Apparently other people’s words and a smear.
Last week Couric’s Notebook consisted of plagiarized passages from a Wall Street Journal column, an act blamed on one of the show’s producers, who was duly fired over the incident. What made the intellectual theft all the more striking was the sheer stupidity surrounding it and apparently Couric’s newsroom. Not only did the producer plagiarize but he or she apparently lacked the good sense not to steal an article that was less than a month old and from one the nation’s most read newspapers.
I’m reminded of college freshmen that are too lazy to reformat the text they paste into their papers from the first website that comes up when a topic is typed into google. A rather weak defense of Couric was mounted by CBS associates that argued Couric was unaware and “upset” that the piece had been lifted. I suppose 15 million dollars a year is just not enough for Katie to verify a piece that starts out,
“I still remember when I got my first library card”
You’d also think that after all the attention she’d have learned her lesson. But alas, you’d be wrong.
Thursday’s (April 12) installment of Couric’s “Notebook” repeats lies and rumors about candidate Barack Obama that were debunked month’s ago. This time she began her piece by asking,
“Is America ready to elect a president who grew up praying in a mosque?
Media Matters has the video clip of Couric’s entry and links to the complete and utter destruction of the “madrassa smear” waged against Obama that created a controversy that was front page news. I’m not an Obama supporter but for a “reporter” to repeat such vicious and obviously destructive rumors shows how far the field of television news has fallen. That a single staffer didn’t catch and prevent a report on such a publicly discredited smear –one that you had to be living under a rock not to have heard about the first time around– is frightening on several levels.
I wonder if Couric thinks America is ready for a news anchor that is completely unaware of the news?
Technorati Tags: Katie Couric, Notebook, Obama, Madrassa Smear
What’s next an anchorperson reading text from the prompter then looking off frame to their producer and saying, “No shit? You’re kidding me, a war in Iraq?”
*****UPDATE*****
You’ll love this.
Apparently Katie suffers from Alzheimer’s as she proclaimed in her January edition of her Notebook that the Madrassa Story was a smear.
Here’s a link to it.
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2.....9831.shtml
You know you’d think that she’d remember at least some of the stuff she reads off the teleprompter.
From her OWN mouth:
“Let’s resist the temptation to repeat unsourced gossip. Let’s fact-check first and broadcast second. “
Yes… let’s “fact-check first”! Ed Murrow is spinning in his grave. Sweet Lord, she makes Shepard Smith look like an intellectual heavyweight.
Brian, you made me laugh out loud with your last sentence.
Brilliant.