Oprah Owns Up

Posted on January 27, 2006
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What happened to Oprah Winfrey should cause chagrin among politicians and shows that life remains in our body politic.

After Oprah brushed aside disclosures that author James Frey included fabrications in his “memoir”, A Million Little Pieces, she had him on her TV show to give him a real dressing-down, complete with occasional tears. “I feel duped”, said Oprah, who helped make Frey’s book a best seller. “But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.”

Two weeks earlier, Oprah had called in to the Larry King Show, on which Frey was being interviewed, to brush aside incidents in the account of his troubled life that turned out to be imaginary or overblown. What happened in the meantime was that “E-mail after e-mail” came in from Oprah viewers who objected to her defense of Fry’s creative conjuring. Fiction isn’t supposed to be presented as fact, they reminded her.

“I left the impression that truth is not important,” Oprah acknowledged. The critical response showed that the public can be aroused and its regard quickly withdrawn. That’s what our system is about; this is reassuring evidence people will still react when riled.

Through a Glass, Darkly

Posted on January 18, 2006
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The death last month of George Gerbner, dean emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, reminds us of how complacent we have become over how television shapes the context of our lives.

Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory, advanced in the 1980s, held that television has become the most common source of information and was no longer simply a medium of communication. “I call it a cultural environment into which our children are born, and which tells all the stories,” Gerbner said. “You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behavior. It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it’s a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.”

Gerbner’s work pointed up the all-important difference between the content and context of our lives, and suggested that context is insidiously determining content. Heavy TV viewers, he held, are exposed to more violence and are affected by the Mean World Syndrome, an idea that the world is worse then it actually is. According to Gerbner, the overuse of television is creating a homogeneous and fearful populace.

But even occasional TV viewing can also be a concern as our media environment fragments. We’re increasingly skimming the surface of our world via television images. Electronic context is providing increasingly shallow content, to our peril.

“You’re Sick? Papers, Please”

Posted on January 5, 2006
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The egregious federal budget bill awaiting a final vote contains an unbelieveably inhumane provision, reports Bob Herbert in The New York Times. Applicants for Medicare would be required to prove their U.S. citizenship, which means producing a birth certificate or passport. People who are poor and sick will have to produce papers they don’t have, and have little or no way of obtaining, to gain help they need and are entitled to.

The Washington scene has reached such a despicable low that Herbert can write, “Someday the pendulum will swing back, and the government of the United States will become more representative and more humane. Meanwhile, as Lily Tomlin said, ‘We’re all in this alone.’”

Disaster Information Disciplines

Posted on January 4, 2006
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As at Three Mile Island in 1979, although much more tragically this time, the West Virginia coal mine disaster shows how emergency public information requires disciplined procedures and training, a single, authorized source of information, and drills beforehand.

Ben Hatfield, CEO of the International Coal Group that operates the Sago Mine, told a press conference that an “incomplete evaluation” of the status of 13 trapped miners had been misunderstood and passed from the command center as word that 12 of them were alive, when actually they were dead.

“That information, of course – because we were all looking for good information and anxious to share that information – someone – I’m sure with good intentions – picked up that bad information and spread it to friends and passersby, and it quickly got out of control.”

Good intentions hardly count when it comes to providing accurate public information in the stress of a disaster. What matters is previously planned and practiced care in determining how vital information is to be gathered and released, then sticking to the plan.

It’s not yet entirely apparent, but such procedures apparently weren’t in place when the families of 12 miners were given the word that their loved ones were alive, when actually they were dead. Even West Virginia’s Governor Joe Manchin, despite uncertainty on what was happening, spread the “good news”, then regretted it. “I wanted to believe,” he said.

The U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration will be looking at “how emergency information was relayed about the trapped miners’ conditions” as part of its investigation of the accident. It might dust off the Report of the Public’s Right to Information Task Force in the Kemeny Commission’s report on the TMI accident for insights on what it takes to provide timely, accurate information to the public during a disaster.

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