A Second Scalp For NPR Re: #OWS...

[WillyT]

Link: http://boingboing.net/2011/10/17/how-occupy-wall-street-is-like-the-internet-or-a-tale-of-a-randomly-blogged-funny-protest-sign.html

The next day, Boing Boing co-editor Xeni Jardin posted the photo as the site's Occupy Wall Street sign of the day, the post circulated around Tumblr, Friedersdorf himself saw it and wrote about it, as did Felix Salmon at Reuters, who called me "one of those protestors that photographers dream of" and the sign "true, and accurate, and touching, and grammatical, and far too long to be a slogan, and gloriously bereft of punctuation, and ending even more gloriously in a mildly archaic preposition."

Beyond that, Salmon noted, the sign's internet notoriety showed that there was something about it that resonated with people. Which was really the whole point of why we made the sign, and of Friedersdorf's piece.

I thought all of this could be fodder for an interesting segment on The Takeaway—a morning news program co-produced by WNYC Radio and Public Radio International—for which I had been working as a freelance web producer roughly 20 hours per week for the past seven months. I pitched the idea to producers on the show, in an e-mail.

The next day, The Takeaway's general manager fired me over the phone, effective immediately. He was inconsolably angry, and said that I had violated every ethic of journalism, and that this should be a "teaching moment" for me in my career as a journalist. The segment I had pitched, of course, would not happen. Ironically, the following day Marketplace did pretty much the exact segment I thought would have been great on The Takeaway, with Kai Ryssdal discussing the sign and the Goldman Sachs deal it alluded to in terms that were far from neutral.

That same week Lisa Simeone was in a similar situation...

More: http://gawker.com/5854118/how-occupy-wall-street-cost-me-my-job

:wtf:

:mad:

:kick:

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[yardwork]

2. But it's ok for Republican candidates for president to be paid commentators for MSM?

[CrackersMcGee]

3. It's ok for Republican activists to be paid commentators for NPR!

You tellin me none of those Repukes they have on NPR have ever held a friggin sign at a protest?
C'MON!!!!!!!!!

[mwooldri]

4. this time it wasn't NPR... it was WNYC and PRI.

I don't know if WNYC was using the NPR Code of Ethics but PRI should know better... they have a much closer relationship with the BBC than NPR and the BBC Guidelines are different.

In the end, it was American Public Media's Marketplace that did a segment that was similar to what the terminated contractor suggested to her bosses @ WNYC.

[mwooldri]

5. I have some reading material for The Takeaways' GM...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/

It's not light reading. If that GM wants to know about the ethics of journalism, it's there. If skills need to be brushed up on try http://www.bbc.co.uk/journalism/

THOSE are ethics and standards that should be in place. Nation shall speak peace unto Nation. And all of that.

btw Happy Birthday BBC Television. Shame it took another 21 years for TV news readers to appear on screen.