By now, everyone’s seen the video and heard bits of the story, but this is the best big picture description I’ve seen of what happened. Her ruse is once again proof that most TV news is over-dramatized shock media on par with Howard Stern. Is your child safe?
While I’m here, I’ll say also that I find her references to “people in Kansas” pretty insulting. Does she really think those of us from Kansas are stupider than the rest of the world? Does she really think that people in middle America, in a day and age where we have a global network for instant communication, are any less aware of what DEFCON is than people in coastal cities? On behalf of Kansans everywhere: screw you, lady.
I do feel bad for her on a personal level, though. She’s going to be eaten alive for this — and all because some wanna-be producer unwittingly sent her into the worst possible circumstance in an effort to shock and appall “people in Kansas.” It’s not her fault — it’s the fault of pathetic journalistic institutions like Dateline NBC who insist on purveying this kind of crap. And, it’s also the fault of each and every American who watches it.
001 // Erwin Heiser // 08.05.2007 // 9:05 AM
You got to admit it’s pretty funny sending a young, blonde female into a room full of hacker geeks and then asking who the undercover reporter is… you can’t make stuff like that up.
002 // John Burris // 08.05.2007 // 9:24 PM
Undercover reporting — if it has any roots in journalism — would require the reporter to do the research without bias or direction.
What to make of DEFCON? I imagine the producing team at Dateline had already finished storyboarding, and had taped, edited and scored all the damning interviews from legal experts and law enforcement — they just needed to get an hour of DEFCON footage, so they could recontextualize it and flesh the piece out.
The current “About The Show” Dateline page on the MSNBC web site eschews using the word “journalism” altogether, for reference. (It also appears to have been edited poorly; the show “has made headlines recently with reports that include a hidden-camera investigations,” to quote the fourth graf.)
003 // Fredrik // 08.06.2007 // 5:53 AM
fwiw, the metafilter crowd seems to be pretty confident that this was “too obvious to be true” distraction, and that dateline’s real story is somewhere else — after all, if you want to get everyone to look in the wrong direction, what’s better than sending a young, blonde female into a room full of hacker geeks?