So I don't know who Sharyl Attkisson is. Is she a big name, or a relative nobody? After twenty years she must be a somebody. I don't know for sure, but she's big enough to merit a story at Politico, which I never tire of pointing out is most assuredly not a conservative news site:
CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson has reached an agreement to resign from CBS News ahead of contract, bringing an end to months of hard-fought negotiations, sources familiar with her departure told POLITICO on Monday.She felt stonewalled trying to get information, so the network doubts her "impartiality". I don't think reporters should be impartial, they should be skeptical. That's the entire, and I'd assert perhaps the only, reason for protecting press freedom in the First Amendment.
Attkisson, who has been with CBS News for two decades, had grown frustrated with what she saw as the network’s liberal bias, an outsize influence by the network’s corporate partners and a lack of dedication to investigative reporting, several sources said. She increasingly felt that her work was no longer supported and that it was a struggle to get her reporting on air.
At the same time, Attkisson’s reporting on the Obama administration, which some staffers characterized as agenda-driven, had led network executives to doubt the impartiality of her reporting. She is currently at work on a book — tentatively titled “Stonewalled: One Reporter’s Fight for Truth in Obama’s Washington” — that addresses the challenges of reporting critically on the administration.
2 comments:
Of course a reporter should be skeptical but it's the reporter whose bias doesn't leak into their copy that's the gold standard. I knew one such who was as far left as anyone I've known but from the copy he wrote you couldn't tell if he was right, left or visiting from another planet.
To the left however everything's political and the world divides into those on your side and the enemy. The uninterested are the enemy because they're not your friend so a reporter who hews to the journalistic ethic of impartiality is the enemy.
Reporters are society's skeptics, or should be. Back when I was in J-school we were told that the story's the thing and our job was to get the information right and let readers make the connections. Now the assumption is that viewers/readers are just too dumb to connect the dots so networks assume the mantle of teacher and present the audience with a final opinion-thus alleviating them from the need to think critically or at all.
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