Check It Out: What happened to old fashioned news reporting?
By Joan Janzen
Sharyl Attkisson’s book “Slanted’ has just been released, and she has first hand experience with the subject material in her book. “Hard news stories, which are supposedly telling the facts, are filled with conjecture and speculating,” Sharyl said. “CNN, The New York Times and others said they needed to adjust their standards. I argue that there’s never been a more important time to follow our standards and ethics.”
“When I was at CBS News, we had strict standards when using unnamed sources. When we resorted to using sources who wanted to remain anonymous, it had to be a last resort and you had to give the audience the best perception of who these people were without revealing their identity,” she noted. “New York Times kept quoting sources that were repeatedly wrong. That would have violated our standards, but now those sources are invited on again and again as if nothing ever happened.”
In her book, Attkisson takes on the media’s misreporting. “When the facts don’t fit their narrative, the media abandons the facts, not the narrative,” she says. Attkisson is a five time Emmy award winning journalist who worked for CNN and CBS a decade ago, when she went independent with her Sunday evening news report “Full Measure”.
“I tell old fashioned news reporting, the way we used to report things. It’s not shoving viewpoints down your throat; it’s not censoring ideas. I think people find it very refreshing,” Attkisson said, who left the mainstream media when she noticed the industry was changing.
“Some of my best stories were not allowed because they were off-narrative topics they didn’t want us to talk about. I first noticed when covering pharmaceutical stories, when suddenly the media partnered with the drug industry. Once the billions started flowing in, the pharmaceuticals were trying to stop the stories that CBS had been encouraging me to do.” Attkisson said. “I was on the leading edge of censorship. Not many people want to talk about it because you have to be willing to walk away from a very lucrative job. The whole industry is largely a propaganda machine.”
In her latest book, Attkisson says “We invite these special interests to work in our news rooms. There’s misreporting on a topic, the facts are wrong and no one gets fired. It happens over and over. It’s by design. They still accomplish their goal which wasn’t accurate reporting, but it was getting out a narrative to try and save public opinion.”
She says in 2016 fake fact checkers were brought in to save people from what they call “false information” and to control information.
“I call this information ‘the box’,” she says. “The good news is that there are millions of people who are trying to make sure their voices aren’t silenced when they say things ‘outside of the box’. Many people are watching alternative forms of news and are looking for other sources.”
Attkisson is one of the few ‘true’ journalists who says, “I still say there’s a market for a straight news organization. They want a place to go where they’re just getting the facts, instead of being led wherever the reporter wants to lead them. We should be teaching journalists to let go of their own feelings and not try to convince people to think what we’re thinking.”
Yeonmi Park, who escaped from North Korea, said this about our mainstream media, “ I listen to CNN, CBS, ABC ... all tell one story. Why have all these channels if they all have one narrative? They should make it one channel like they do in North Korea; makes it so much easier for people to follow.”
Megyn Kelly, an American journalist and attorney, worked for Fox News and NBC, but now has her own ‘The Megyn Kelly Show’. “Cable news is stressful and dark.” Megyn says. “You don’t feel good when you turn on these shows and you’re not meant to feel good. I love my new world. It’s fun and it’s the future.”
You can contact me at joanjanzen@yahoo.com