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Monday, December 1, 2008 12:00 AM

NBC and McCaffrey's coordinated responses to the NYT story

Emails obtained between NBC executives and the retired General further underscore NBC's gross indifference to journalistic ethics.

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  • Monday, December 1, 2008 08:53 PM

    @Retz

    I think we could find plenty of photogenic people for our Intertubes News Show. I'm actually pretty cute, fwiw.

    That's nice to know, but it's beside the point I was trying to make, which is that if the #1 thing that a news medium has going for it is that it's peerless at providing tasty eye candy, it's inherently untrustworthy.

    Don Henley got all polemical about this in one of his songs, about 25 years ago. So did Frank Zappa, about 10 years before that. And while I've never met anyone who disagreed with the observations and conclusions contained in "Dirty Laundry" or "I'm The Slime", I notice that most everyone is still spending many hours a week, fitting their minds inside of that Box.

    I no longer live in a television household, but for the past three years I did. I only watched it occasionally, but that experience was sufficient for me to conclude that a steady diet of today's television advertisements is liable to lead a huge proportion of the unfortunate victims to chronic hypochondria, if not outright premature aging.

    I may not be as downright intolerably handsome as I used to be, but there's no point in hastening matters along. Call it vanity, but I'm back to keeping my television exposure to a minimum.

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