Yesterday during the media frenzy brought on by the horrible bombing in Boston on Monday and the subsequent manhunt for the culprits something that struck me as weird and a bit unsettling occurred.
Several times during the course of the coverage it appeared the police had
zeroed in on the remaining suspect, the other having been killed. At one point CNN showed police officers taking positions on the roof of a house were the suspect may have been hiding. As the police got into place and drew their firearms, CNN reporter Deborah Feyerick, who had been providing commentary on the action, all of a sudden said “Are we on delay?”. She then asked her camera operator to not shoot what was about to happen on the roof. Within seconds CNN’s Chris Cuomo was on the screen explaining that CNN would go to a five second delay so that anything inappropriate could be cut out. In other words CNN was telling viewers that they were going to censor the story.
Inappropriate? It’s a live news event, you can’t pick and choose what can be shown and what can’t. If the possibility of something gruesome happening exists then a warning should suffice. Aren’t these people journalists? Either cover the story live,warts and all, or merely provide an after the fact recap with commentary and nice clean video.
It’s a live news event, you can’t pick and choose what can be shown and what can’t.
It seems highly unprofessional to me that a major news channel would not only clean up the news, but in addition would make a point of it, as if they were proud to be censoring the coverage. They must have been apoplectic a few hours later when the suspects’ aunt was interviewed from Toronto. CNN picked up the CTV feed of the interview with the aunt, a peculiar person to say the least, who said “shit” several times. Will the authorities jump on CNN for not delaying the feed from those bad old Canadians? Will the US population be harmed by the scatological nature of the interview?
Stay tuned for details, and I promise I won’t censor the facts.
DCMontreal 