TV News LIES

No matter how much this week's Pulitzer Prize triumphalism hides it, the fact remains that journalism these days is "a disaster," as Ted Koppel said recently. And unfortunately, retrospection dominates the news industry's self-analysis. Like dazed tornado victims, most media experts focus on what happened and why, oh lord, why?

First there was product placement. Now there's "behavior placement," the planting of subtle messages in popular TV shows to encourage certain viewer behavior — such as healthy eating or eco-conscious habits — and thereby convince sponsors that their brands will be associated with "feel-good, socially aware" shows. NBC has owned up to the practice, reports The Wall Street Journal, as part of its Green Initiative: If "Tina Fey is tossing a plastic bottle into the recycling bin," the theory goes, audience members will be more apt to do the same. Innocuous or "Orwellian"?

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Activists behind a website dedicated to revealing secret documents have complained of harassment by police and intelligence services as they prepare to release a video showing an American attack in which 97 civilians were killed in Afghanistan.

The telephone call I received about a month ago should not have been a surprise. "Your apartment in Tel Aviv has been broken into," the voice on the other end of the line said. "Everything's in a mess and it's not clear what has been taken."

Half an hour later, sweating in a Bangkok phone booth, mosquitoes flying around me, I spoke to the policeman who came to the apartment. "Looks like they were looking for something," he said.

Rupert Murdoch insists that his network is "fair and balanced," but he was stumped when asked which of its employees offer credibility to that claim.

A visibly nervous Murdoch folded his hands and froze for a few seconds. "I could give you a couple of names but they're certainly there," he responded. "Uh, if Roger [Ailes] were here he'd certainly spit them out very quickly. I think probably every night Greta Van Susteren is certainly close to the Democratic Party."

A leaked videotape of a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed a dozen Iraqis was unveiled on April 5 by the website WikiLeaks. To much of the corporate media, though, it was either not worth reporting at all, or an unfortunate incident to be defended.