Jay Rosen has some more great input on the Karen Ryan / HHS “news” report originally discussed here. Looks like she’s been interviewed a couple times and is feeling like she’s scapegoated. Kind of funny that she’s out in the wind right now and no one’s pulling her back in the window.
“But the trouble is she is a sort of fraud, and what collapsed for her was a style of video fraudulence she happened to be good at. It may be commonplace in politics, but if so then Ryan is just a more common type of fraud than some who find their way into the news pages. There is no rational interpretation, professional ethic, or angle of vision in which the sentence, “From Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting” looks like anything other than a simple lie.”
The key to it all, for me, is that she was purporting to be a reporter from every angle - and that’s just wrong. Kind of like how a lot of bloggers use a “full disclosure” note when they write about something they might have worked on, etc., Ms. Ryan looked like a reporter when she actually wasn’t. And even though the cop-out of “the producers aired, it, so it’s their fault” might seem cheesy for her, they deserve some of the blame. These same producers are running news now where people are talking about how much they feel duped by the Karen Ryan “report”. So the “media” deserves some of the blame here, too.
Wonder if we’ll ever see any of this type of material in this format - ever again.
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1 The Dead Parrot Society // Oct 11, 2004 at 2:36 pm
Stumping for nothing
So the Education Department has a promotional video to send out to news stations, just like HHS did last year in support of the Medicare law. Like the Medicare videos, the Ed Dept. piece mimics a news report, doesn’t identify the government as its sour…