Monday, March 14, 2005

If journalists do real, on-the-ground reporting

What do we call the people who do "news" on television?

See this review of Tom Fenton's new book:
"When I first went to work for CBS News," he recalls, "we had a Rome bureau staffed by three correspondents. Now we have only three foreign bureaus staffed by correspondents in the entire world." Four of those correspondents are based in London, not because much news happens there, but because that's where the product is "packaged." Footage shot elsewhere in the world by services available to paying news clients is fed to London where a generic story line is written and the package distributed. A CBS staffer might then edit the copy with a correspondent standing by to track the piece and sign off from London, having contributed zero to the reporting involved. The practice, Fenton correctly argues, "can also lead to omissions and errors."
I saw Fenton on BookTV yesterday being interviewed by Roger Mudd. He made the same point but with a twist. When he reported a Middle Eastern story, his crew shot it in front of a large mosque in London. A small deception, perhaps, but a telling one.

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