Now You See it Now You Don't

Abstract

Broadcast journalism has quite rightly kept its head down while newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic have had a field day trashing the New York Times over the Jayson Blair scandal that resulted in the resignations of its two top editors. But television news has had its own share of scandals involving faked documentaries and dubious reporting that managed to get to air without rigorous fact-checking and sober second judgments. Every day in some television station or network, a reporter, correspondent, or producer is committing a similar act of journalistic deception. No one seems to care that this is a fact of life in television journalism.