The "Evening News" Report: The Truth Laid Bear
I want to start this EN Report with some kudos: Last week's "War Stories" series, in which CBS correspondents told behind-the-scenes stories from the front lines, was great stuff. It introduced a degree of transparency into Iraq coverage and served as an appropriately reflective moment in a week that marked a crucial anniversary in the war. You can watch one installment by clicking on the video box.
Video: Last week also brought us the story of Knut the polar bear cub. You can see that one by clicking on the second video box. Richard Schlesinger reported the story, which was ostensibly an exploration of the "controversy" drummed up by calls for the exceedingly cute Knut to be killed.
The argument for killing Knut was this: The cub was abandoned by his mother. If that had happened in the wild, he would have died. And the Berlin Zoo has an obligation to let nature take its course.
The only thing is the "Knut controversy" was never much of a controversy at all: The Berlin Zoo was never going to kill the cub. Germans are going nuts for the bear, and the comments, by a small number of dissenters, didn't have any real chance of gaining traction. "We never thought to put him to death or let him die," Berlin Zoo veterinarian Dr. Andreas Ochs told Schlesinger in the piece. A zoo spokesman called the notion they would kill the bear "complete nonsense."
The "Evening News" certainly had its reasons for showing Knut: The cub is so over-the-top cute that it's hard to take one's eyes off of him. Instead of trying to tie the footage of the bear to the non-controversy, however, the program might simply have let us know it was giving us our end-of-show cute animal fix and left it at that.
I should point out that it wasn't just the "Evening News" that played the story this way: Last Monday's edition of the widely-read German newspaper Bild splashed the headline "Will Sweet Knut Be Killed by Injection?" on the front page, and many other media outlets followed suit.