It means that the journalists are not doing their job of informing us of news and are instead opining and pushing their opinions on us instead of reporting the news as it actually happened.
That's exactly what happened with CNN; a CNN correspondent admitted that he staged a story:
The steamy e-mails that landed a CNN reporter in the news and out of a job detailed more than his adulterous affair - they revealed that the Africa correspondent apparently admitted paying militiamen to help him stage a story, according to several sources.What that last part shows is that journalists are not above paying off sources to lie and fabricate news. And unless we find out about such fabrications at a later date, there's no way for the public to know that such fabrications occurred. The journalists and the layers of editorial review did not uncover the fabrications - it took a completely unrelated incident to expose the fabrications.
For months, Jeff Koinange had been dogged by allegations that in February, he paid off gunmen to put on a show for a story about Nigerian resistance.
The accusations from Nigerian government officials were so strong that CNN gave a denial during a February broadcast.
"CNN did not pay for or stage any part of the report," anchor John Roberts said. "CNN does not pay for interviews."
But a Swiss author - in an e-mail to Koinange's boss, CNN Worldwide President Jim Walton - details a months-long romance with Koinange, and quotes the correspondent as saying he traded cash for the story.
"Of course I had to pay certain people to get the story," Koinange says, according to the e-mail.
Now, there will be those who say that journalists regularly pay off sources for news stories, but the problem is that this story was sexed up to make it more of a story than it actually was.
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