MSNBC is under fire for showing the gold medal women's curling match rather than the press conf. revealing that WSJ reporter Pearl had been murdered. Other all news cable stations like CNN and FNC preempted their regular programming.

The Washington Post's TV reporter, Lisa de Moraes now calls it the Must Show Nothing But Curling network" ... "On MSNBC, they could see a bunch of women in leisure suits on an ice rink, furiously pushing little brooms to guide a rock."

MSNBC claims to have a contractual responsibility to show the match -- they did report on the murder during a break ... and refered viewers to CNBC for more coverage, which IMHO, was an appropriate and fine response.

I'm sorry, but these people that are getting all bent out of shape over something as trite as weather or not a channel showed a story about how new evidence was just found that show's that the guy is dead, seams like they just want to grand stand. The guy has been dead for awhile. This is simply evidence. I didn't find out about it until this morning, and did I feel cheated? Heck no! I mean get real, what do they want next, someone to come by and knock on their door and personally tell them when every little news story breaks, just in case they weren't watching TV? These people are way too sensitive. They talked about it on a break, good enough, I would have been pissed if they would have interrupted the USA vs. Belaruse hockey game to tell me some stupid reporter, who was dumb enough to get taken hostage by these idiots, was finally CONFIRMED dead, even though we all knew he was toast a long time ago!

This must be from the same people who brought us six months of "Chandra Levy" updates every 10 minutes, when there was NOTHING of substance to report. The update would be something like, "Hey, still haven't found her yet!"

Something like 20 servicemen were killed yesterday in an accident in the South Pacific. Did ALL the news stations break into programming to report on this? NO! So one long-dead journalist is more important than 20 or so US Military members? HUH?

From today's USA Today:
"In New York, the non-profit Committee to Protect Journalists said a rising tide of violence against journalists had resulted in 37 killings of journalists worldwide last year, up from 24 in 2000."

Did they break into the news every time when the other 61 journalists were killed during the last two years? Hmmm... why not?

[ February 22, 2002: Message edited by: utahman4u ]

Sorry to say, I wonder if she had been waiting for a chance to show off her word-play on "MSNBC", and used the news about Pearl's death as her opportunity... Yikes, dare I suggest anything so crass? DC guys, who is this writer Lisa de Moraes?

Utahman4u, that's a bunch of good points.

Since I'm unemployed right now, I've been watching Olympics coverage almost from 10 am 'til 11 pm on the 3 NBC channels, every day. They cut in during every break they could with confirmation of the poor guy's demise. The criticism is totally unwarranted in my view.

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These people are way too sensitive. They talked about it on a break, good enough, I would have been pissed if they would have interrupted the USA vs. Belaruse hockey game to tell me some stupid reporter, who was dumb enough to get taken hostage by these idiots, was finally CONFIRMED dead, even though we all knew he was toast a long time ago!

Boy am I glad you think people are too sensitive to kidnapping and murder..someone has to be, since you are not. You have a lot of nerve calling the guy 'dumb' and then referring to him as 'toast'..ANYONE'S life is more important than all the Olympics combined.

[quote]Boy am I glad you think people are too sensitive to kidnapping and murder..someone has to be, since you are not. You have a lot of nerve calling the guy 'dumb' and then referring to him as 'toast'..ANYONE'S life is more important than all the Olympics combined.

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You hit one out of the ballpark.

Geez, a friggin' Olympic Hockey game MORE important than the life of a blundering oaf? Horse manure of course... Calling Daniel Pearl "dumb and toast" is NOT only disgusting but cruel as well. So crass, so insensitive, and devoid of any logic.

I discussed this topic with a friend of mine that is being sent to Kosovo here in a couple of days. Compassion is a great thing, and I try to exercise it whenever I feel it is warrented. I feel for the family of this reporter because he is gone FOREVER! But at the same time, there are people in this country that look at his abduction and death and say, "The US should have sent in special forces to get him out of there, they should have saved his life!" To this I have a couple of things to say. Why was he over there? He was there because he chose to travel to a country that was in the middle of a conflict that centers around a hatered of the country he was from, and with people that do not live by the same rules that we do here in the US. Now, Second, How much would it cost to get One person out of the kind of trouble this guy was in? My friend in the Army estimated approximately a million dollars or more to simply mobilize the crew to go in and find this one person, is that reasonable? For every person that is over there we are going to pay over a million dollars to bring them home. In my opinion it is not the job of the US to get every person who is caught over there unless they were working for the US. I think that the global community of journalists should have put pressure on these people over there to respect the media the way it was intended, and protect the rights of reporters. The reason that I was peaved over this subject is because of the fact that a special news bullitin interrupted every channel except this one channel that was showing curling, and that channel is made into a terrible channel because of it's lack of respect. I just don't buy that. It's the middle of a match in a sport that some people are watching right, well this information that these tapes of him being killed, had been transported across a desert, handed off to someone else, then mailed across an ocean, then given to an intern, then put into a VCR, viewed by an executive, a writer put togeather a quick explanation, then the camera crew had to bet togeather, someone made coffee, then they clicked the switch, and interrupted the entire US television broadcast system to bring this BREAKING news. So MSNBC decided to wait until commercial, like 5 minutes later to bring this BREAKING NEWS. In my OPINION, that was not such a bad thing, give them some slack, 5 minutes difference in finding out this info isn't worth this much controversy.

Just as an FYI, Maybe I'm a cold person, but I treat death like the rest of life. If it happens it happens. I lost my grandfather 6 years before I was born, my grandmother the year I was born, both of my other grandparents within 6 months of each other when I was in 1st grade, an uncle when I was 12, and an aunt and an uncle about 2 years ago. I don't get excited about death, enjoy the memory of the people they were and move on. If you get too excited, your life will be a heck of lot shorter and you won't be able to enjoy life as much. That's just my Opinion on some stuff, if I piss some people off, I'm sorry, but that's just the way I see things.

Guys, go back and read my post from a few days ago. So what are ANY of the NAMES of the other 61 journalists killed in the past two years?

So NOW whose life is more important?

I'm not in charge of all the media outlets in creation, so there's no way to answer why the other journalists slaughtered were not as publicized.

Maybe they were not kidnapped. Maybe we were not in a war with savages. I don't know.

No one said their lives are less important than Daniel Pearl's. But should we NOT hear about him cause we didn't hear about them?

My point was not that we shouldn't have heard about him. I believe that chastising a news organization about the timing of their announcement about it was the rediculous part of it. Just because other stations decided to interrupt their regularlly scheduled programming doesn't mean that every station needs to, and yet these people made a huge deal about it and expected MSNBC to do what they were doing. I simply think that they did the correct thing by not stopping their coverage of curling, and waiting until a commercial break to make the announcement.

MSNBC fancies itself as the "all news" arm of NBC. As such, they had a responsibility to confirm the news about Daniel Pearl as soon as they had corroboration. They dropped the ball. Or, in this case, the puck. And that's the rub of this all, isn't it?

I think it's fine to agree or disagree with MSNBC's decision, but it was NOT fine to refer to Pearl as "dumb" and "toast." That betrays an insensitivity to his family, friends and colleagues that is really quite troubling. Nobody deserves to hear words like that at such a moment.

I have corrected my original section of the message, that offended so many of you, to a more Politically correct version.

"I would have been very upset if they would have interrupted the USA vs. Belaruse hockey game to tell me a reporter, who was careless enough to go off by himself in a country where there is questionable loyalty to the US, and then get taken hostage by these radical revolutionaries, was finally CONFIRMED dead, even though it had been reported 2 weeks earlier."

Perhaps I used improper context that could have been deemed unappropriate, but this is what I ment to have said. Semantics doesn't change my opinion on the subject. I have watched several news shows on the events that lead to this pour guys situation, and I do feel bad about what happened, but, was any of this news really breaking news? No, like I said in a previous post, this tape was sent from all the way over there(where ever that may be), to the US, then it was watched by a couple of executives, then someone had to make up the teleprompter messages so the reporter could read it, then the reporter had to put on the makup and get the hair just right, then finally they assemble the camera crew and start shooting. Like I have said before, waiting for 5 minutes just doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me in the grand scheme of things. TV doesn't happen at a split second notice, and for another tv news person to pick on a channel for not going along with the norm and waiting for a few minutes, to me that shows a huge lack of class on that reporters part.

Just my opinion.

[ February 26, 2002: Message edited by: MSUBobcat ]

The whole Daniel Pearl story is not a big deal to me. I have no personal stake in it. I feel sympathy for his loved ones and hope that the criminals are brought to justice. Beyond that, I don't really care if MSNBC interrupted the Olympics coverage or not. But the TV critics are justified in their opinion. MSNBC is a news station that went two weeks with sharply reduced news coverage.

The job of TV critics is to give opinions of what they see on TV. In this case, what the critics saw is MSNBC -- which is in competition for news viewers with CNN and Fox News Channel -- putting off a breaking news story in order not to interrupt their Olympics coverage.

The abduction and murder of Daniel Pearl is a major story. Whether or not it should be a major story is up for debate. But considering when and where it occurred, with the backdrop of the ongoing war against terrorism, it became a big story.

So the critics are saying that MSNBC was derelict in their duty to present the news, and it's certainly something that CNN and FNC can use to its advantage in advertising.

Here are the Nielsen ratings: MSNBC women's Olympic curling competition an 1.1 million viewers from 4:30 to 6 p.m.; CNN and FNC coverage of the Pearl news trailed with 980,000 and 900,000 viewers.