Daily Commentary – Thursday, January 21st, 2010 – Self-Serving Reporters in Haiti, Exploitation or News Coverage?

• Dana comments on some controversy about whether reporters and networks are exploiting the disaster in Haiti to promote themselves and their shows. When does the media go too far in exploiting a crisis rather than covering it?
  • What felt less comfortable was the sense that ABC was using Roberts’s achievement to sell a TV program.It’s not that the “GMA” promo was especially egregious. Every media outlet is promoting its own Haiti coverage as the best, which is standard practice.

    But when the scope and intensity of the suffering among Haitians seems to grow up by the day, spotlighting a single act by a visiting reporter – like Anderson Cooper of CNN helping a wounded boy across a barricade – feels uncomfortable and, to be blunt, self-serving.

Daily Commentary – Thursday, January 21st, 2010 – Self-Serving Reporters [2:35m]: | Download