MEDIA WATCH

Airwaves filled with inaccuracies over Florida terror scare

By Glenn Garvin

Sept. 14— “It seems like everyone connected the dots here,” WSVN-Fox 7 anchor Christine Cruz said during the sixth hour of the marathon coverage of Friday’s bomb scare on Florida’s Alligator Alley. “It seems like everyone did what they were supposed to be doing.”

Like a lot of what was said during the coverage, that was about half right. Television reporters were certainly connecting dots — lots of dots, some of them seemingly from another planet — but if journalism is about facts and not hype, then they definitely weren’t doing what they were supposed to do.

Friday’s coverage was the source of a staggering amount of misinformation. Among the inaccurate reports:

• uSeveral stations reported that a woman in Georgia told police three Middle Easterners were coming to Miami to blow something up. (That’s not what she said.)
• Several also said cops spotted the men after they roared past a tollbooth on I-75. (One car rolled by at a normal rate of speed; the other stopped and paid the tolls for both.)
• The cops used explosives to detonate a suspicious knapsack found in one car. (They didn’t.) Channel 7 reported that explosive “triggers” were found in one of the cars. (There were no “triggers” or anything else to do with explosives.)
• Channel 7 also reported that cops were searching for a third car. (They weren’t.)

It was a wretched performance — worse yet, a wretched performance that dragged on for eight hours, terrorizing South Florida and smearing the daylights out of three medical students who can be counted on to contribute heavily to the next edition of the travel guide What Sucks About South Florida.

“This is what is wrong with local news,” said Bill Pohovey, news director at WPLG-ABC 10, one of the two stations that kept their perspective on the story and stuck with regular programming. (WLTV-Univision 23 was the other.) “This is why viewers get disgusted with local news.”

My only quibble with Pohovey is the word local. The worst parody of journalism Friday was actually on CNN, where the high-paid-low-rated anchor Paula Zahn speculated, without a jot or tittle of evidence, that the three men were coming to Florida to blow up the Turkey Point nuclear reactor. Now you know why CNN promotes her sex appeal rather than her news judgment.

Local stations at least had the excuse that when you go live for six to eight hours, you’ve got to fill up the airtime with something — especially when the pictures are dull shots of cops standing around empty automobiles. At best, that means stuff will get on the air without being as thoroughly checked as it should be; at worst, it means your telecast devolves into rampant speculation and hype. We had plenty of both Friday.

The most egregious offender was WSVN 7, where it sounded like the staff had to hold anchors Christine Cruz and Tom Haynes back from storming onto the causeway and personally administering lethal injections to the three detained men they’d already tried and convicted.

Over and over, the cops and public officials interviewed by the station’s reporters cautioned that there was no physical evidence against the men (WSVN’s false report of explosive “triggers” notwithstanding), they hadn’t been arrested, and they weren’t even being called “suspects” yet. Over and over, Cruz and Haynes ignored them.

“This story started as Sinister Plot,” Cruz warned darkly. “Now it’s become Attack on Miami.”

Haynes wondered whether “these guys, apparently on their way to Miami to do some harm to the city of Miami,” were tied to al-Qaida. “This looks like some loosely pulled together plot,” he added. Later, he called them “three men apparently on their way to Miami with some ill intentions.’’

Sometimes I seriously wondered if Haynes was listening to his own station. At one point, WSVN aired an interview with the Georgia woman who reported the three men to the police. She described overhearing one man ask, “Do you think we have enough to bring it down?’’ and another answering, “If we don’t have enough, I have contacts. We can get enough to bring it down.’’

Seconds after the interview ended, Haynes summarized like this: Three men “talking about driving down to Miami and using some sort of explosive device to blow it up.’’ How he read all that into those two simple sentences, I’ll never know. Though I’ll bet Paula Zahn can tell us.

Source: Miami Herald

FCC’s media ownership proceeding to allow more consolidation

Washington, DC, Sept. 12— The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) launched a proceeding today that will lead to the erosion of long-standing safeguards designed to ensure that the public can receive information, opinions and ideas from a robust array of sources. In a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, the FCC set in motion changes that will place control of the nation’s TV stations, broadcast networks, and major daily newspapers in the hands of fewer giant corporations.

Among the rules at stake include a long-standing safeguard designed to prevent common ownership of a TV station and a newspaper in a single community (broadcast cross-ownership); the National Broadcast Ownership Cap, created to ensure that communities are served by local/and or diverse owners, instead of the major networks; and policies that now prohibit one major TV network from acquiring another (dual network rule).

Recent Commission actions have also put competition and diversity on the Internet at risk by moving to eliminate “open access” and content nondiscrimination requirements on broadband networks. “Soon, one company in a town will be able to control the newspaper, several TV and radio stations, the cable system, and the principal ISP,” explained Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit public interest group.

The lobbying efforts for scuttling federal media ownership policy have enabled a few companies to own more outlets, but have been accompanied by cutbacks in local and national newsroom budgets. Media deregulation has meant fewer foreign bureaus, investigative reporters, and resources for journalists, while at the same time we have seen a greater focus on bottom-line tabloid programming.

“The country cannot afford another wave of consolidation designed to bolster the bottom line of a few at the expense of our democracy,” said Chester. “The studies underway by the FCC are insufficient to develop a truly independent record that will protect the public. We call on the Commission to engage the country in a national debate about media ownership, involving leading independent academics, journalists, political scientists, civic and nonprofit leaders.”

Source: Center for Digital Democracy

Journalist harangued in Huntsville

By Jordan Smith

Austin, Texas, Sept. 13— When local political activist and Independent Media Center (IMC) reporter Christopher Plummer traveled to Huntsville’s Sam Houston State University last month for a forum on inmate rights, he didn’t expect to be arrested — especially for asking a question. Yet officers from the Office of the Inspector General — the “police” arm of the Texas Board of Criminal Justice — cuffed Plummer for his curiosity, then released him with the condition that he leave the campus immediately. Asking another question would have constituted disruption of a public meeting, a Class B misdemeanor, the officers told him.

According to the Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) Web site, the department organized the Aug. 24 conference, titled “Public Awareness — Corrections Today” (P.A.C.T.), to let inmate families and concerned individuals sit down with prison officials and “discuss common interests ... which leaders say will be a valuable exchange of information.” The online announcement noted that inmates’ families would be able to discuss individual inmate concerns one-on-one with prison officials. But conference attendees were required to write down their questions for TDCJ officials, who then determined which questions to answer.

TDCJ spokesman Larry Todd said the conference wasn’t structured to encourage the free-flowing, open discussion. “It’s not that kind of a forum,” Todd said, “because we’d still be there [answering questions] if we did it that way.” But Plummer arrived late, and didn’t realize that a sanctioned Q&A session wouldn’t follow each TDCJ presentation.

After a session on inmate grievance procedures, Plummer said, he stood up and “politely” asked his question, which TDCJ officials declined to answer. He eventually caught up with the session’s presenter in a hallway and received a response. Thinking that was the end of it, he walked outside to smoke a cigarette. Then along came OIG officer Jerry Bell. As a video taken by Plummer’s wife, Rebecca, shows, Bell poked Plummer and asked, “Are you refusing to identify yourself?” Plummer, wearing IMC press credentials around his neck, said no.

“I’m a police officer and I have a badge,” Bell replied, then whipped out his handcuffs and arrested Plummer for “failing to identify” himself — which is not an arrestable offense. The bizarre scene lasted about 10 minutes, until OIG and TDCJ officials took Plummer into a small room inside the Sam Houston School of Criminal Justice and said they wouldn’t arrest him if he left. Plummer agreed, albeit reluctantly.

“If these weren’t the same people who control my parole, I wouldn’t have left,” Plummer said. In January, he was released from prison after serving eight years for “breaking and entering with intent to burglarize” — the result of a politically motivated raid he and other members of the United Anarchist Front instigated at a Houston home inhabited by members of an Aryan brotherhood group. Plummer kept up his political activism behind bars, he said, which made him unpopular with TDCJ officials.

Source: Austin Chronicle