Sometimes a question can be so blunt, so explicit, that offended listeners disregard the validity of the query. Or the evasive response.
The latest example of this is Bill Cosby’s refusal to respond when interviewers ask him about rape accusations.
However, over the years, I’ve asked troublesome questions. Usually, my offensive questions followed failed efforts to get required information by asking nicely. Reporters do that. We ask questions to elicit information our readers/viewers/listeners will value. As I told generations of reporting students, if that bothers you, consider another line of work. Sometimes, we know the answer but we need to get it on record from someone whose authority will be recognized. Other times, we really don’t know the answers. That’s why we persist.
Broadcast/cable reporters are most vulnerable to criticism because audiences hear questions and answers, both of which can be offensive, duplicitous, angry or evasive.
Sometimes, the reporter is breathtakingly offensive. Once, we saw a young TV reporter chase a man through an airport terminal, repeatedly asking how he feels after learning his family was on a plane that just crashed.
Print reporters have not faced such scrutiny. I’ve survived some exceptions.
When the Episcopal Church was debating whether to ordain female priests, the denomination’s triennial convention approved ordaining female deacons. That can be a step toward priestly ordination but it wasn’t what women’s advocates wanted. Female bishops were a long way off; female priests had to be ordained first. After the vote to ordain female deacons, the presiding bishop held a press conference. He waffled on the subject of female priests. I’d covered religion and I was utterly frustrated by our inability pin down him down.
“What difference does it make whether a priest’s genitals are internal or external when consecrating the bread and wine,” I asked.
The presiding bishop’s mouth opened and closed but no sound came out. He turned his panicky look on his press officer who gave me this OMG! look and called on another reporter for another question. I really wanted to know.
Years later, during the bloody uprising at the Ohio prison in Lucasville, the state prison press officer was updating reporters on what was known about events inside the areas occupied by rebelling inmates. It was clear from what she said that murdered prisoners may have been mutilated.
“Were they castrated?” I asked.
“Beeeeeeeennnnn,” shrieked the press officer, her voice rising octaves.
“Well, were they?”
Next reporter, next question. I never got my answer.
Then there was the day when a leading litigator asserted something in court that directly contradicted what his associate – a specialist in the field in contention – told me. No hesitation, no embarrassment. Trust what the associate told me: “He has to be 100% right so that I’m 51% right.”
That’s why I wasn’t put off by AP and NPR questions to Bill Cosby about recurrent rape accusations or CNN’s query about an accuser’s failure to bite Cosby’s penis when she said Cosby forced her to go down on him. By now, you’ve probably know about Cosby’s non-marital relations with women during the past half century. Interviews with Cosby and accusers have begun to raise questions about the kinds of journalism the rape accusations inspire.
NPR is defending Scott Simon’s questions about rape accusations during an interview about the Cosby family’s loan to the Smithsonian Institution’s African art collection.
“This question gives me no pleasure Mr. Cosby, but there have been serious allegations raised about you in recent days.”
Cosby went silent. Five seconds of dead air time.
“You’re shaking your head no,” Simon said. “I’m in the news business. I have to ask the question. Do you have any response to those charges?”
Cosby remained silent.
After about five seconds, Simon continued, “There are people who love you who might like to hear from you about this. I want to give you the chance.”
Cosby said nothing.
“Shaking your head no,” Simon said on-air. “There are people who love you who might like to hear from you about this. I want to give you the chance.”
Cosby was silent. Simon dropped it.
“Alright. Camille and Bill Cosby. They have lent 62 pieces from their collection of African and African-American art to create an exhibit called Conversations: African and African American Artworks in Dialogue. It’s now on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art through early 2016. Thank you both.” Simon later said Cosby’s “people . . . had a strategy in place for when the question was asked. Maybe they thought we couldn’t use silence on the radio.”
Some listeners accused Simon of ambushing Cosby. Hogwash. Cosby is no stranger to interviews or years of rape charges. He chose to be interviewed.
Simon, unlike the author of a recent Cosby biography, would have been derelict if he hadn’t pursued drug-and-rape claims.
Days later, CNN’s Don Lemon interviewed Joan Tarshis about her rape allegations against Cosby. The Huffington Post provided this transcript:
Lemon: Can I ask you this, because — and please, I don’t mean to be crude, ok?
Tarshis: Yeah.
Lemon: Because I know some of you — and you said this last night, that he — you lied to him and said ‘I have an infection, and if you rape me, or if you do — if you have intercourse with me, then you will probably get it and give it to your wife.’
Tarshis: Right.
Lemon: And you said he made you perform oral sex.
Tarshis: Right.
Lemon: You — you know, there are ways not to perform oral sex if you didn’t want to do it.
Tarshis: Oh. Um, I was kind of stoned at the time, and quite honestly, that didn’t even enter my mind. Now I wish it would have.
Lemon: Right. Meaning the using of the teeth, right?
Tarshis: Yes, that’s what I’m thinking you’re —
Lemon: As a weapon.
Tarshis: Yeah, I didn’t even think of it.
Lemon: Biting. So, um
Tarshis: Ouch . . . it didn’t cross my mind.
Was this attacking the victim or pursing the credibility of the accusations? I fall on the ask-and-be-damned. It’s a mistake for reporters to take sides and treat accusers with greater deference than the accused.
And then there was a Cosby power play when AP arts reporter Brett Zongker asked about rape allegations at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.
Phillip Kennicott, the Washington Post’s 2013 Pulitzer winner for art/architecture criticism, described what happened. After Zongker asked Cosby about rape/abuse allegations, Cosby suggested that such questions were irresponsible.
The couple said they chose to sit down with the AP, Cosby said, because they thought the AP was a reputable news organization and would not dig into those unpleasant accusations.
As the Washington Post’s Kennicott put it, Cosby equated reportorial seriousness and deference to himself and “asked David Brokaw, his longtime media representative . . . to get on the horn to the AP and do everything possible to ensure that the videotaped encounter was ‘scuttled.’ ”
It didn’t work. We’ve seen AP’s video of the interview.
AP vice president Lou Ferrara, whose oversees arts and entertainment news, said, “It was his duty to ask the question as a reporter and journalist.”
After the interview appeared to end, Cosby apparently forgot he was wearing a live mic. “Now, can I get something from you, that none of that will be shown?”
Zongker replies, “I … I can’t promise that myself but you didn’t say anything.”
Cosby increased the pressure: “I would appreciate it if it was scuttled.”
Zongker says, “I hear you, and I will tell that to my editors and I think that they will understand.”
Cosby increases the pressure further on the younger man: “I think that if you want to consider yourself serious, that it will not appear anywhere.”
I agree with Kennicott: “Zongker, who covers art and cultural issues in the nation’s capital, deserves credit for asking the hard questions.”
Moreover, I’d add that Zongker’s response, “I will tell that to my editors,” was appropriate.
Deciding to kill sensitive material was above Zongker’s pay grade. Reporters don’t do that.
Arts reporting is often a feel-good beat on the edge of the real news business, especially on television, Kennicott said. “Cosby’s effort to hold the hard questions at bay also was premised on assumptions about the larger field of arts and culture — that it is a safe place, where the expectation of old-fashioned civility and the ubiquity of uplifting narratives would give cover to a man increasingly under pressure from dark allegations about his past sexual behavior.”
Curmudgeon Notes
• Norwegian provocateurs faked the YouTube video of a Syrian boy rescuing a little girl under sniper fire. It was credible and it went viral.
And it was a lie, produced in Malta with actors.
After someone caught on, BBC interviewed director Lars Klevberg. He said, “We wanted to see if the film would get attention and spur debate, first and foremost about children and war. We also wanted to see how the media would respond to such a video.”
Producer John Einar Hagen added, “The children surviving gunshots was supposed to send small clues that it was not real. We had long discussions with the film’s financiers about the ethics around making a film like this.”
BBC said the video “received funding from the Norwegian Film Institute (NFI) and the Audio and Visual Fund from Arts Council Norway . . . The filmmakers say their application for funding made clear they wanted to upload the film to the internet without making it obvious it was real or fiction. They also claim that those who financed it were aware of, and supported, these intentions.”
Ase Meyer, short film commissioner for the NFI told BBC, “It was not a cynical way to get attention. They had honest motivations. I was surprised people thought it was real. When I see the film, the little boy is shot but he keeps on running. There is no blood on the child.”
Meyer added that NFI had no responsibility to tell people the film wasn’t real. “It was the responsibility of the filmmakers.”
Once the film was made, how did it go viral?
“It was posted to our YouTube account a few weeks ago but the algorithm told us it was not going to trend,” director Klevberg said. “So we deleted that and re-posted it.”
Filmmakers added the word “hero” to the new headline and tried to send it out to people on Twitter to start a conversation. It was picked up by Shaam Network, a channel that features material from the Middle East, which posted it on YouTube, BBC said, and it began to attract international attention.
The YouTube video has been watched more than five million times and inspired thousands of comments, BBC said, while there viewers debated whether it was genuine.
“We are really happy with that,” Klevberg said.
It is dishonest to fake a photo, a video or a news story. It cheats the viewer/reader and I don’t care about motive. Fakery undermines remaining confidence in the news media while government and corporate lying rise to new depths of cynicism.
• Sometimes Internet dishonesty is motivated by blatant partisanship. TalkingPointsMemo.com. caught unrepentant — and mistaken — right wing vitriol when breitbart.com refused to correct a hatchet job on Loretta Lynch, Obama’s nominee for attorney general.
The headline was “Obama’s attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch represented Clintons during Whitewater.”
The story said “she was a member of Bill Clinton’s defense team during the 1992 Whitewater corruption probe.”
Uh, wrong. That was another lawyer by the same name. Eventually, breitbart.com added the word (corrected) at the end of the otherwise unchanged and false headline. Breitbart left the story unchanged but it added this at the end: “Correction: The Loretta Lynch identified earlier as the Whitewater attorney was, in fact, a different attorney.”
Whitewater is shorthand for failed GOP attempts to tie the Clintons to Arkansas real estate deals, probes and prosecutions.
• The headline in London’s Independent grabbed me: “US fire chief caught on camera ‘refusing to help crash victims because they are black.’ ”
It’s a Kentucky story that I don’t recall seeing or hearing on our local news media. A pickup and a car collided in Bullitt County. Firefighters took the white pickup driver to a local hospital and back to their fire station where someone was waiting with a car.
No one offered to help to Chege Mwangi, the car’s black driver or his family although he tells them he lacks any roadside assistance policy. The encounter was captured by a deputy’s body camera and posted on YouTube.
Louisville’s WDRB News said the encounter was late in September but the station recently obtained the video. The deputy says he has a “family of four from Cincinnati, I got to do something with.”
Southeast Bullitt County Fire Chief Julius Hatfield responds, “We ain’t taking no niggers here,” and refuses to help the Mwagni family.
WDRB says the sheriff’s department confirmed the speaker was Hatfield and he used the racist term although the sheriff’s department later bleeped “nigger” on the tape.
Hatfield told a WDRB reporter he didn’t remember the incident but “sometimes there is a slip of the tongue.”
• From a recent New York Times story: “The newspaper industry has lost 40 percent of its revenue since a peak of $60 billion in 2005.”
But some cost-cutting can backfire, said Alan D. Mutter, a newspaper consultant who writes a blog called Reflections of a Newsosaur. “The surest and fastest way that publishers can cut expenses to try to approximate a semblance of the industry’s formerly hefty double-digit profitability is by trimming staffing and benefits. These actions, however, tend to degrade the quality of the product, which likely will disappoint readers and repel advertisers, thus accelerating the industry’s decline.”
• Now New Yorkers know why Midwestern country houses have one door built three to four feet above the ground: blizzards can block other doors. No one, however, builds for snowfalls like the Buffalo area got as cold air blew across Lake Erie. Those images reminded me of my photo after being trapped with a farm family during a blizzard along the Minnesota-Dakota border. Snowfall ended, the sun came out, and children climbed and slid down drifted snow packed hard to the top of their family barn.
• Diana did it. Now it’s Kate’s turn. The wife of an heir to the British throne has one duty: produce his heir and a spare. Elizabeth the Queen Mother bore Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. Diana had Princes William and Harry, Kate had Prince George and the royalist press is in a swoon over his imminent sibling and how well Kate’s fashion sense enhances the “baby bump.” Get ready for another commemorative plate.
Meanwhile, brace yourself for the visit of Prince William and Kate, whose other achievement is being a clothes horse.
• Nonpartisan Pew Research Center surveyed Americans’ politics and media preferences and found we are still cocooning — turning to familiar, comforting news and opinions. AP summarized the Pew pre-election study, saying:
“Liberals favor CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio and The New York Times, but none of those sources more dramatically than another. Conservatives have an overwhelming favorite: Fox News Channel.
“ . . . Conservatives are more likely to distrust news sources that don’t reflect their point of view. Conservatives tend to have more friends who share their political views, and are more likely to read material on Facebook that reinforces their opinions. Liberals are more likely to ‘defriend’ someone on Facebook or end a real friendship because of political differences.”
• Unpaid or underpaid news media internships are an ongoing scandal that draws too little attention . . . from the news media. And don’t give me this crap about student interns getting college credits; try to live on that. Worse, some schools charge them tuition for the weeks they’re off campus learning our trade and building their resumes. They have to pay for housing, food, transportation and tuition.
Crass exploitation of aspiring journalists is shameful and there may be Labor Department issues. My gut tells me that these internships go beyond cheap labor; they are a conscious evasion of demands for newsroom diversity.
Students who can afford not to be paid reinforces the traditional newsroom caste system that favors affluent interns. That’s why I rejoice in this Reuters story: “Condé Nast agreed . . . to pay $5.8 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by thousands of former interns at the publisher who said they were underpaid for work at the company’s high-end magazines.
“The settlement agreement, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, covers around 7,500 interns at Condé Nast magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair. The case is one in a wave of recent suits brought against media and entertainment companies that pay little or nothing for internships.
“Condé Nast canceled its internship program soon after the lawsuit was filed in June 2013. Lauren Ballinger, who worked for approximately $1 per hour organizing accessories in the fashion closet at W Magazine, and Matthew Leib, who earned around $300 for a summer internship at the New Yorker, were the two lead plaintiffs in the case.”
• London’s Guardian — which won a Pulitzer for its Edward Snowden revelations — says America’s National Enquirer killed a 2005 expose of rape accusations against Bill Cosby. The Guardian quoted the reporter who said Cosby’s lawyers threatened to sue.
Robin Mizrahi, who reported the story that the National Enquirer killed, told the Guardian that she remains “livid” about the spiking of her hard-news investigation in favor of “a bullshit feel-good interview with Cosby. I feel sad for the women who tried to speak up and weren’t listened to because he was so powerful and had such effective lawyers . . . I did unflinching reporting, but they didn’t publish it.”
Dailybeast.com recently added that the National Enquirer killed Mizrahi’s rape accusation story in exchange for an exclusive interview with the comedian.
As the Guardian put it, the Enquirer’s ensuing front-page “exclusive” with Cosby allowed him to rebut the sexual assault allegations that were starting to dog him.
Cosby said “words and actions can be misinterpreted by another person,” adding that “I’m not saying that what I did was wrong, but I apologize to my loving wife … These allegations have caused my family great emotional stress.”
He also cast aspersions on the motives of the women who raised the allegations, saying: “I am not going to give in to people who try to exploit me because of my celebrity status.”
This article appears in Nov 19-25, 2014.