Steve Safran caught a particularly nasty and vindictive little snipe in the New York Times today, and it didn’t really surprise me that they felt it, only that they dared say it:
I hardly know where to begin with all the things offensive with that headline. “LATEST BLOW TO NETWORK”? Is that really the concern here? “Field Reports Were a Ratings Strategy”? So reporting from a war zone is just fine for newspapers, but if it’s on TV it’s a “Ratings Strategy?” The body of the story is mostly about ABC News and its ratings troubles. That’s what the NY Times takes away from the attack?
When I read this story, I was somewhat skeptical. At the time Steve put it up on Lost Remote, he didn’t have a scan of the paper. Later on, he added it. That’s exactly what it said. That the field reports were a “ratings strategy.” What’s most offensive is what’s implied here. As Steve accurately notes, you never hear a newspaper say, “reporting from field is a circulation enhancing strategy.”
Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine has written numerous articles about the dire straits that tree media is in, and this is yet another demonstration. Newspapers around the country are hemmorhaging readers and this is a textbook example of why. A prominent national news anchor is attacked in a war zone, and the most the New York Times can worry about is the fact that the coverage was a boon to ratings.
Typical slime from the slimiest national paper we have.
[tags]ny times, slime, newspaper, media, woodruff[/tags]