Jan 28, 2013

MMMM # 260 -- The News responds & FREE Video!

     The Birmingham News has responded, kinda, to Diane McWhorter's op-ed piece in the New York Times last week.
     "Community engagement specialist" (is some retired general in charge up there?) Edward T. Bowser wrote this piece for the paper and their online alter-ego, al.com.

***    

   The EWTN Catholic TV cable network operating out of Irondale, near Birmingham, Alabama, is offering free high quality video for TV stations of an anti-abortion event in Washington in March. They wrote:
Irondale, ALEvery year, tens of thousands of people converge on our Nation’s Capitol for the annual March for Life. And every year, organizers complain that the media ignores it. We think that may be because media “outside the beltway” don’t have access to footage or can’t afford it. EWTN Global Catholic Network is the largest religious media network in the world and we’d like to change that.
This year, for the first time, we’re offering our own top quality video clips, sound bites and high resolution photos from Washington, D.C.’s largest march of the year – FREE! We ask only for appropriate attribution to the EWTN Global Catholic Network.
      Remember the old line about there being no such thing as a free lunch?
      I expect there will be few stations that use the "free video". It comes from A TV network owned by a church that funds the anti-abortion effort worldwide. It won't show anything remotely pro-abortion-rights. And the reverse is true as well. A pro-abortion-rights group's video of the march would only show scenes that might reflect badly.
     I've written about VNR's in previous MMMM postings....they are professionally produced "TV reports" created for companies to sell their products and services. A TV station in this market has run them before... without telling viewers they were produced by a firm with a dog in the fight, so to speak.
     If there is bias in network coverage of the march in D.C., replacing it with bias in the other direction is hardly a solution.


[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of www.timlennox.com.]

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