Does Reuters Have It In For Mark Cuban?
Sure, Mark Cuban’s a sensationalist blow-hard — but what blogger isn’t a little guilty of that these days? (that’s my own modus operandi, anyway) At any rate, surely he’s still earned the right of fair and balanced coverage from an esteemed media source such as Reuters. Right? Think again.
Donna Bogatin of ZDnet blogs about attending the same Advertising conference where Mark Cuban gave a talk on many things — YouTube, HDNet, and so on. And then compares her own notes to Reuters.
She writes:
My reporting put forth lengthy highlights of the real focus of Cuban’€™s keynote: promotion of his Dallas Mavericks NBA property and his HDNet hi-def television property.
Reuters’ reporting put forth paragraph after paragraph about the operations of YouTube, despite the company’€™s claims that ‘€œThe world relies on Reuters journalists to provide accurate, clearly sourced accounts of events as they occur.’€?
Although the rest of the article goes into Mr. Cuban’s track record, one does wonder if the personal side of blogging has begun to seep into “traditional” journalism. Sure, we’ve all got our own personal chips to bear (chips on our shoulder), but if Reuters can’t keep it together, what’s next? The AP doing a drive-by on Mike Arrington?
Reuters is an international news organization. It wouldn’t be interested in an American football team or a television manufacturer, so it concentrated on the topic of the moment, which is YouTube. The blogger meanwhile rambled all over Cuban’s personal space.
Real journalism is about filtering out the superfluous and tightly editing the rest. Reuters produced the pro account.