Rolling On Down the Road
Greyhawk
Stephen Spruiell reports from a forum bringing together Marines and media representatives. Well worth a read for many reasons. But those who recall last week's 60 Minutes story on Route Irish (Debunked here.) will especially appreciate Stephen's relay of this comment from a CBS producer in attendance:
To be fair to the CBS and NBC guys, they were both good panelists and gave the Marines useful suggestions for dealing with the press. The CBS guy admitted that he was outraged by a recent "60 Minutes" piece about Route Irish, the once-deadly road to the Baghdad airport which the military has since secured. "60 Minutes," which had videotaped the segment prior to the security improvements, didn't bother to report in depth on the recent progress.
Admittedly it's easy to express "outrage" about media undermining the military when you're addressing a group of Marines. How this producer channels his outrage will reveal whether or not this is simply an example of adjusting your message for the current audience. (Or "pandering" if you prefer a harsher tone.) As I've noted here before in several examples of media types admitting they
have a problem, that's a great first step, not the end of the road. In this case, that audience likely expects actions beyond words.
Or maybe that's something they can only expect from fellow GIs.
Read it all.
Posted by Greyhawk at 07:43 PM |
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