Pressroom Buzz’s regular roundup of recent media news and commentary from all over.
TMJ’s Garage Exposé: WTMJ-TV’s Aaron Diamant was all over maintenance records for O’Donnell Park the day a chunk of concrete fell there, killing a teenager on his way to Summerfest. “[T]he O’Donnell garage operated by Milwaukee County Parks is in really bad shape. County leaders have known the specifics for at least six months, and we have the evidence to prove it,” Diamant told viewers in his characteristically pumped-up delivery. The next day, he walked it back slightly, with quotes from County Executive Scott Walker asserting the deferred maintenance to the garage, the subject of a December 2009 audit, had already been taken care of.
Over at the conservative MacIver Institute, blogger James Wigderson cried foul. Wigderson (who also posted about the issue on his personal blog) pointed out that Diamant’s follow-up story basically stuck with the innuendo that deferred maintenance was at fault when the facts clearly showed otherwise: “So despite the lack of any connection between the deferred maintenance reported and the accident itself, WTMJ-TV aired not one but two reports attempting to connect the accident to cost-cutting measures by Milwaukee County. The first report failed to establish any connection. The second report repeated the mistakes of the first, using visual cues to imply a connection before finally revealing otherwise.”
This isn’t the first time Diamant’s work has made a foamy drink out of pretty small beer.
A Fauber Fan: By contrast, John Fauber‘s work for the Journal Sentinel and MedPage Today on doctors’ conflicts of interest gets a laurel from Columbia Journalism Review. Money quote:
This is the kind of reporting that’s hard to do. It takes time to piece together information on clinical trials, understand what’s missing from the results, and find the discrepancies in the data. …
CNN to AP — Buh-bye: CNN says it won’t continue using the Associated Press wire service. Some thoughts on the broader implications of that move here.
Will Beliefnet Convert? Beliefnet, one of the most fascinating news, commentary and social networking sites to spring up in the last decade, was bought a while back by Rupert Murdoch. Beliefnet was founded to cover religion seriously and comprehensively and drew a huge following from people of every faith and no faith at all. All those eyeballs, of course, are what made it attractive to Murdoch, but prophets apparently didn’t translate into profits. Now Murdoch is shedding it again, and the buyer is linked to an Evangelical Christian group. Understandably, this raises eyebrows among the site’s non-Christian readers. An excellent neo-pagan news website, The Wild Hunt, offers a sharp analysis.
The Reporter and the General: The case of the Rolling Stone story that got General Stanley McChrystal relieved of his command is getting old, but we can’t sign off without calling attention to the blowback over the issue. CBS correspondent Lara Logan (who freelanced a few pieces for the Journal Sentinel back in the 1990s) insisted in a TV interview that Michael Hastings must have broken ground rules and published obviously off-the-record comments. Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi defends his colleague and slams Logan. At Huffington Post, a Logan defender responds. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviewed Hastings in a radio show broadcast last week. And finally, CJR considers the fallout.
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