The slogan at Fox News is ‘We Report. You Decide”, but on Thursday morning’s ‘Fox & Friends” show host Gretchen Carlson refused to report the news.
When the breaking news story of the day was being reported, the Wednesday mall shooting in Omaha, Nebraska, Carlson refused to say the name of the shooter, Robert Hawkins. She further complained when his picture was shown on the screen. She continued to take this position of superiority throughout the full two hours.
This was irresponsible journalism, disrespectful to her fellow anchors on the show, and condescending to the viewing audience.
By refusing to report Robert Hawkins name as the shooter Carlson was picking and choosing which facts she would report in the lead story of the morning. The name of the shooter is not a salacious detail included for the titillation of the audience. His name is a central fact in the story. Carlson should not be censoring central facts in the major story and withholding information from the viewers.
No doubt Carlson felt she could refuse to say Hawkins name because her fellow anchors would report his name, as they rightful did. Carlson’s actions put her fellow anchors in the position of either doing their job and reporting ALL of the facts and allowing her to look superior in her taking a stand, or they join her in the refusal to say his name and they loose their journalistic integrity of telling the facts to the audience. Either way they were placed in a bad situation by Carlson.
Carlson also broke one of the rules of good journalism by making herself part of the story. She took away from the reporting and injected herself by continually saying that she was refusing to say his name.
Where does Carlson suddenly get this moral superiority to not report news that she doesn’t like? Has she refused to mention the name of other killers? Did she refuses to report the name of Cho Seung-Hui, the Va Tech shooter? Has she refused to say the name of murderous dictators? Has she refused to say Saddam Hussein’s name? Adolf Hitler’s? Joseph Stalin’s? Osama bin Laden’s? Maybe it has to be a current story in the news. So does she refuse to say the name of Drew Peterson, the suspect in the disappearance of his fourth wife and a person of interest in the mysterious death of his third wife?
Where does she draw the line in which bad guys she will report on and which she won’t?
Did Carlson inform Fox News and the producers at ‘Fox & friends’ that she was going to pick and choose which parts of which stories she would report?
Most of the time the news is filled with bad stories. Stories of robbery, rape, murder, and other violent crimes. The facts aren’t always easy to hear or to tell, but that is the job she chose to do. If Carlson refuses to report central facts in major stories, for no other reason than it violates her sense of right and wrong, than she should find another job.
Carlson’s actions were unprofessional. Carlson owes Fox News, who hired her to report the news, an apology. She owes her fellow anchors an apology for putting them in a difficult position. Most of all she owes the viewers an apology for setting herself up as the decision maker for what the audience did and didn’t have a right to know.
One Eyed Man
1 response so far ↓
1 John L // Dec 7, 2007 at 7:18 am
Well said. We have enough folks who are trying to keep us morally pure in our society…we don’t need news reporters to “filter” the news for us. We can always turn off the TV if we see and hear things we don’t like.
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