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PrintAugust 27, 2010
Journalistic malpractice
ABC News, in committing a naked act of journalistic malpractice, is unlikely to be harshly rebuked by their fellow journalists, happily imprisoned in the Soros/Obama media complex.
Andrea S. Lafferty, a speaker at the August 22nd rally to prevent the building of the GZ mosque in New York, posted a chilling account [with photos] of an ABC News crew and their feckless coverage on "Andrew Breitbart Presents Big Peace" website.
Lafferty writes,
I noticed a man in black shirt with a phone camera aggressively questioning and haranguing a gentleman with the sign, "No Sharia Here." He was very aggressive, disrespectful and condescending; apparently, he did not like the gentlemen's answers about Shariah and pushed the point: "Why do you feel threatened? What are you afraid of? Why can't you answer my questions?"My instincts told me to document the scene, and I took out my camera. I originally thought he was a supporter of the mosque (they'd gathered in much smaller numbers a few blocks away), or some kind of fringe reporter for a small, even fringier leftist paper. When I challenged the man in the black shirt, asking him to tell me what media outlet he worked for, he refused to answer. He walked away.But there was cameraman was standing nearby, watching the scene play out. When I asked, he said he worked for ABC News. I then asked if the man in the black shirt was with him. The ABC cameraman said, "yes."Sure enough, a few blocks away, I observed the [same] man in the black shirt getting into an ABC News truck and putting on the sound equipment. When he saw me with my camera, he attempted to hide. Clearly, the ABC employee's role at the rally was to provoke a confrontation with participants so ABC News cameras could record it and then use the footage.
This childish and odious breach of faith just cements Main Street America's belief about the deceptive, dishonest and radical progressive political agenda of the MSM.
We can easily surmise the conversation at the ABC assignment desk that morning. "So, lets roll some hard edgy video of some pissed off white folks hating Muslims for the early national feed. Any black guys on this news crew? -- Ok you there -- get right in the face of an older fat white guy with an anti -Muslim sign or shirt, and first really hack him off. You know, insult his mother, call him a Red Sox fan, and then ask him some pointed questions. And for God's sake don't get caught making news."
Robert A. Iger, CEO of The Walt Disney Company, parent company of ABC, writes in his 2008 Corporate Responsibility Report,
We're enthusiastic about making our corporate responsibility efforts even more effective. Our approach has been guided by Disney's enduring principles of integrity, optimism and decency as well as a results-oriented strategy that we believe can lead to steady improvements in the way we do business.
Let's be clear, incidents and situations like these don't occur in a vacuum, they are thoroughly discussed and sanctioned by senior management to meet specific corporate goals. The Walt Disney Company must be quite proud that their ABC New York flagship station carefully follows a "results-oriented strategy" in reporting and making the news. However Mr. Iger, those "enduring principles, " seems to have had a relatively short shelf life, as measured by corporate apathy and indifference.
[A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper." --Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785.
