Yesterday morning shortly after 8am I was contacted by an intern from CNN about a blog post I had written in May about an NRSC fund-raising letter disguised as a survey. Apparently reporter Carol Costello's husband recently received a similar letter and CNN wanted to do a story about it but couldn't use an employee's husband as a primary source. They were having a hard time finding anyone else who had received the letter until the intern came across my blog post.
After talking to producer Bob Ruff, my wife and I agreed to cancel our museum trip and instead go downtown to a local CNN affiliate to film a segment about the letter for Carol Costello's appearance on Wolf Blitzer's The Situation Room. An amusing way to spend an afternoon, sure, but the real lure was that Bob Ruff agreed to have the name of this blog mentioned on-air and to have the URL displayed at the bottom of the screen while Jessica and I were talking.
If you watched the segment you'll know that Master of None was not mentioned in any way, nor was the fact that we're bloggers at all. My URL was not shown and no one made any mention of how they found us and made contact with us. We mentioned the blog during the interview, but they cut it out during the editing process. Carol Costello told us that she and some others had read parts of my blog after having been given the URL, so there's no question that she knew what was going on.
The behavior of Bob Ruff and Carol Costello was extremely unprofessional, disrespectful, and dishonest. My wife and I spent the useful part of a whole day to provide CNN material for their story, and I was promised some national exposure for my blog in return. My blog may seem trivial or meaningless to CNN, but it's a big deal to me. I treated them and their product with respect and professional courtesy, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect to receive the same in return.
Update:
CNN doesn't seem to understand the whole internet thing yet.
Update 2:
John Murdoch got the same letter and was similarly irritated.
I took a media training class about 15 years ago as a part of my job. The first thing they taught was:
1. Never trust reporters
2. See #1
While we have Freedom of the Press, the reporters who write for it are only after forwarding their own jobs and agendas. They are not in it for some higher purpose (and to be fair, this is true of most of the population and their professions).
So they will lie, cheat, and tell whatever you want to hear in order to get their story.
My dealings with the press have largely been benign, but that is because I follow the two rules and know what to expect.
That's sad but not surprising. In terms of trust, I would put reporters even below politicians and car salesmen. Can anyone think of a group that deserves even less trust than a reporter?
Don't even get me started on how they edited our comments to fit their pre-conceived story and omit our main points.