[philk]

It's times like this that I wish there was more scrutiny of the media itself. We've got a reporter, Soledad O'Brien, who is cynically exploiting an issue so she can get a good story and she doesn't have to answer questions about her behavior because she's got the bigger megaphone.

[staunch]

People read something on CNN or NYTimes and think it must actually be true. The assumption is that stories are thoroughly fact checked and are free from any significant bias.

Once you've seen firsthand just how biased and intentionally misleading they can be you will see how fundamentally flawed their model is.

You shouldn't trust what Soledad O'Brien says just because she happens to work at CNN. Even the best of these organizations don't do enough to maintain the standards that would be necessary for you to trust everyone who works for them.

Hopefully in the future journalists will live and die by their own reputations, and not get to hide behind the power of "trusted" brands. The system as it is causes great harm to individuals, companies, and the world at large.

Just look at what certain people were able to do by leveraging the power of trusted news sources in the lead up to the the Iraq war. A few corrupt individuals were able to abuse the public's trust to push an agenda based on lies.

On a much smaller scale this is what Soledad O'Brien is doing to Arrington. She had an angle for a story and she did what was necessary to cast him as the bad guy. It's an unfair abuse of power and trust -- power and trust that she clearly doesn't deserve.

[reduxredacted]

I agree completely and as a result I generally don't trust any news source that pretends to be objective (whatever that means in an environment where personal bias meets advertising revenue and the end-product is at least partly entertainment).

A whole lot of people jumped all over Arrington when he was (and still is) covering tech startups that he is invested in. It never bothered me, he was up front with his disclosures and although he tried to remain objective and even took several companies he invested in to task, having a reasonably clear statement of bias was helpful.

I prefer to read and consume opinion pieces over hard news because hard news reads more like opinion pieces without the author's bias being disclosed or at least well known (neither Limbaugh nor Olberman include disclosures, but neither have to go out of their way to make their political bias known).

Outside of politics and race, there's a lot of tech writers who see Apple as the company that can do no wrong and Microsoft as the company that can do no good. Earlier this year I was looking for an objective, terse, comparison on Relational Databases vs NoSQL in the tech press (yes, I know, not the best source for such things). I found it more useful to read from the diehards. They both knew the strengths of their design and the inherent weaknesses in their perceived competition. Take out the spitting and grumbling and you generally get a good picture when sent through the known bias filter of the author.

[zby]

Story is everything for the media. I used to trust BBC until their subsidiary did a documentary on migrant workers that featured myself. Not that it was something vicious like the thing CNN did to Arrington - but it was so clearly manipulated to fit what they decided to make the story - that it makes me laugh. Things like:

1. For maybe 6 hours they spent in our flat my daughter cried maybe a minute or two - but they put it as one of the first scenes to set the emotional tone of the story.

2. When I say "There used to be lots of job adverts in this newspaper - now there is so few of them, everything is in the Internet" they cut it to "There used to be lots of job adverts in this newspaper - now there is so few of them."

[Alex3917]

At the end of the day, much of the blame for racism and inequality in the US lies with those who work for or subscribe to advertiser-supported media. Both Arrington and Soledad O'brien are part of the problem.

[gaoshan]

To be fair, if you look at Soledad O'Brien's track record it is heavy with race focused coverage. It's her bailiwick and if I were Michael Arrington I would have at least been alert to this fact. If a national level reporter with a reputation for covering race related issues comes to you and wants to discuss business incubators you can bet race will be part of, or in fact all of, the topic. Arrington should know better, given his own background. I don't see her as cynically exploiting the issue, I see her as cynically exploiting Michael Arrington.

The issue at hand is a real one... the argument is how to deal with it. Personally, I think Arrington's arguments are good ones. I tend to agree with him on the overall situation and hope that this incident will result in a nudge in the right direction, with regards to how race in tech should be discussed.

[kenjackson]

The problem I have is that Arrington said what he said, period. And unless this was edited "Daily Show" style, there's not much way around it.

You can say Soledad ambushed him, but it frankly wasn't that hard of a question. And Arrington should really be down on whoever set up the interview if they didn't forward him the info, not Soledad. That second email clearly states that it will be part of "Black in America".

In theory I guess Soledad could have sent them a list of questions of ahead of time -- but there's no guarantee Mike would have got them. And that's typically not how these interviews are done. She could have said we won't air that answer, but frankly it's a pretty damned telling answer. And it's an answer that I have trouble believing most people would have answered so poorly.