Tuesday, January 31, 2012
NBC News: Don't believe us!
I'm amused by Tom Brokaw complaining about Mitt Romney's ad that features some footage from an NBC News broadcast about Gingrich's ethics censure (or whatever) from the House back in the 90s.
Politicians quote TV and newspapers all the time in their ads, and I've never heard a complaint, except on the occasional super out of context quote. But it's hard to see how 30 seconds or so could be that out of context.
You hear a lot of criticism of attack ads. This class of ad is probably the worst offender of out of context quotes. But this ad is pretty much just a rebroadcast of the nightly news. Conservatives have said for years that the mainstream media are biased against conservatives. So maybe this is just NBC copping to that bias.
But I suspect that's not what's happening, and that they just don't want to be associated with a political campaign. I could certainly understand why a journalist wouldn't want to sit down and shoot a campaign ad, but that's obviously not the case here.
Whatever their motivation, the message that they're putting out is that we shouldn't rely on NBC to provide us information for making decisions about voting. I'm just not sure how well this plan was thought through.
Politicians quote TV and newspapers all the time in their ads, and I've never heard a complaint, except on the occasional super out of context quote. But it's hard to see how 30 seconds or so could be that out of context.
You hear a lot of criticism of attack ads. This class of ad is probably the worst offender of out of context quotes. But this ad is pretty much just a rebroadcast of the nightly news. Conservatives have said for years that the mainstream media are biased against conservatives. So maybe this is just NBC copping to that bias.
But I suspect that's not what's happening, and that they just don't want to be associated with a political campaign. I could certainly understand why a journalist wouldn't want to sit down and shoot a campaign ad, but that's obviously not the case here.
Whatever their motivation, the message that they're putting out is that we shouldn't rely on NBC to provide us information for making decisions about voting. I'm just not sure how well this plan was thought through.
