“Tigger Trouble”

“Hey, TV news producers and reporters: Absurd amateur video footage does not a news story make,” Liz Cox Barrett writes on CJR Daily.

She writes about TiggerGate — the guy who “is claiming that during a family visit to Disney World last week, a man dressed as Tigger punched his 14-year-old son in the face as they posed for photos. And — oh, happy day! — this guy captured the ‘assault’ on home video (or, as CNN’s Betty Nguyen gleefully exclaimed while reporting this story on Sunday, ‘Ooh, it’s on tape!’).”

Barrett continues: “Time was when footage like this might, best case, end up on America’s Funniest Home Videos with Bob Saget. We no longer live in that time. Today, the once-wholesome Bob Saget is raunching it up. And television news judgment has gone to hell.” More…