As I was sitting in my apartment last evening, I was kind of flipping between watching TV, eating my concoction of beef Ramen Noodles with salisbury steak and gravy and playing games on ye olde computer when I flipped channels on the TV and the NBC Nightly News was on. I forget the story that they were yammering about, it could have been economny this, holiday spending that, or the typical travel news story that always pops up around the Thanksgiving holiday. None of that bothered me all that much, as it was pretty much standard fare for the news, but then they went to commercial break and all bets were off.
The first thing that came up was the "Yes We Can" DVD, which is the biography of Barack Obama. Now normally I am not one to jump on the liberal media bandwagon, far too often I find the media takes what ever story is the most sensational and runs with it. That being said, I am most troubled by this product because it is being produced by NBC News regarding a man that they will be covering for the next 4 years. How objective can they be when it comes to covering the President elect (as well as his presidency itself) when they are using him to push product. This isn't a matter of putting together a video of someone who is either dead or no longer in office and making use of stock footage and interview clips that being a news organization would give you access to in order to shed greater insight on a person or subject, it is taking someone that you are expected to cover objectively and using them to sell soap. Just how objective in their coverage are they going to be, when bad press could hurt DVD sales? It creates a conflict of interest where there needn't have been one and for that, NBC News is our Asshat of the Week.
I didn't think their pre election coverage was particularly objective anyway, but then I can't rally judge it that well because I only saw some of their broadcasts. I'm with you I find this disturbing.
ReplyDeletewhat , if anything of historical value could possibly be on this dvd?
ReplyDeletedid they have one of mcain in case he would have won instead?
i guess it will sell to the same clowns who shelled out the dough to purchase an obama tshirt
Well I will say that Newsweek magazine usually publishes a book at the end of the election that covers the inner worklings of the campaigns, which is a fascinating read for those of us who are geeks like that. You start to get an idea of how the different candidates staffs treat the media and how that starts to play out in the coverage. That being said, what they do covers all of the candidates and is just focused on the campaign itself, there is no career retrospective on someone that they plan on covering for the next four or eight years. The idea that a news organization would put forth a bio on someone that they are supposed to be covering objectively, knowing that bad press could in fact cost them dollars, is troubling, because for all of the yammering about how no one watches the news anymore, and that there are plenty of other places to get the news, the Big Three's (ABC, NBC and CBS) evening newscasts are still the highest rated shows of that genre, and one would hope that they would keep the appearances of impropriety to a minimum.
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