Journalists/Co-Authors of a Book Critical of TV News Talk About Being Disinvited to a TV News Interview

(Apologies for the long headline but I'm writing this on the quick while on a vacation in Texas and, in fact, a niece is playing with my hair as I try to type this so I blame all typos on that.)

On Wednesday I published an interview with Howard Rosenberg and Charles Feldman, journalists and co-authors of No Time To Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-hour News Cycle.

There were two ironies present with this action. First, I was going to wait until next week to publish the interview but speed and breaking news changed my plans, which was a basic point of the book: with the Internet and 24-7 television news seems to happen faster and people make decisions more quicker than may be wise to do.

What changed my plans was the news (story here, seeded here that a television program officially disinvited the journalists from appearing on a program, citing the book as the reason for this change.

For the record a request, made via email on Wednesday, from a response from KRON were not returned.

But it's the second irony that intrigued me: As with the station, apparently, I had some objections to portions of the book. This made it a difficult interview (you'll see why in the last part where I got way more preachy than usual and was duly taken to task and corrected for it)

But whereas I thought the differences of opinion between those two journalists and I made the interview more important this television station took a truly antiquated option by just killing the interview. For while I may disagree with the book authors about the value, quality and ethics of blogs in general I don't think any of us would suggest teh solution to a difference of opinion is to simply kill a project or interview. I haven't heard such outdated thinking from a media source since the New York Times failed experiment with paid subscription called TimesSelect.

Enough ranting, here's what the authors had to say.

Scott: In your own words, what happened? When were you invited to speak and for what purpose? To talk about the books or other issues?

Charles: We were invited on the show because the host said she had read the book and liked it very much and wanted to interview us. We were invited probably more than a month ago, I think. We were invited to talk about our book.

When and how did you learn you had been disinvited?

I got a call left on my voicemail this past weekend from the host. She apologized but said there had been a format change and she would not be doing interviews so couldn't have us on as planned.

It was only when we learned of the email sent from the KRON TV news director to our publicist that we actually discovered the real reason for being booted from the program...as he said in his email...he didn't want a discussion on his air that was critical about the television news business.

Scott: So what do you make of KRON not having you on?

Charles: What do I make of KRON not having us on? Well, I think the news director there sort of answered that question for us...He was pretty clear, I thought, about why he elected to banish us from the interview show this Saturday (though, as we've said, the station did, after the @!$%# hit the fan, offer to have one of its news producers interview us, which we declined). I think it is pretty pathetic, really. Make one wonder whatever that station doesn't air??

What, if anything, do you plan to do about it?

What do I plan on doing about it? Nothing really. Nothing I can do except talk and write about the incident to better inform the public how certain decisions are made that determine what they can and can't watch on some television news programs.

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