Via Lake Sun Leader
Cable news squawk shows are not journalism
By Jules Molenda
Our news editor, Joyce Miller, stuck her head in my office a week or so ago to tell me that she was moving up in the world: CNN had called her and wanted her for an on-air interview.
That’s pretty impressive for a small-town newspaper scribe, I thought. I asked her what they had called her for and when she’d be on.
‘It’s about my story on the kids in the clothes dryer and I’m not going on,’ she said.
In case you missed it, we ran a story in mid-April about a young woman whose boyfriend had allegedly place her two youngsters (separately) in a clothes dryer and turned it on.
The details that came off the police report that we used as our source were sketchy. The information on it consisted of police interviews with an 8-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy and ‘ not surprising - somewhat conflicting interviews with the two adults involved.
Sadly, child abuse such as is alleged here is pretty common in the U.S., but the clothes dryer angle was somewhat unique.
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