CNN’s Reliable Sources Lets Truth Leak Out About Sex Scandal

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CNN’s Reliable Sources Lets Truth Leak Out About Sex Scandal

June 29th, 2008 · No Comments · News Media

June 29, 2008

The Facts

On CNN’s Reliable Sources today host Howard Kurtz was discussing the latest sex scandal involving Lara Logan with Jonah Goldberg, National Review’s Editor-at-Large. Logan is CBS’s Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent. It seems that Logan had an affair with Joe Burkett, a State Department contractor for the US in Iraq. Joe and his wife Kimberly Burkett are divorcing, presumably over the affair. But this isn’t the entire story; evidently Logan was also having an affair with CNN’s Michael Ware at the same time. Ware is CNN’s International Correspondent.

During the discussion Kurtz asked Jonah Goldberg about the scandal. Goldberg replied, in effect, “when news organizations insist on making their news people celebrities, this sort of thing is going to happen”. He went on to say that celebrity magazines and others, including “this station” (meaning CNN), are making celebrities out of news people when they should be nothing more than reporters.

My View

And herein lies the truth and the problem; news reporters want to be nothing but celebrities, and they are encouraged to do so by management in an effort to improve ratings. That is the very reason we the public can not get the facts and nothing but the facts about a news story. I use to say the reason I watched CNN’s Headline News was because they reported only the news and didn’t try to “explain” to me what the news meant, what I was suppose to think, and which political party was responsible for bad news. However, now that their anchors have joined the fray of CNN, Fox, and others in competing as celebrities, their news reporting has “gone to hell” right along with the rest.

During the interview, I noticed that Howard Kurtz conveniently “skipped over” Goldberg’s comment about news people being celebrities. Kurtz obviously wasn’t interested in addressing that remark. Until the business side of the news media decides that it is more important to report the news as it is instead of becoming a celebrity organization, we can expect no more than we are getting.