What used to be unspeakable is now not only news but fodder for tweets, blog posts and myriad forms of comment. Freedom of information has advanced, hasn’t it?
A 39-year-old woman, CBS correspondent Lara Logan, is “beaten and assaulted” by a crowd in Cairo. We know because her network issued a terse press release, which the Washington Post and New York Times respectfully reported, adding only such information as citing a report about previous sexual attacks on women journalists.
The tabloids and bloggers have not stopped there, with Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post dredging up irrelevant details of Logan’s personal life (no link here, this post is prurient enough), and an impetuous blogger has gotten himself fired from a job at NYU after setting off a left-right battle over a tasteless tweet about Logan and Anderson Cooper, who was previously bruised.
The underlying question, however, is what justifies the risks, other than ratings, of putting TV news “stars” into raging crowds? Do we learn any more than we would from indigenous reporters doing the interviews or, if the names need to be there, doing their work in a secure area?
These are not questions about journalism but show business.
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