. Logan or any journalist that has gotten sloppy. And that seems to be what has really happened here. Whether it’s a refusal to do the deep checking a complex story requires, or a subtle need to “be the story” rather than just report on the story, sloppiness is the result. Back in the day, it was harder to fact check the details of blockbuster stories because those resources weren’t as available to the general public and there was no venue for the public to say a reporter had gotten it wrong. But in the 70s and 80s, the subjects started fighting back.
Remember ABC vs. “Food Lion”, NBC and the exploding gas tank of the General Motors pickup and CBS vs. General William Westmorland? Since then, with the advent of social media and the taste of blood increasingly on everyones tongue, no iota of information goes free from scrutiny for reasons that range from payback to schadenfreude.
In some ways, Edward R. Murrow, Woodward and Bernstein, Uncle Walter and the untainted others hang like the Sword of Damocles over every modern journalist, as well they should and here’s why. Former CBS Executive Sam Roberts told Folkenflik these incidents fuel a public already skeptical about media reporting. “Oh you guys just make it up,” Roberts said. [People will say] “See I told you. Look at what Brian Williams did. We’re going to hear that over and over from people who are skeptical about the media”.
All a reporter has is his or her ability to tell stories and his ability to convince people to believe them. Once that is gone, they are no longer a reporter. Society is quick to take that away. But reporters tend to be harder on each other regarding this kind of thing than the general public, maybe because of what Mr. Roberts told Mr. Folkenflik. These incidents only make it harder for us to do our jobs. Thanks, Brah.
But I certainly appreciate forgiveness and I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t. People make mistakes and, oddly, some of those same people aren’t very forgiving of the mistakes of others. Journalism is human recipe of storytelling fact and fiction. And journalists are a social construction of gumshoe and celebrity. Absolutely every reporter is subject to getting a fact wrong or embellishing a story a little too much. Because they have a mouthpiece most others don’t, they do have a special responsibility to do everything they can to tell the transparent truth. When they make honest mistakes, they need to own up to them quickly. And everybody, audience and reporters, need to remember their hard work over the years before we kick them to curb for not being perfect, as so few of us are.
It reminds me of an episode of the hit TV show, “Scrubs”. Chief in Interns, Dr. Percy Cox is telling the residents, including J.D. Dorian “Each and every one of you is going to kill a patient. At some point during your residency you will screw up, they will die, and it will be burned into your conscience forever.”
The pep talk continues …
“The point is, the harder you study, the longer you just might be able to hold off that first kill. Other than that, I guess cross your fingers and hope that the guy you murder is a jackass with no family. Great to see you kids. All the best!”
Journalism can be like that.
TMI?
This is a quickie.
Anna Werner of CBS This Morning did an excellent report on cloned vehicles that drug traffickers use to move drugs across the Mexican border into the U.S. Apparently, they are copying FedEx trucks, ambulances, police vehicles and WALMART semi-tractor trailers. It was a great, need to know story. It reminded me of another great story and a caveat.
In 1993, the Society of Professional Journalism published a guidebook called “Doing Ethics in Journalism”. Under the chapter “Making Ethical Decisions”, the authors talk about a Pulitzer Prize winning story called “AIDS in the Heartland” by Pioneer Press reporter Jacqui Banaszynski. They talk about guiding principles Ms. Banaszynski used when writing her story. Those were:
Seek Truth and Report it as Fully as Possible
Act Independently
Minimize Harm
About that last one, it is assumed to make sense that minimizing harm, as in not letting the revealing of something actually cause damage or help more of it to happen, should be a goal. Journalism though, might argue that it isn’t. And there’s the rub. In Ms. Werner’s story, it was certainly important for the public to know that drug traffickers were moving drugs in legitimately looking vehicles. But is it minimizing harm to the public by alerting drug dealers that mispellings on the fake logos of those fake vehicles help police spot them better? The argument could be made that a mispelled logo could also alert the public who could, in turn, alert the police. But you could make the counter argument that making that piece of information public just helped drug traffickers make better logos.
The problem with the story, as I saw it, was it gave a tiny piece of information that may make finding these fakes harder and makes me question those times when and if news reporting goes too far. For the public, that detail may have been incidental, but for law enforcement, it might be huge. Some of that responsibility does lie with the police. If they didn’t want it shared, they probably shouldn’t have shared it. Of course, if they did consider it minor and purposely released this tidbit, then all this is moot. But if it slipped into the reporter’s notebook, then so too did some of the responsibility.
When Pakistani student Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by the Taliban, I asked this same question. Although this is about drugs, not crazed religious extremists, the principle is the same. At what point in a story should reporters just stop talking? We now know that drug dealers mispell logos and maybe, we laugh at them for their ignorance.
But I’m guessing the police aren’t laughing.