This is how desperate the ratings-driven, truth-is-a-casualty, facts-don't matter cable and newspaper 'entertainment' press have become.
In a column Tuesday, David Zurawik of the Baltimore Sun wrote an article that is truly a monument to arrogance and how far journalism has fallen as a profession. You will note the article page is heavily laced with irrelevant commercial messages and links, and has no real feedback mechanism other than buttons to "like me" on several sites. I want some "this is stupid blather" or "hate me" buttons for this kind of tripe!
The gist of the article is that PBS NewsHour apparently laid off some folks and adjusted their staffing, and he saw a golden opportunity to lay into their integrity.
Needless to say the folks at the NewsHour were more than up to the task, and I will let them make their fact-based and eloquent reply themselves.
Anytime Zurawik or anyone else wants to take on PBS...I am ready. How he can think that the obviously biased and uninformed reporting on cable news holds any kind of candle to PBS is astonishing. I personally think all of the major broadcast networks should just cancel their newscasts -- 21 minutes per night (the amount of content in a 30 minute newscast after commercials) is ludicrous.
Finally, I can't resist pointing out the segment of the comment by Kathleen McCleery, Deputy Executive Producer of the PBS NewsHour:
The PBS NewsHour gets high marks for trust. In February of this year, Public Policy Polling found "that there's only one [TV News] source more Americans trust than distrust: PBS." That means a lot to us and to our viewers. Our reporting has earned acclaim, too. Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism has called our international coverage, "The PBS Difference," noting in 2012 that we provided "one-third more coverage of international events over the last year than the media overall." Media Matters took note of our climate change coverage, which included Hari Sreenivasan's "Coping with Climate Change" reporting from around the country, observing that "PBS NewsHour devoted almost twice as many segments to climate change as the other networks combined."
So rest assured Zurawik...thinkers aren't ready to roll over to your brand of bland, uninformative, biased, factless, spectacle-based news anytime soon !
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