THOMAS LIPSCOMB WRITES IN EDITOR AND PUBLISHER about why RatherGate and EasonGate are still open:
Whatever CBS and CNN may have done wrong originally, both organizations compounded it by going into a coverup mode worthy of the Nixon White House or Bernie Ebbers’ Worldcom board room. The “suits” simply ran a classic corporate crisis-management operation to prevent the important news about what had really happened in their organizations from ever seeing the light of day.
Both The New York Times and USA Today, faced with their respective newsroom fantasists, Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley, felt obliged to send their news teams back to re-report the stories in question. They then detailed their errors in full. What should CBS and CNN have done? . . .
Whatever CNN wanted to do, like Dan Rather, it didn’t do it. Like CBS it did serious damage to a brand name that had taken decades of fine work to establish. And so CNN’s latest February Nielsen ratings, post-Jordangate, dropped 21%, to about one-third of Fox’s. And this is in a day when even flagship sinecures of indispensable information like The New York Times Co. and Dow Jones are projecting hard times.
Readership and audiences of the mainstream media are dropping like a stone, but the reporting by the mainstream media on Rathergate and Easongate give little sign that anyone understands why. CJR Daily managing editor Steve Lovelady gave a pretty accurate consensus of the mainstream media’s view of what the real problem was: the bloggers did it! Rather and Jordan went down, he said, because: “The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail.”
If it takes “salivating morons” to get major news organizations to clean up their acts and remember Journalism 101, may they slobber on — before the American people stop paying any attention to big media at all. In the end, as The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz points out, Jordan only resigned “following a relentless campaign by online critics but scant coverage in the mainstream press.” Those of us in mainstream media had better ask why we didn’t do a better job ourselves.
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