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Originally Posted by alpha phi
I suspect this is where some of the more
informed internet blogs are coming from.
Journalists who want a huge public outcry
But are not willing to risk their job (or life)
to get the reports to go public.
Notice how the anthrax attacks
after 911 hit the media?
NBC and New York Post
The "big guys" who would be doing the investigative reports
Won't touch them out of fear of retailition |
It's not so much a matter of risking our job. I fight at least once a week to get a story on the air that I think needs to be told, but that's rejected. Sure I could go shoot, write, voice, and edit the story anyway and no one would fire me. But unless I hijack the control room, I can't get it on the air anyway
Elphaba asked me in PM to explain my earlier comments on Reagan and the Fairness Doctrine, so here goes a simplified explanation:
In the "good old days" the media was required by a law called the fairness doctrine to cover all sides of a story. Under this doctrine, if I show a democrat saying "I think the republicans suck because of X" then I MUST go find a republican counterpart and let him refute it. Regan and his deregulation sweeps (the same sweeps that deregulated the meat industry and are directly responsible for the fact that the hamburger you ate last night has a good chance of having been in contact with animal feces - or worse) abolished the fairness doctrine.
Interestingly, this same deregulation also abolished a requirement that came about at the same time as the fairness doctrine. That requirement said that the press, being a public trust, MUST actively seek out issues of importance to their community, and to air programming that addressed those issues. This means Clinton would never have gotten away with not effectively retaliating against bin Laden when he bombed the WTC the first time because the press would have been required to jump on the issue. Unfortunately, we are no longer required by law to do that, and since our corporate owners want us to 1) produce stories they think the "ignorant public" wants to see and 2) do it as freakin' cheaply as possible, we don't enterprise nearly as many stories as we ought to.