Serious Journalism

This clip aired on the Today Show on Friday. Let it soak in. Apparently even her colleagues couldn't hold back their laughter during the live broadcast. All of us sometimes try to cast the best light on things, but it sure is funny when someone gets caught. She defends it by saying she had been in rougher water earlier and the network was afraid she would get hurt... ("It's not like we were trying to pass it off as something it wasn't," spokeswoman Lauren Kapp said.)

Download Clip (originally posted on Newsbusters.com).

It does make you think, though. How often do we retell an incident by adding new information? I mean, she had been in deep water, she just wasn't any longer; but she was trying to make us believe otherwise. Some might say this is not dishonest because the conditions had been true but could not be safely reported. So, she construed a new truth and sought to replicate an old one. I wonder how often that's done in journalism? I know Bush got a lot of flak for something similar which seems to have been misreported, but had it been true it bothered us. We want to believe that journalists in dire conditions really are in dire conditions, but I wonder how much is staged--an effort to re-create truth, but nevertheless, false. If this happens on the Today Show, how much is added to print media? Information from one source that seems to come from multiple sources or events that occurred quickly seeming to have taken months. Our God deals with this directly. He says "I am that I am." I've always understood that to be an assertion of his self-existence, but maybe it's also an assertion of his nature--he is as he is. There is nothing false in there. I can trust that.