Fox Reminds DC Staff They're Jounalists:

[witness23]

Fox News reminded its staff to follow journalistic standards after a producer was caught on camera whipping up a crowd at a tea party protest, Mediaite reports. Bill Sammon, the channel's vice-president of news, sent staff at Fox's DC bureau an email warning: "We do not cheerlead for one cause or another. We do not rile up a crowd. If a crowd happens to be boisterous when we show it on TV, so be it. If it happens to be quiet, that’s fine, too. It’s not our job to affect the crowd’s behavior."

He said any effort to affect a crowd "undermines" journalists' role to be "detached" eyewitnesses. "Our viewers are counting on us to be honest brokers when it comes to reporting," Sammon added.


—Rob Quinn
Source: Mediaite


One might ask, why do they need to be reminded? This sounds like lip service if you ask me.

[Turtle]

They need to be reminded because most aren't taught in journalism classes what journalism actually is anymore. Several years ago at a C-SPAN televised National Press Club luncheon in her honor, Carole Simpson (here: World News Tonight and here: Carole Simpson: Biography) was asked why she wanted to become a journalist. Her reply, "Because I wanted to change the world." I couldn't believe my ears when I heard it. Even if that's true of many journalists, most will usually come up with a more journalistic answer, like, "Because I wanted to witness and report the important events of our time, yada, yada, yada." But she came right out and said it.

If you read her biography, especially this one (Carole Simpson: Biography) you will see that she is, in fact, a journalist with an agenda. An agenda that has won her many awards, but an agenda just the same. Now she's teaching it to other people who want to become journalists, people who were weaned on the reporting of Carole Simpson and others just like her.

It's very rare these days to hear or see a news report where the person doing the reporting doesn't add some bit of commentary. They usually do it at the end of the report, disguised as them explaining to us what really happened, or what it's all supposed to mean. Affecting the crowd to make a news story is over the top, and as such should be reacted to in the manner in which Bill Sammon reacted. The problem is, he nor much of anyone else even notices when commentary is cleverly disguised as fact within the reporting, and thus never gets admonished.