News Anchors Salute Mayor Daley on his Retirement

Bad move?

 

He's retiring i.e. no longer going to be in office. I don't see a problem with saying thanks when a guy is retiring and will no longer be a political figure you cover.

 

Damn, Walter Jacobson is STILL on the air in Chicago? He's got to be closing in on 40 years.

 

True. But the perception may be that because they liked him and wished him well, perhaps they wished him well enough during his tenure that anything that can be construed as negative wasn't reported.

 

Bill and Walter, 6 p.m., THE Channel 2 News. (complete with the old theme music)

 

That's true but in cases like this I like the people think what they want. I know (or they know) that the job was done the right way. If people want to look in retrospect and tear your work apart then let them. What you did when you did it is what matters.

 

Correct. But if you reported a story completely, 100 percent factually true, and 100 other people deride that story as being false, what you did when you did it is not what matters. You have a reputation for accuracy at stake that's been sullied.

 

Howard Kurtz knocked these guys for doing this ad on his CNN show this morning.

 

To be honest, to me, it comes across as blatant brown-nosing. And really, Daley has a rep for tightly controlling media access(like many, many other pols.) Why praise some guy who has made your job a hassle for the last two decades?

 

Thank you.

I'm always amazed how often things that are clearly wrong are indulged by some people here.

I'd expect people in the industry to be more zealous in criticizing stuff like this.

 

You might be surprised at how much of it goes on. The Lowell (Mass.) Sun did a special section several years ago as a tribute to Rep. Marty Meehan upon his 50th birthday. Swear to God (link to Romenesko below). It wasn't so much ideologically driven (Meehan's a Democrat; the Sun's pretty conservative) as it was the Sun's shameless hucksterism for the city of Lowell and the forces, public and private, trying to boost its profile.

The whole thing was nauseating.

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/romenesko/79544/lowell-sun-to-put-out-special-section-for-pols-50th-birthday/

 

Cynical side of me wants to say "Eh, it's television. Pretty hard to worry about your credibility when the next story is 'The Jersey Shore cast is going to Italy!' or 'Stay tuned for our special report: How clean is that bus seat?'"

But, no way that should have ever hit the airwaves. Just another ding in an already dissolving rep.