With newsgathering budgets well below what they need to bring original content to viewers 24 hours a day, cable news networks have become media vampires, feeding on the work of others in order to keep blood pumping through their own veins. Usually, the victims are nameless, their original work fed to the television beast without attribution or acknowledgement. And usually there are no identifying marks to let you know who the victim really was. But occasionally one can ascertain the identity of one of these Jane Does, and the process of discovering her identity lays bare the whole sordid process.
On December 7, CNN’s “American Morning” featured a segment about people surprising each other with gift cards for cosmetic surgery procedures. Andy Serwer of Fortune magazine, in one of his regular spots on the show, opened the segment: “It used to be that Christmas was all about gold, frankincense and myrrh. Now it’s gold, frankincense and Botox.” With that, he presented a co-anchor with a card from Advanced Aesthetics Institute of Florida, good for up to $50,000 worth of “Body contouring, breast enhancement, breast lift, breast reduction, eye lift rejuvenation, tummy tuck, nose contouring, face lift, brow lift, body lift, cheek and chin implants.”
It was one of those bits of “soft news” — an item on the trendlet of the day — that network execs think viewers love. But it was also an item hauntingly familiar to readers of the Wall Street Journal.
On December 3 — four days before the CNN broadcast — the Journal had run a story (subscription required) in its Weekend section about the same trend. And the headline –“Gold, Frankincense and … Botox” — was, word for word, one of the phrases Serwer had used to introduce the segment.
There is, of course, a long history of news outlets rewriting each other’s stories without attribution (a phenomenon we bore witness to during the campaign). There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with that — after all, if you’ve taken the time to re-report the piece, the story is yours, even if the idea isn’t.
And while this case is hardly earthshaking, it is especially egregious. Though Serwer/CNN clearly did some reporting of their own (or at least talked Advanced Aesthetics Institute into a tidy little cross-promotion), the idea, the source, and the headline were evidently each borrowed from the Journal — without attribution.
True enough, CNN brought the story to the attention of millions of people who might not have read the Journal. And no one can be expected to feed the beast of 24 hours of airtime a day purely with original material. But would it have killed Serwer or CNN to give a little credit where credit’s due? That way, they could accomplish three good deeds at once — avoiding deceiving viewers, not irritating the hell out the competing outlet/reporter whose story and headline were stolen, and, best of all, tossing a few more words into that voracious maw of time unending to fill.
–Bryan Keefer
Bryan Keefer was CJR Daily’s deputy managing editor.