CNN uses personal journal of slain Ambassador as source material

State Department is furious that CNN used the personal journal of slain Libyan Ambassador Christopher Stevens as the basis of several on-air reports in the past week. Apparently, the journal was found in the rubble and was given to a CNN producer.

Fair play?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/22/cnn-christopher-stevens-journal-state-dept-response_n_1906609.html

 

Fair play. Poor taste, unless the family gives permission.

 

If it was Fox doing this, we'd be up in arms. CNN deserves the same kind of heat.
Signed
A Blue Dot in a Red State

 

Fox would -- should? could? I don't know, I don't watch it -- be asking why someone was able to find the journal in the ransacked compound days after the event. Didn't we have any "friends" on the ground who could go through it and sanitize the place?

 

Given that it was removed from the site of the attack doesn't this qualify as tampering with a crime scene?

And the fact we didn't lock down the compound is yet more evidence of the shitshow that is the State Department's handling of diplomatic security.

 

Tampering with a crime scene? What is this, CSI Libya?

 

I'd say fair game. There are obviously things in there the State Dept./Obama Admin. didn't want the public to know. It doesn't seem like what CNN reported was a threat to national security. I don't see that a law was broken. The U.S. justice system can't apply evidence tampering laws to the site of violence on foreign land. From what I've seen, CNN didn't report any salacious details of the guy's personal life. CNN is simply reporting something that makes the Obama Admin uncomfortable: There were signs beforehand.

Fair game, and in fact good reporting.

 

Embassy properties are considered the legal domain of the nation in question.

 

Unless its intensely personal information that the public doesn't need to know and would really just be gawking, I say fair game/good reporting. And that doesn't seem to be the case here.

 

On the surface, I call it fair game, but I don't see the point in going with it, unless there was something huge that came out of it (also didn't see the coverage), especially since the family was against it. I know this business is about competition, but there is still a line of decency when working on that stories that involve deaths.

 

This is my feeling on it. It's fair, if in poor taste, but...why? I can't tell from their reporting how this enhanced it, over the less dead-guy's-diary sources available. If this had contained truly revelatory information, great, but it feels like "WE FOUND A DEAD MAN'S JOURNAL IN SOME RUBBLE, THIS ALONE IS BRILLIANT JOURNALISM!!!!111111ONEONEELEVEN"

Having an exclusive "source," in and of itself, doesn't make a story better, but that's the attitude that seems prevailing right now, beyond even this.