Staged.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a news producer for one of the top news stations. Your job is to create meaningful clips of news-worthy events for broadcast, and in order to ensure you are on top of current events, you keep tabs on the other networks.

The White House correspondent for your network emails your Blackberry, urgently requesting a satellite uplink be ready for a telecast of the President speaking candidly with soldiers in Iraq. This spontaneous event will allow the President to field questions to the soldiers, allowing them a response. The event is to take place in a few hours.

In the meantime, you setup the uplink and find the soldiers busily practicing their lines. A little odd, perhaps. After a few minutes of watching, you see a DoD spokesman rehearse the following:

The President will open up with some remarks. He’s going to kind of shape this discussion today by highlighting the importance of what you’re doing, by letting you know how much the American people appreciate your hard work, and how important this vote on Saturday is to the process in Iraq. And so you’ll hear him shape those comments today.

The cogs start clicking, and you come to the realization that the spontaneous Q & A session with the President of the United States is not so spontaneous. The soldiers have been prepped, given a list of questions, and rehearsed. As a dutiful member of the free press, you must report this clandestine effort by the current administration to bolster its failed policies in Iraq. Suddenly, this news piece has gone from filler material to a top-of-the-hour news bulletin!

You frantically start emailing your boss and the nightly news anchors to alert them to the situation. Clearly, this deserves some major coverage, so you need the heavy-hitting reporters to snap into action. The Q & A session takes place, but the major news is clearly the recorded practice session. Congratulations, you’ve just made some news.

[/end “I’m a reporter” delusion]

Welcome back to reality. The mainstream press is disgusting. All too often, it is injected with superlatives, exaggerations, drama to the point that it is no longer news. The good ol’ days of reporting like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are long gone. Now, we have cable network news 24/7 with charming personalities like Rita Cosby and Anderson Cooper. The sensationalism is so shrill that I can hardly stand to watch anymore. I like the news because I like to stay current with the world around me, but when I have to learn about the news as it is filtered and injected with steroids by the big networks, I find myself thinking twice.

The above parody was written as just that: a mini day in the life of a news producer. Although I am not that familiar with the technical terms and exact hierarchy of a news organization, you must be able to see my glaring sarcasm and disgust. Oddly enough, after writing my little parody, I happened across an excerpt of NBC anchor Brian Williams’ blog [via]:

My day, at least editorially, started just after I’d chosen a spot on the couch for the 9:30 a.m. editorial daily planning meeting. I arrived early and was finishing up the newspapers when an e-mail came into my BlackBerry—it was from a producer in our control room, watching the incoming feed from Iraq. The President was minutes away from what was billed to us as a “give and take…a back and forth” with soldiers on the ground in Iraq. The e-mail said they were rehearsing their answers to the President’s questions. It went on to say they were receiving coaching from yet-unnamed government officials on HOW to deliver their lines once the President appeared.

A huge lapse in understanding of what they were seeing during the pre-event broadcast occurred. Not only did all the major networks misinterpret the independent rehearsal of the soldier’s answers to questions, but overreacted to the simple instructions given by DoD spokeswoman, Allison Barber. None of the facts surrounding the pre-event broadcast are in question, simply the interpretation. A list of questions was forwarded, the soldiers were told what to expect from the President, and they rehearsed out loud in order to sound articulate on camera.

Giving a list of questions to the soldiers beforehand to give them some idea of what to expect seems perfectly normal. Slashdot does Q & A all the time with people from across the tech sphere, and submitting questions ahead of the responses is normal practice. Unless the DoD spokesperson were to explicitly give both question and answer to the soldiers, there is nothing to report here.

The fact that NBC Nightly News chose to lead with this story on Thursday night is simply stunning. How delusional are these guys? First, they plant questions (relevant, yes, but not the soldier’s own question), then call foul on this supposedly non-spontaneous, staged event. Please, you guys are flattering yourselves. Be sure to check out this ironic twist involving a media crew’s own staged event that took place just before more coverage of the whole fake-Bush-conspiracy-staged-event was going to rear its ugly head on NBC’s Today show.

Oh, and by the way, journalists, stop making value-added, sound byte-compatible news and start reporting it. The difference is minute, I know, but maybe then, you’ll earn some respect.

P.S. The fact that you have cameramen parked outside my house (literally) does not help you. What possible reason could you have to get a new picture of a certain member of my household everyday? Do you think he is going to come out dressed in a Halloween costume or something? Get real.