As the whole Shirly Sherrod thing continues to embarass cable news on an unprecedented scale, the networks are alternatively flaying themselves and pointing fingers.
Guess which one Fox News is doing? That's right, the whole debacle was was President Obama's fault.
Nevermind the fact that it was Fox News who took the story from incindeary partisan hooliganry to mainstream, million-viewer importance. Never mind that, at no point, did Fox (or any cable TV news outlet) take the time to call Sherrod, ask for the whole tape, or talk to the farmer, any one of which would have put the brakes screeching on a story that should never have been -- and any one of which an intern at a more stable medium would have tried reflexively before running with unverified, out-of-context video. Nevermind the fact that Fox News would have been screaming reverse racism if Sherrod hadn't gotten fired.
Never mind that any politician, no, any human, would probably act hastily when the entirety of cable news is telling the world one of their workers is a racist.
This story is, perhaps better than any other, a perfect example of the flaws of the 24-hour instant information media culture. In fact, it's hard to envision a scenario that could illustrate those flaws better.
This is a story made up entirely by cable news, blown out of proportion entirely by cable news, and fantastically, hilariously exploded entirely by cable news. It wasn't a story. Nothing happened. But a network with biases jumped on a similarly-aligned blog -- a damn blog -- and turned nothing into a very big something without taking the time to verify it.
In this long-ass, totally useless, kinda-sorta Mea Culpa, Roland Martin totally misses the point. He says this thing is a result of a nation still struggling with race issues.
Yeah, we're still struggling with race issues. But that's not the point. This isn't a story, isn't the great big mistake it is because we have race issues. It's the great big mistake it is because TV news media trample on those issues just like every other issue in their haste to break a big story.
Are other media outlets perfect? Of course not. Do we have weaknesses the others don't? Of course.
But newspapers didn't make this non-story happen. In fact, newspapers are barely mentioning it -- the one I work for certainly isn't. That's because we aren't so worried about the scoop or about being the first to make news that we sacrifice the steps necessary to make sure the facts are straight.
Which is exactly what happened here.
No comments:
Post a Comment