THE CAMEL TOW APPROACH TO JOURNALISM
HOW ERIN BURNETT STOOPS TO CONQUER
THE VIEW FROM THE VIRGIN ISLANDS
By John McCarthy
Moderate Voice Columnist
To say I’ve been watching a lot of the World Cup soccer
games is a bit of an understatement.
I’ve watched all of them. At least all those broadcast by
ESPN/ABC.
What I’ve learned is that The Netherlands (Holland) came
up with the world’s first national anthem.
And like most groundbreaking things, it remains one of
the best. By contrast, Chile’s national anthem sounds musically like a Big Band
version of a traveling circus’ “Here Comes The Clowns” siren’s song.
Good team, bad theme.
Which brings us quite naturally to what this column was
supposed to be about: Erin Burnett’s visit to Qatar to confirm her assertion
that the average Qatari “doesn’t care” that they now have “Al Qaeda” in their
midst.
This after the United States swapped five Haqqani Network
prisoners from Guantanamo Bay for American prisoner of war Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.
The fact that the Haqqani Network has never tried to
attack U.S. interests outside of Afghanistan or Pakistan was not mentioned in
Ms. Burnett’s report.
Nor was it mentioned that the United States probably
would have released these five prisoners when it ends its operations in
Afghanistan in 2015 anyway – and taken nothing in return for so doing.
But the fact that the national media has not pointed this
fact out – is not Erin Burnett’s fault alone. Most in the national media –
including some of our vaunted elected leaders and our most celebrated prisoner
of war [John McCain (R-AZ) seem to be confusing trading terrorists for hostages
with redeeming enemy combatants for prisoners of war.
What President Ronald Reagan did in 1986 was trade U.S.
arms for hostages – not prisoners of war. I think even Sen. McCain would admit
that there is a big difference in our national moral hegemony between
extracting civilian hostages and making sure no American serviceman is left
behind.
What Erin Burnett hoped to prove by blowing into Qatar
for one day and disingenuously trying to find one Qatari citizen to say that
they don’t mind having five “Al Qaeda” among them is perhaps not even known to
her or her CNN producers.
Forget the fact that the five prisoners were Haqqani –
and not Al Qaeda. Ms. Burnett seems to pride herself in pulling up stakes from
New York and running off half-cocked to the trouble-plagued Middle East at the
drop of her high hat.
The fact that her premise was wrong from the start didn’t
seem to bother her any more than such reasoning bothered President George W.
Bush when he used flawed intelligence to bolster the argument for invading Iraq
after 911.
And if Qatar had been free enough (and spendthrift
enough) to fly a Qatari TV reporter to a Boston pub in the 1970s or 1980s –
they could have done a similar report about Americans not caring whether or not
Massachusetts had IRA terrorists in THEIR midst.
What Erin Burnett’s OutFront production team from CNN did
in Qatar had the same journalistic significance as what Geraldo Rivera did in
opening up Al Capone’s Chicago vault on live TV – absolutely none.
The most intelligent thing in the CNN report was a sound
bite from the First Lady (and second wife) of the Emir of Qatar, when Sheikha
Mozah told Burnett that even if everything she was telling her was true, if the
United States and Qatar did do as she said they did, it probably “benefited all
parties involved.”
Mark Twain said: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry,
and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.
Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating
in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
Maybe if Erin Burnett stayed longer in the places she was
visiting journalistically-speaking, she might stop doing her level best to
prove Twain wrong on this account.
It is hard to say what journalistic benefit people who
regularly watch “OutFront With Erin Burnett” are getting, she is an investment
banker by trade who is most famous for accusing Australian Prime Minister Kevin
Rudd of “camelcide” and for heckling Occupy Wall Street protestors on camera
when the “greed is bad” protests first began in 2011.
If CNN hopes to beat Fox News in the ratings wars, it
needs more news programming like Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” – and less
programming like Erin Burnett’s – where just the points are unknown.
CNN’s ratings were buoyed by the nearly 24-hour-per-day
coverage of the search for the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 in the
Spring, but now that Summer has arrived the Nielsen Ratings have returned to
their natural order.
That order has Greta Van Susteren’s news program getting
5.6 times as many viewers as her competitor Erin Burnett.
And if Ms. Burnett’s inattentive handlers continue to
allow her to manically go off on wild goose chases all over the Middle East,
OutFront might be as hard to find on TV as that ill-fated airplane is to find
in the Indian Ocean.
In TV as with anything else, you can’t lead from behind,
and OutFront needs to show that it “gets it” if it wants to grow its market
share.
© 2014 John Francis
McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC
John McCarthy is an
investigative reporter, fine artist and photojournalist based in the U.S.
Virgin Islands. Please send comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com
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