Day 4

1/14/09

Today may have been the best day yet. But before I get to why it was so great, I'll start off with the 1st speaker:

First up was Steve Bell once more, former anchor for ABC's "Good Morning America" as well as "World News This Morning". Of all of his lectures, I think this was his best so far. His topic of discussion was that of biased campaign coverage. According to the people, 65% said this was a very biased coverage and of those who said yes, about 2/3's claimed it to be leaning liberally. Personally I'd definitely agree, but in this case I don't even have to plug in my opinion because the facts speak for themselves; it was a biased coverage. For every one story about McCain, Obama received 4. That's a huge difference. Not only that, but statistically speaking, no candidate has ever held more than 50% positive stories since 1980. It goes without saying that this year, Obama beat that by attaining 65% positive while McCain received a mere 35%.

These numbers by far show a drastic favorance towards Obama than there really should be. Every candidate should have a fair opportunity, and it is clearly not the case here. It seems as though media may have been struck with the "Obama Phenomenon," and did not deliver the news as it should be delievered. I'd like to continue on this, but another speaker brings this up later on in the day, so I'll put my plug in over there.


Next up we had Dana Perino, White House Press Secretary, televised on C-SPAN hosted by Steve Scully. Um, I'll get to this later on in the trip. I want to get to my favorite part.

Ted Koppel. Yes, THE Ted Koppel. The only journalist I have more respect for than Ted Koppel is Peter Jennings (RIP), although my respect for Anderson Cooper steadily rising, he still can't beat Ted. He began his lecture asking a question: Should journalists be held accountable for what they write about. The vast majority of students voted yes. Teds opinion: let me tell you a story. He told a story about NBC calling for humanitarian aid needed for the starvation in Somalia. US then responded to this call by sending food brought by US Marines. Some 300,000 people survived because of this aid. After the food was brought, some Marines stayed behind, and in staying behind, rebel groups ended up shooting down a helicopter (remember Black Hawk Down?? Yea, that was a true story). Rebels then took the body of a soldier and dragged his dead body through the streets. After that action, no one wanted to be apart of Africa. That's why Rwanda had 800,000 die, even though only one battalion was necessary to quell the fighting.

Hearing him tell this story, it was clear that no matter what story you tell, you can NEVER predict the outcome. Who would have ever thought that a simple call for humanitarian aid would end such in an atrocious way. This is why, he said, that journalists must focus 99% of the time on the accuracy of the story and not on the repercussions of it. The facts must always be true, because no matter what story you choose to write about, you never know the actual outcome of it.

He also spoke about the change in news from being a show that was not expected to bring any sort of money to the network, to major source of income for these network stations (thanks to the success of 60 Minutes-not that its a bad thing). This changed the dynamic of the stories to covering things they wouldn't normally cover, but yet forced to do it just for ratings. Which bringing back to my point earlier: Obama's biased coverage may be due in part to our craving of more topics on him instead of McCain. To me, that's not exactly fair as every candidate should have an equal chance.

Still didn't get to the best part yet. Now, after today I respect Ted Koppel so much more, its actually absurd. He spent a tremendous amount of time on EVERY question asked. He ended up taking 40 minutes AFTER his lecture just for questions. Every response was well more articulate and detailed than I could have ever had hoped for. But he had one statement that really got me. Now, although I did just sit here and tell you how journalists should be unbiased, it is kind of nice to hear an opinion. There was a question that was asked to Dana Perino by a caller stating that the Iraq war was conducting only for oil and that we truly had no interest in Saddam. If we did, then we had more than ample time to remove him from power a long time ago, and the fact that we waited until now only makes that more obvious. Her response to this was that it is simply not true, and that Saddam was a threat to the nation. When I heard that, I thought to myself UMMMM, NO!!. I'm not going to deny what he had done to his own people is atrocious, but to claim that he was a threat to the US is absurd.

This same statement was brought up to Ted Koppel and asked to comment on it. His response was, and I quote: "For Dana to sit here and say that the Iraq War was not for oil, she is either silly . . . or protecting this administration." I cannot explain the roar of applause that followed that statement. It was by far the best moment of my trip thus far. He continued on by stating that he does understand Bush's claim though stating that they did have Weapons of Mass Destruction, of course they would, we sold it to them. But for him to say that he was a threat to national security is clearly false.

Like I said, I highly respect Ted Koppel.

After this, we went out to the US Capital. Here is a few pics.