BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

The good news

4 comments on The good news

The good news
: The Washington Post’s Peter Baker flew to Kuwait with the freed POWs and so he got their story.

“We weren’t POWs very long,” Young noted. “I don’t know how the guys in Vietnam made it. I wouldn’t have made it.”

: The Today show (and probably others) eavesdropped — no, gawked — on the first phone call from Spec. Shoshana Johnson to her family. It was unseemly for us all to watch as this brave woman finally reached her family and the tears came out. I want to hear the story and see the drama, too, but a little privacy is the least we can give them.

4 responses to “The good news”

  1. Donald Sensing Avatar
    Donald Sensing

    Note it is only the female POWs, Lynch and Johnson, who get this sort of maudlin attention.

  2. af Avatar
    af

    I don’t know about that Rev. Sensing. I think Kaye Young, Ronald Young’s mother, got more television time yesterday than Regis Philbin did at the height of “Who Wants to be A Millionare’s” notoriety. The media came off looking like ungainly scavenging birds yesterday. Pretty unseemly stuff.

  3. Pithpott Avatar
    Pithpott

    I could bear watching only a few squirming minutes of this slurpy intrusion. I half expected Jerry Springer to walk down a sidewalk. I think we can safely assume a sordid reason for the media’s overemphasis on the treatment of the female prisoners, but this is tricky stuff for them to handle, they’d better get it right.

  4. John Avatar
    John

    I had to photograph a memorial service for one of Johnson’s fellow soldiers from the 507th who was killed in the attack on Friday. While the pictures of the family, his wife and children do make for very emotional and evocative images, even in a public place like that you feel a little guilty about intruding during a time of grief, especially on the few flash shots I took to make sure there would be decent upper facial images, as opposed to the other nighttime shots bottom-lit by candlelight.
    I can be selective about what I shot there, and so were the other photographers and local TV stations. But the higher up the media food chain you get, the greater the competition, and it inevitably turns into the “get the widow on the set” line from Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry.” So, sadly, that means having things like the Today Show turning a private moment by the Johnsons into a emotional scene that it shown to the world, under the justification that if NBC doesn’t do it, Good Morning America on ABC will, or if not them, then CBS, CNN or Fox will (it would finally take enough producers who will draw the line on this for it to end, but so long as these type of images attract more viewers than they lose for the show, it’s not going to happen).