All Blog Posts from Public Eye

The bulging ranks of cable news critics saw their ranks grow by another member yesterday: None other than Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Welcome, El Presidente. Now settle down.

According to various news reports, Chavez – who has already has shut down one popular TV network, with another in his crosshairs – announced he is going to sue CNN International for placing his image next to Osama bin Laden during a recent news package.

[Venezuelan] Information Minister, William Lara, showed a press conference what he said was CNN footage of Mr. Chavez juxtaposed with images of Osama bin Laden, saying: “CNN broadcast a lie which linked President Chavez to violence and murder." He also accused CNN of dishonesty for using footage of a Mexican demonstration in a story about the current Venezuelan disturbances.

CNN has already aired a correction and apologized for the Mexican footage, adding that it is not “engaged in a campaign to discredit or attack Venezuela.” To the contrary, CNN was actually singled out for praise by Hugo Chavez in 2003, when he lauded their coverage of his standing up to a coup. (A coup fomented, in part, by the Radio Caracas Television network he just took off the air.)

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Each week we invite someone from outside PE to weigh in with their thoughts about CBS News and the media at large. This week, we asked Justin Rood, a reporter/blogger for TPM Muckraker. He has reported for Government Executive magazine and the Congressional Quarterly as well as other publications. Here, Rood discusses the differences between reporting for traditional media and reporting for a blog. As always, the opinions expressed and factual assertions made in “Outside Voices” are those of the author, not ours, and we seek a wide variety of voices.

Starting out as a Washington beat reporter, I quickly learned the power of a cup of coffee. While most of my reporting was done at one end of a telephone line, I got much of my best stuff after convincing sources to sit down with me at a Starbucks.

It's not hard to understand why: Out of earshot from co-workers and bosses, sources tend to feel more free to say what they really think. They more readily develop trust when they interact with you in person.

Lunches and dinners with sources could yield even better results. As long as I didn't try to match my companions' scotch intake, I often came away with great details, anecdotes and insights of the way the nation's capital functions.

That was then, however.

For the past year, I've been reporting on Washington for a different sort of publication: TPMmuckraker.com, an investigative blog covering all manner of political scandals and corruption. And I've come to appreciate a very different kind of relationship with a very different group of sources, our readers.

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Let's Call The Whole Thing Off: Another day, another Osama/Obama mix up, this time from Yahoo News. TPM Café's Greg Sargent has the details. Despite an plausible-sounding explanation for what happened posted in the comments section by a Yahoo! representative, TPM Café readers are crying conspiracy. "Well, it looks like the media are going way out of their way to get this into people's subconscious," wrote one commenter. Claimed another: "Every one of these 'mistakes' is a smear with deniability attached to it."

Bring Out The Good China? "A new era of journalism in China is upon us!" We'll believe it when we see it. Still, some good news: The Chinese government has gotten rid of laws that restrict the movement of foreign journalists through China. "Before Monday, the foreign press needed government authorization to report from a location other than Beijing or Shanghai. Under the new laws, aimed at accommodating the Olympic foreign press, reporters are able to report and conduct interviews all over China without permission," reports Flumesday.com. Worth noting: "[A]s soon as the new rules took effect Monday, both NBC and the New York Times sent additional journalists to China." Tibet, incidentally, is still off limits. And the old restrictions are scheduled to come back after the Olympics end.

For All You Job Seekers Out There: A citizen journalism Web site in Canada is looking for a sex trade worker to cover the trial of an accused serial killer. For some reason. Qualified applicants, it should be noted, need the "ability to tell compelling stories for no pay." According to the site's editor, there have already been a few applicants.

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Occasionally, we take a look at the experience of covering major news events of the past. Sharyl Attkisson recently shared what she remembered most about one chapter of the Clinton/Lewinsky saga. Bob Orr discussed separating fact from rumor in the 1996 TWA Flight 800 crash. And Charlie Wilson remembered filming outside the Washington Hilton when Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981.

Yesterday was the sixth anniversary of the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, one of the biggest terrorism stories before 9/11, and one that dealt with Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Correspondent David Martin was among those who covered the story and he addressed some of the criticisms that have arisen since then about media coverage of terrorism prior to 9/11.

“I certainly remember the Cole as a very big story,” said Martin. “It was a warship nearly sunk by two men in a motorboat. The assumption was that it was Osama because two years before in ’98, we had the embassy bombings in Africa and that had been Osama.”

As far as questions about whether enough attention was paid to the Cole bombing in its immediate aftermath, Martin contends that the denouement of the story wasn’t all that much different from many other major stories that simply run out of steam.

The Clinton administration "never had any evidence to launch another strike," said Martin, so "the Cole started to no longer be a daily news story because there was no subsequent action that would keep it alive."

“The big question for a while was, should the captain of the ship be punished and should the ship even have called in a place like Yemen,” he explained. “But it started to, like all news stories, run its course and there weren’t any new developments to keep it alive -- this happens with every news event.”

As far as criticisms that the media didn’t spend enough time covering the threat of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden before 9/11, Martin disagrees. “I’ve obviously done more stories on terrorism since 9/11, but we didn’t have a war on terror before 9/11, and that took everything to a different level. But I think of all my journalistic sins, paying attention to terrorism I think is not one.”

“Where we failed, and I mean everybody,” said Martin, “was in making the leap of imagination that those kinds of attacks overseas were the harbingers of 9/11.”

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