September 16, 2004

People Love it When You Lose

How did that song go again? "Kick up when they're up / Kick 'em when they're down?" Yeah, something like that:

``One of the problems in journalism . . . is we ask for transparency, and yet we don't demand the same from ourselves,'' said Ken Auletta, media writer for The New Yorker magazine. ``CBS still has a lot of great reporters and `60 Minutes' is still the best news magazine show. They don't deserve to be robbed of that reputation, but they risk (it) if they don't act.''
I could quibble about the verb "robbed" in that last sentence--it implies they didn't do this to themselves but were, you know "attacked"--but you know, it is just faintly possible that Dan Rather's given more people ulcers in his long career than we'll ever know about, so maybe that's who's being fingered as the culprit. Posted by Ilyka at September 16, 2004 07:49 AM in news
Comments

Ken Auletta? Hmph. I came across a book of his about the meedja while at a bookstore a few weeks ago...can't recall the name, and can't be arsed to look on Amazon.

Auletta spent an entire chapter quoting Aaron Brown, the Dan Rather of CNN, about what FOX News was all about. (Hint: mostly about Roger Ailes and the VWRC. Nothing about how they'd finally given non-LLL viewers an alternative.)

And he spent less than one page dismissing blogs because (of course) "they're not edited." Surprisingly, he said nothing about pajamas.

Posted by: Reginleif the Valkyrie at September 16, 2004 06:55 PM