Apparently the news shows just love the YouTube. At least it's a step up from the "Cool Links" news segments from a decade ago. From an article by Liz Cox Barrett at CJR:
Hey, TV news producers and reporters: Absurd amateur video footage does not a news story make.
All three networks (plus cable) recently aired a "story" -- we'll call it, for now, TiggerGate -- that has left us wondering: where's the news judgment? It's almost as if the only question television news producers ask nowadays before approving a "story" is, "Is there video we can run (ideally video that has appeared on YouTube, so we can say the word 'YouTube' in the story)?"
Now for some background on TiggerGate.
As you probably know by now, some guy is claiming that during a family visit to Disney World last week, a man dressed as Tigger (Winnie the Pooh's tiger friend) punched his 14-year-old son in the face as they posed for photos. And -- oh, happy day! -- this guy captured the "assault" on home video (or, as CNN's Betty Nguyen gleefully exclaimed while reporting this story on Sunday, "Ooh, it's on tape!").
Time was when footage like this might, best case, end up on America's Funniest Home Videos with Bob Saget. We no longer live in that time. Today, the once-wholesome Bob Saget is raunching it up. And television news judgment has gone to hell.
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