The Shame Of CBS

The CBS news magazine 48 Hours will air a 6-part reality TV series on the Brooklyn DA beginning in May. The program won't he hard-hitting investigative news. Instead, it will be reality fluff TV that largely whitewashes the real problems of what could easily turn out to be the most corrupt DA in New York City's recent history. The lead "characters" are the DA Charles Hynes himself and his thuggish and allegedly corrupt lead prosecutor Michael Vecchione.

The CBS news magazine 48 Hours will air a 6-part reality TV series on the Brooklyn DA beginning in May.
The program won't he hard-hitting investigative news.

Instead, it will be reality fluff TV that largely whitewashes the real problems of what could easily turn out to be the most corrupt DA in New York City's recent history.

The lead "characters" are the DA Charles Hynes himself and his thuggish and allegedly corrupt lead prosecutor Michael Vecchione.

Why would CBS do this, especially during the middle of Hynes relection campaign?

It's hard to say.

One of the producers involved in the show allegedly is close to the DA.

The series, which will air during sweeps week, grants CBS unprecedented access, including knowledge of stings the DA's office has yet to carry out. This should make for good TV even if it is bad and unethical news reporting. And that should translate into significant money for CBS.

I don't believe CBS producers could ever have sold this piece of crap to CBS executives without Hynes having some cover for his bad actions.

That is probably what is behind Hynes courting of Jewish Community Watch (formerly Crown Heights Community Watch), which has repeatedly boosted Hynes even as Hynes continued to lie about child sexual abuse prosecutions.

It also probably has much to do with Hynes petition to release David Ranta from prison. There are other inmates who had and have cases as strong as Ranta's, but Hynes has fought the release of pretty much all them. Why not Ranta? Probably the timing, which coincides with the CBS producers' attempt to get the reality series approved.

Meanwhile, the Forward published a Thompson-Reuter's piece today on the Hynes' reality show that credits the Forward for reporting done by The Jewish Week, The Guardian, the New York Times and FailedMessiah.com – but not the Forward, which came to this part of the Hynes story belatedly:

In 2011, The Forward, an influential Jewish newspaper based in Brooklyn, said Hynes misled the public about the number of Orthodox Jewish sex offenders his office has prosecuted - itself a response to the newspaper’s earlier complaints that Hynes allowed rabbis to handle criminal accusations within their secretive rabbinical courts.

A mistake? After all, it was the Forward that printed Hynes' original inflated claims of numbers of prosecutions without comment, and it was the Forward that printed what it perhaps the dumbest and most irresponsible piece ever written about Hynes. That piece tried to show that because Hynes did more haredi child sexual abuse prosecutions than the Los Angeles DA did, Hynes was therefore doing a better job. That the haredi population of Brooklyn is many magnitudes greater than LA (or Miami – another Forward comparison) escaped the Forward's crack editors. So did the idea that social scientists had long since showed that these types of comparisons do not actually bear out accurately – which is why social scientists do not use them. Etc.

So, yes, this could be just another in an increasingly long line of Forward errors.

Why did Thompson-Reuters make the error?

Probably because its reporter saw coverage of the Times series on child sexual abuse and of the column by its then-public-editor crediting The Jewish Week, Failed Messiah, the Forward and others with actually breaking many of the stories the Times reporters had claimed as their own.

The Forward's PR people spun the Times' public editor's column to read as if the Forward had driven that coverage and broken those stories, when the stories in question were overwhelmingly – and clearly – broken by Hella Winston in The Jewish Week and by Failed Messiah.

That PR people lie and misrepresent is not news. But the fact that a Thompson-Reuters' reporter read coverage generated by that dishonest PR and accepted it as true is news.

Unlike what you learned in haredi yeshiva (or in the Forward's newsroom), the truth is not relative. The seal of God is truth, the Talmud says, because the world stands on truth and falls on lies and falsehood.

CBS will make money on the Hynes reality show. But that money will surely come at price – raped and abused kids, wrongfully convicted men, and the usurpation of democracy in Brooklyn.

http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/2013/03/the-shame-of-cbs-456.html