When ABC announced that CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour would take over as host of their Sunday chat show This Week, there were rumblings about how different things would be. Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales wrote a nasty hit piece on Amanpour in which he worried thattheshow focuses on "inside-the-Beltway palaver, an area where Amanpour is widely considered to be deficient." He seemed to mean that was a bad thing. ABC president David Westin, meanwhile, wrote in amemo to ABC staffers,"With Christiane we have the opportunity to provide our audiences with something different on Sunday mornings." Something different, something not [...]
Jul
07
2010
Liberals are Liars: More on ABC's Factchecking Failure
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Back in May FAIR wrote about the problems with a new factchecking project, where the PolitiFact website evaluates ABC's This Week. As we said then, this is theoretically a fine idea; the problem is that, in practice, what PolitiFact decides to analyze is almost as important as what is said on the show. A completely uncontroversial comment from Bill Clinton, for instance, was determined to be "true," though no one would suggest that it wasn't. Defense Secretary Bob Gates' somewhat tendentious criticism of Wikileaks (for releasing a video of civiliansbeing killed in Iraq by U.S. forces)was determined "Mostly True," though [...]
Mar
17
2009
George Will on the Infallibility of Business Journalism
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"I think the best journalism in America is business journalism precisely because they deal with real metrics. You can actually–they know things." –George Will, ABC's This Week, 3/15/09 It's possible that Will actually believes this. Read Dean Starkman's piece in Mother Jones, "How Could 9,000 Business Reporters Blow It?," for another take. Or this piece from Extra!. Or recall that, not too long ago, Will was lecturing us on how the economy was doing just fine, in spite of the gloomy message the media was delivering: Conservative pundit George Will (ABC's This Week, 12/4/05) blamed media coverage for the public's [...]
