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Category: In the news

California judge bans cameras from courtroom after District Attorney’s office denied access to media pool feed

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Cameras have been banned from an Orange County courtroom after the district attorney’s office was denied access to the live pool feed, according to VoiceofOC.org, a non-profit investigative news agency.

“Susan Schroeder, chief of staff for District Attorney Tony Rackauckas, said there was an earlier court ruling ‘that we [the DA’s office] were part of the pool’ with rights to access the videos.

“But Rick Terrell, executive director of the Radio and Television News Association of Southern California, said, ‘There’s nothing in [California court rules] that says the news media must give its raw material to anyone other than another news organization.'”

Read the complete post by Tracy Wood here.

A helpful primer on Government Surveillance and the Press from NYT Public Editor

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Margaret Sullivan, the public editor for The New York Times, recently published a column offering four pieces that may help add texture and context to the continuing discussion about press rights and government surveillance.

Alan Rusbridger (The Guardian) along with Bill Keller, David Cay Johnston and Jill Abramson (all of the NYT) each offer perspectives worth considering (or revisiting if you’ve seen them before) as we look toward the Center for Journalism Ethics’ 2014 ethics conference.

Brief introductions as links to the each piece can be found here.

Will Ferrell brings his Ron Burgundy character to a Bismarck ND TV news broadcast. Is this news, promotion, advertising, comedy, or some combination of each?

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Viewers of last Saturday evening’s broadcast of KX-News in Bismarck ND were likely surprised to see Ron Burgundy serving as co-anchor.  Will Ferrell’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy character has been popping up in unexpected places recently as the actor promotes the upcoming sequel, Anchorman: The Legend Continues.

Ferrell’s character was integrated into the actual KXNews broadcast script, and the actor clearly ad libbed during transitional banter.  While it may not have been on par with a carefully polished Hollywood script, the appearance went viral with the full broadcast logging more than 180,000 views on YouTube within 48 hours.  Several other shorter videos, as well as the station’s own post, further grew the exposure.

Funny?  Sure.  Appropriate?  Not so sure.  The Burgundy character is clearly a satirical send-up, yet probably does little to build credibility of TV anchors.  As a former advertising guy who counted Universal Pictures as a client, I loved this.  But as a journalism scholar, I found it a bit troubling.  Having Ron Burgundy co-anchor an entire broadcast essentially made that it a 30 minute promotional message for the upcoming film.

In the comment thread below a Facebook post linking to a Talking Point Memo post about Ferrell’s KXMB appearance, two adjacent comments offer opposing opinions about the stunt…

TPM FB

Love it or hate it, Ron Burgundy’s turn as co-anchor on KXNews does call into question station KXMB’s credibility.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpj4uM1ruvs

 

Maybe 60 Minutes can learn a few things from lesser news magazines…

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Brendan Nyhan, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, suggests that the folks at 60 Minutes would do well by following the lead of “its downscale cousin Inside Edition” when that broadcast news magazine aired what turned out to be a factually-challenged segment.

“After the story went viral and started attracting scrutiny from critics, Inside Edition didn’t just run a brief segment apologizing for its first story, as 60 Minutes did. Instead, it aired a long segment… [detailing and correcting several erroneous story elements].”

Read the entire post here.

News Organizations push back on White House photo restrictions

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Thirty eight news organizations signed a letter to White House press secretary Jay Carney protesting a strict policy that greatly limits news photographers’ access to President Obama.   As reported by the Los Angeles Times, Poynter and others, and recapped on iMediaEthics.com, several news organizations state they will not use any photographs or footage provided by the White House, except for the rare occasions involving national security restrictions on press access.

The letter suggests White House restrictions are similar to censorship, saying,

“As surely as if they were placing a hand over a journalist’s camera lens, officials in this administration are blocking the public from having an independent view of important functions of the Executive Branch of government.”

Read the complete iMediaEthics article here.

Journalism Educators Call for CBS News to Correct their Correction of the 60 Minutes Benghazi Story

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Amidst the corrections, critiques and internal investigations, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) called upon CBS News to rethink the way the network is handling key aspects of the correction.  AEJMC president Paula Poindexter notes that the original and incorrect version of the story has been scrubbed from both the CBS News online archive and the 60 Minutes You Tube Channel, “as if to say the Benghazi report never existed.”

“This handling of the report and its correction will likely further damage the public’s already low opinion of journalism. The Pew Research Center has found that only 18 percent of the public believes the press is “willing to admit mistakes” and almost three-quarters believe news organizations “try to cover up mistakes.” Recognizing how important correcting mistakes is to the public’s trust in journalism, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), the largest association of journalism and communication educators in the world, calls upon 60 Minutes to return the original broadcast to its website and YouTube channel.

“Correcting an inaccurate broadcast that has aired is challenging, but in today’s digital world, it can be done in a way that simultaneously preserves the original broadcast for the historical and journalistic record and tells the truth about the inaccurate content. Therefore, AEJMC recommends that 60 Minutes embed the original report together with Logan’s official correction and the link to her Nov. 8, 2013 CBS This Morning interview in which she answered tough questions about events that led to the defective report. Additionally, a correction should be superimposed across the video so there is no misunderstanding about the inaccurate content in the report.”

Read the entire article here.

Would Welles War of the Worlds radio program play in the age of Social Media?

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When the Columbia Broadcasting System broadcast The Mercury Radio Theater’s version of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds,” Orson Welles managed to convince a portion of his audience that Martians were attacking Earth.  Media reports that followed told of mass hysteria and widespread panic.  Recent research suggests the alleged panic was mostly a media fallacy.

The public radio program Big Picture Science looked into how and why the media of the day created and advanced stories of a frightened public.  As part of their story, they spoke with Katy Culver, associate director of the UW Center for Journalism Ethics about the changing nature of journalism ethics, asking “Can we tweet ‘Mars is attacking!’ with impunity?”

Listen to the broadcast: http://traffic.libsyn.com/arewealone/BiPiSci13-10-21.mp3