Think about it. When I took exception to Jones's response, he asked me what I would have done without violating the publication's guidelines. I said, at the very least, I'd have Mathison write a straight news article describing exactly what happened. Jones said it was a good idea and he'd think about it. That was August 6, 1991.
Television journalists are as culpable of the sins of omission as their print colleagues.
But it was not always so. Where we once had the NBC White Paper, CBS Reports, and ABC's Close-up, today we have A Current Affair, Unsolved Mysteries and Inside Edition. It Can Be Told with Geraldo Rivera. While the media moguls squander their resources hounding Donald Trump, Pee Wee Herman and William Kennedy Smith, they ignore the economic, environmental, political and social ills that profoundly threaten the nation. The media's love affair with sensationalism, combined with its sins of omission, leaves the American people uninformed and ill-prepared for the 21st century.