http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/He's talking about seeing Fox coverage of the elderly lady on the plane that Fox blew up, through fear mongering, into a terrorist threat...until the facts were known.
"My question was initially: How do we end this? How do we stop the decline of television "journalism" so that those making decisions no longer feel compelled to broadcast each rumor but instead have the courage to take the time needed to gather the facts, discern truth from rumor, and then go on the air? I ask because what we got in this case, was tripe. If the "news" was this inaccurate, yet still made it on the air, why should anyone believe anything they hear now?
My solution is sophomoric, but it is the best I can think of. We should initiate a conspiracy.
This would be a conspiracy among print journalists, and particularly among print journalism’s editors, which has the objective of assaulting the television news industry whenever and wherever they play upon this culture-of-the-immediate. What if, for example, the Wall Street Journal took Fox to task for this crap? What if the New York Times, in repeated and thundering editorials, assaulted MSNBC, when they too put forward images and rumors instead of doing the research that the craft of journalism demands? What if the New Yorker, and Atlantic Monthly, and Esquire for that matter, took it upon themselves to commission articles about why, and how, such tripe reaches the screens? What if you, all of you, when you saw rumors broadcast as “news,” wrote in to protest? Forget left and right for the moment. Focus instead upon the content of the news at the most raw stage of development. I believe that our national experiment cannot survive without the involvement of the people. But if the people are misled by our own Constitutionally protected establishments, how can we move forward?"
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