aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, April 13, 2007

TV news is a big lie!

TV lies to us all the time and it bugs me big time! Jon Stewart’s in-studio green-screen location correspondents underscore it every night on Comedy Central: TV works to imply that it’s live and on the scene when typically it’s there long after the fact and rolling in previously recorded footage to imply that it’s still there - give us that live feel - when it emphatically is not.

Today Timothy Noah looks at the deeper fakery of Katie Couric:

I’m hardly the first to point out the risible irony in CBS News firing Web producer Melissa McNamara for passing off as her own work a commentary she ghosted for Katie Couric that borrowed extensively from a March 15 Wall Street Journal column by Jeffrey Zaslow. From a strictly narrow perspective, of course, CBS was justified in firing McNamara. The network paid her to write original essays for Katie Couric to read in video and audio clips made available on its Web site and to CBS-owned radio stations. McNamara deceived CBS by plagiarizing the Journal. But CBS News wronged visitors to its Web site by inviting them to think that the opinions Couric expressed in these commentaries were her own. It’s no special knock on Couric; before Couric, Dan Rather regularly recited commentaries on the radio that were written by others, and Walter Cronkite did the same before him.

The deception was a little more conspicuous in this instance, at least retrospectively, because it began with a personal memory: “I still remember when I first got my library card.” That sentence was not lifted from the Zaslow column, but it’s actually more fake than anything else in the commentary because it purports to be a personal recollection. In fact, however, it is McNamara remembering on Couric’s behalf the time she toddled up to the library, filled out a form, and was handed her very own library card.

I’m a Couric fan. She’s only playing by the rules. Problem is, the rules should change and Couric could should lead the way. Read the whole piece.