A Call For Media Transparency

At Big Journalism, our friend John Nolte lays down a challenge to big media: be as transparent as conservative activists are:

With their most recent undercover video investigations, independent journalists James O’Keefe and Lila Rose have set a new standard of transparency in the field of journalism — a standard I call on all media outlets — print, online, and broadcast — to adopt and to institute immediately. Within hours of releasing what the AP called “heavily edited” video footage of a high-powered NPR executive’s troubling statements with respect to the Tea Party, conservatives, and Jewish control of the media, Mr. O’Keefe then released to the public the full, unedited two-hour video of the entire conversation. Another New Media pioneer, Lila Rose, also released the full video of her undercover investigation of Planned Parenthood.
While the biased AP apparently only whips out the term “heavily edited” when the institutional left is under fire, it’s difficult to disagree with them on principle, especially when we live in a world where on a daily basis the network nightly news programs, Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, and every facet of the MSM broadcast and publishing world release reports no less “heavily edited” than Rosa and O’Keefe’s initial video releasse. However, unlike Rose and O’Keefe, the mainstream media never allows the public to view the full, unedited material in order to judge the full context for ourselves.
This can and must end today. …
Because Mr. O’Keefe and Ms. Rose have led the way in journalistic transparency and taken the first step, as a show of good faith from the MSM in accepting this offer, we call on Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric to release every frame of video involving their 2008 interviews with then Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin.

Heh. It won’t happen; not now, anyway. But the fact is that a standard has been set, and media outlets that don’t live up to the standard will steadily lose credibility.

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