What did Big Media say after Diane Sawyer revealed that the famous Dean “scream”–broadcast more than 700 times with shocked comments each time–was the artifact of a mike that blocked out crowd noise?
Basically, “Oops!…I did it again…”*
CBS News: “Individually we may feel okay about our network, but the cumulative effect for viewers with 24-hour cable coverage is — it may have been overplayed and, in fact, a disservice to Dean and the viewers.”
— Andrew Heyward, President – CBS News
ABC News: “It’s always a danger that we’ll use good video too much.”
— David Westin, President – ABC News
CNN: “We’ve all been wrestling with this. If we had it to do over again, we’d probably pull ourselves back.”
— Princell Hair, General Manager – CNN
Fox News: “It got overplayed a bit, and the public clearly thought that, too, and kept him alive for another round.”
— Roger Ailes, Chairman and CEO – Fox News
Sorry boys, that’s not good enough. It would be nice if you could give me back my illusions about your diligent fact-checking and fair coverage. But you can’t.
No. Instead, I demand that every one of you gentlemen exorcise that inner Britney Spears.
Take off the multi-thousand-dollar suit, put on a tiny skin-tight costume, gyrate and sweat for us in front of a camera as you offer up those oh-so-lame-excuses. We’ll be here on the couch eating popcorn, making fun of your hair and lamenting how much cuter you looked when you were 15.
In not-unrelated news, John Nichols points out (The Nation):
[A nonpartisan] study of 187 CBS, NBC and ABC evening news reports found that only 49 percent of all on-air evaluations of Dean in 2003 were positive. The other Democratic contenders collectively received 78 percent favorable coverage during the same period.
(Thanks to Roland Tanglao for the link.)
Get back in those costumes, and give us another chorus…
Oops!…I did it again…
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah…
Damn it, Britney–I mean, Roger Ailes–I want my country back.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Betsy Devine // Feb 8, 2004 at 3:15 pm
Salon does this story much better than I did, worth the ad if you’re not a paying subscriber: http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/02/08/cnn/
2 Two screens are better than one // Jan 20, 2009 at 8:31 pm
[…] than those who talked with friends and family. And how about the 2004 “Dean scream”? Played more than 700 times with shocked comments each time, it emerged as the artifact of a crowd-blocking microphone, but not before torpedoing Howard […]