More On The Greenfield/FAIR Debate
A quick recap: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) posted an "Action Alert" complaining that the piece was flawed. Because the "Action Alert" told readers to write in to CBS and request a correction they felt warranted, we received more than 500 emails criticizing the piece.
Not long after the first such email arrived, we contacted Greenfield and asked him to respond to FAIR's critique. He did so. FAIR did not acknowledge his response until late yesterday, however, and the vast majority of the emails that have come in have simply followed FAIR's script and not engaged the response in any meaningful way.
Now the latest: Today, an "Evening News" employee has been contacting many of those who wrote to us to make sure they were aware of Greenfield's response. (He decided against replying to those who simply copy/pasted the FAIR piece or loaded their email with expletives -- and, to be honest, I'm sure a few more worthwhile messages have fallen through the cracks.)
So to review: Public Eye immediately acknowledged the complaints and got the correspondent to respond to them. An "Evening News" employee then took the trouble to make sure that many of those who had not seen the response were able to see it. That's pretty decent engagement with the viewer, isn't it? News organizations have not, historically, gone to such lengths to address issues like this; CBS News' competitors still, for the most part, do not.
But this has apparently not been enough. I just received an email from someone who heard from the "Evening News" employee but felt that CBS News' efforts to engage her were insincere. She offered a list of questions that she expected CBS to address on an individual basis and harshly criticized CBS News for not doing so.
The relentless beat of media criticism over the past few decades, combined with the rise of niche media outlets, many of them ideological, has conditioned news consumers to expect that they get exactly the news as they believe it should be. Or else. Some, like the e-mailer above, actually seem to believe that news organizations should spend their time and money offering detailed responses to every single person who writes in as part of an astroturfing campaign.
In an era when news budgets are shrinking and overseas bureaus are being closed down, that doesn't strike me as the best use of resources.
Over the roughly two years I've been with Public Eye, I've read thousands of e-mails from both sides of the ideological fence that, when boiled down, are some variation on: "I disagree with story X, therefore you have a bias problem." Frankly, it's time to move past that. CBS News is far from perfect, and we've aired countless criticisms of the organization over the course of our existence. But it is frequently overlooked that there are real efforts being made to hear out those who find fault with the network, and I find it extremely discouraging that, instead of acknowledging those efforts, many folks prefer to continue offering up the same old tired rhetoric I've been reading since my first day on the job.