Not sure if this has been diaried and hate to cut and paste it but here is a post with quotes about ABC's story last night and the comment of other news agencies about the distortion of Dean after the Iowa loss.
Last night Diane Sawyer of ABC News took a new look at Governor's Dean's Iowa speech, and determined in a "mea culpa" that what the networks had shown over and over wasn't quite the same as what happened on the ground. Turns out that famous video snippet failed to capture the crowd--or the sound of its cheers. Sawyer says:
After my interview with Dean and his wife in which I played the tape again -- in fact played it to them -- I noticed that on that tape he's holding a hand-held microphone. One designed to filter out the background noise [...]
So, we collected some other tapes from Dean's speech including one from a documentary filmmaker, tapes that do carry the sound of the crowd, not just the microphone he held on stage[...]
Dean's boisterous countdown of the upcoming primaries as we all heard it on TV was isolated, when in fact he was shouting over the roaring crowd. And what about the scream as we all heard it? In the room, the so-called scream couldn't really be heard at all. Again, he was yelling along with the crowd.
Was the coverage fair? ABC asked the network chiefs themselves:
CBS News: "Individually we may feel okay about our network, but the cumulative effect for viewers with 24-hour cable coverage is -- it may have been overplayed and, in fact, a disservice to Dean and the viewers." -- Andrew Heyward, President - CBS News
ABC News: "It's always a danger that we'll use good video too much." -- David Westin, President - ABC News
CNN: "We've all been wrestling with this. If we had it to do over again, we'd probably pull ourselves back." -- Princell Hair, General Manager - CNN
Fox News: "It got overplayed a bit, and the public clearly thought that, too, and kept him alive for another round." -- Roger Ailes, Chairman and CEO - Fox New
Anyone surprised they waited to do this until the day after New Hampshire?
Full story with links to video and such at BFA:
http://www.blogforamerica.com/
Excuse me if this had been diaried over the course of the day and I missed it.