Former “CBS Evening News” anchor Dan Rather took to the Huffington Post to critique the news coverage this week, from the Obama birth certificate to the Royal Wedding.
“The next time you hear about another round of layoffs at a TV news division, the closing of a bureau, the decision not to cover a foreign story with full force, remember this week of silliness in April,” he wrote.
Remember the millions of dollars, hundreds of staff and hours of coverage spent on a wedding in London when crises around the globe and here at home festered. Remember the unseemly pas de deux between the press and a reality TV show huckster peddling racially-fraught falsehoods, as both interviewers and the interviewee seek a bump in ratings.
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The idea that we can’t afford to throw resources at an important foreign story, but can afford to spend this kind of money on a story like the royal wedding is just plain wrong. The idea that we can’t break into regularly-scheduled programming for an address by the president is wrong as well. When the topic was the “Birther Story” (better referred from here on out by the first letters of those two words), the networks jumped right in.