Marty Griffin... why does KDKA keep him?
I was very disturbed by City Paper's front page article this week, "Crisis of Faith," in which the slipshod, sensationalist reporting of Marty Griffin drove a local pastor to suicide. A year ago, when I was a films chair at CMU, KDKA was contacted by an upset student over an explicit film we were planning to show. Marty Griffin was given the story, and he interviewed two misinformed students and broadcast an inaccurate piece about "the community outrage towards the university." The night of the showing he made a second report where he "quoted" us with falsified statements. In response to the media exposure, the activities board and the student senate agreed to hold a forum to gauge the larger campus community's attitude towards showing pornographic films, and Marty came back to campus a third time, but we denied him access. Later that evening, while at Mad Mex with some friends, we spied his news report on the overhead tv screen: a falsified account of the forum, reported over unrelated b-roll that reiterated his original inaccurate premise.
Dugan's story is a horrifying extension of the same sleazy practices, carried to the worst-possible conclusion. At the time, we researched Griffin, and discovered the conditions of him losing his job in Dallas, and I'm glad that Meinzer included it in her article. With all teh worthwhile candidates for television journalism working tirelessly, how does a worthless yellow journalist like Griffin stay on the air?
Dugan's story is a horrifying extension of the same sleazy practices, carried to the worst-possible conclusion. At the time, we researched Griffin, and discovered the conditions of him losing his job in Dallas, and I'm glad that Meinzer included it in her article. With all teh worthwhile candidates for television journalism working tirelessly, how does a worthless yellow journalist like Griffin stay on the air?