Slanting a story
Posted on September 14, 2005
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With CNN suing the Bush administration for the right to cover the clean-up of bodies in Louisiana the media-censorship story is a big one and it appears that the length of time it’s taken the government to go in and clean up is an even bigger story.
However when you’re looking to attack it’s easy to get carried away, and reporters are not immune to this. Witness “As bodies recovered, reporters are told ‘no photos, no stories’” by Cecilia M. Vega of SFGate.com in which she throws this tidbit into the middle of it:
After the recovery team took away the St. Anthony Street body, two workers urinated on the side of a neighbor’s house.
Nice. Through some clever juxtaposition we have the image of body removal and then an image of desecration directly following quotes by residents of the neighbourhood that imply the government doesn’t give a damn about them.
The “piss” comment is a throw-away statement, a statement that, on the surface, makes the government workers look terrible without adding any details or information to the story itself. In a story about media censorship it serves no factual purpose except to attempt to villify the institution by re-inforcing the idea that the workers, and thus by association the government, are callous, uncaring, insensitive.
Maybe that’s true of the goverment but in this case I’d be willing to bet that these guys weren’t taking a piss on someone’s house because they’re assholes. I’d be willing to bet they were doing it because it’s 100 degrees in Louisiana, they’re spending their days walking around in HazMat suits pulling weeks-old fetid bodies out of houses that still don’t have any running water, and sometimes a piss is just a piss.
It’s a fine line between reporting and manipulating. As Joe Friday used to say “Just the facts ma’am. Just the facts.”
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