As Predicted

The press is completely backing off of Jill Carroll's homecoming:

She did not step into public view, but reports on the Monitor's Web site, along with photos, showed a joyful and tearful reunion with her parents and twin sister.

Oh, please. She was on a commercial flight, which all three cable networks follwed up until it landed, and it was widely reported that there were many reporters on the flight -- although they weren't in first class with her. Just the same, at some point she had to have "stepped into public view" just to get off the plane. AP is just too reticent to say explicitly what some of the networks did yesterday -- that the press has been asked to back off, and is complying.

The AP explains further:

Photographs of the reunion released by the Monitor showed Carroll with her family, her sister stroking her hair, her father casting eyes upward as he held her tightly, her mother staring intently into her face.

In other words, to keep the beast at bay, the Monitor is getting an exclusive, but sharing it.

What irks me here, again, is not the press's behavior, which I think is exemplary. It's that the bottom line, which they won't say out loud for love nor money, is that their behavior is exemplary because Carroll is a friend and a colleague. Regular people beg for respect and privacy on days like yesterday in vain, as photographers follow their every move, essentially sticking cameras right in their faces as they embrace their loved ones for the first time, a disgusting, but routine and repeated ritual.

This is the case even for those returning from non-traumatic events. Have you not seen cameras shoved in the faces of returning soldiers embracing their families and found the willingness to intrude so closely (apparently within inches, sometimes) in a tremendously intimate moment jarring at the least? This is a practice neither necessary to tell the story, nor an intrusion on couples who in and of themselves are newsworthy. And on occasion it borders on soft porn. Give them a minute, why dontcha?

Can they really think that if they pull back from such behavior in this case that we won't notice what's missing, and consider it an admission on their part, that they don't truly need to behave in such a fashion to do their job? How will it look the next time some poor soul returns home after some trauma, only to have the cameras follow their every move and breathe?

Once again the press has busted themselves more effectively than anyone else ever could.

Comments

[Subsunk]

You're right again Cori. We always knew they would treat their own better than they would the common men and women of America. We just want to know why they think they are so much better than the soldiers who defend their abilities to write whatever they want.

It isn't a reporter that exposes the truth about illegal or dangerous activity. It is the soldier, cop, fireman, or attorney who does the actual work to expose it. Reporters just let the rest of us know what these people do.

Subsunk