This item on NPR’s web site really bothers me for some reason.
It’s not the headline part about some clueless White House aide making a heartless and cruel remark in front of witnesses.
It’s the bit further down, where a retired 3-star general on a Fox Business Network show claims that John McCain gave the North Vietnamese vital information after being tortured, i.e. that in that case, torture worked.
The part that bothers me is the later response of the show’s host, one Charles V. Payne. This is what he said, via tweets, later:
Now this tweet may be completely untrue, and maybe he was happy to let the general’s remarks go by without comment. Worse, for me, is if he is telling the truth, that someone can say something that is a complete and materially slanderous lie* and it will go unchallenged because of the production needs of the show to end on time. The allegation is now out there, heard, presumably, by millions, and no amount of apology is going to erase those words from the minds of people who heard it.
I shouldn’t be so naïve, I suppose, but I find this very disturbing.
*The statement got a “pants on fire” rating by Politifact, for what that’s worth.
I’m not sure why you think that tweet is untrue or why it bothers you. I’ve had people talking in my ear through the security ear pieces and sometimes it is hard to hear other people talking to you in person at the same time.
I’m not saying I think the tweet is untrue, just that it might be (e.g. a self-serving excuse after the backlash against the comment started coming in). That in itself doesn’t surprise me, it is pretty much SOP these days (not to say that it wouldn’t be wrong to lie about it, but not surprising).
The other part isn’t really surprising either, it just hit me from this example how an interviewee can get away with speaking utter trash on live TV even to an honorable interviewer and it can go unchallenged due to the structure of the program and the way TV works (i.e. that hewing to a schedule is more important than truth and accuracy).
Maybe this is a good reason why these kinds* of interviews should be taped rather than live, so these remarks could have been pursued at the time they were uttered. If the interview had to be edited for time before it was aired, something trivial could have been edited out, and the entire interview offered online for those who want to see it. I realize this isn’t always possible for breaking news. I don’t think this interview counts as news in any sense.
*By “these kinds of interviews” I mean those from news and opinion sources mostly, and not so much from entertainment sources.
It is nearly impossible to catch everything that 2 different people are saying at the same time.
It is entirely possible that he wasn’t paying attention to the blowhard at all. ‘Wait for pause…insert talking point…wait for pause…‘Thanks for joining us today’…’
What exactly are you suggesting? That if he truly* didn’t* hear the remark, he should have condemned it anyway? (Which is a big if, yes - maybe he did hear it - but suppose he didn’t, what could he have possibly done?)
Suppose your child says “(N-word!)” to a black person, but you don’t hear it because someone happens to honk their car horn at you at the same moment, and then later someone remarks, “**Roderick Femm **allows his child to call people N-words and doesn’t reprimand, what an awful parent,” is that fair?
I think the idea is that a responsible broadcaster should make sure that there aren’t these kinds of distractions so that objectionable statements don’t go out to millions of people unchallenged. In the scenario with you and your child, you make sure there isn’t a car horn honking.
Also there is the part where I suggested that maybe these kinds of interviews be taped so that this doesn’t happen. I’m not really expecting any network to do that, but it would be, I think, a good thing.
The control room talking into the host’s ear is not an excuse for missing something controversial or especially important from an on-air guest during a professionally produced television broadcast. Particularly if it is live TV.
That may be an excuse for the host, but it is a piss-poor excuse for the rest of the staff to miss it. The show producer (and higher-ups) is responsible for what goes out over the air. If questionable content goes out unchallenged then the producer either didn’t find it a problem or that producer is not very good.
Then there’s the director, audio tech, and other folks in the booth who are busy but should be keeping an ear on what’s being aired.
If the comment was troublesome I would think somebody communicated that to the producer who then decided not to wake up the distracted host to tell him to challenge the guest’s comment.
I think we should take the tweet at face value, since Fox has a long history of directly challenging the lies spewed by conservative politicians to attack the people who disagree with them.
These people are supposed to be pros. That he didn’t know or expect the control room to give him a “close in 20” “10” “5” so he could not hear his guest is a bit hard to believe. I will give him the benefit of the doubt that perhaps he did not have time to counter the statement.
No, I don’t buy his excuse. Newspeople have the control room in their ear all day long. This is why you hear reporters say things like, “We only have 30 seconds left” or “Time for just one more question” or “We just got breaking news”. They have to be able to pay attention to both or they won’t stay in their position very long.