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ABC News Intern Update

By Eric McErlain
It looks as if ABC News is going to air the first part of its "Loose Nukes on Main Street" story this evening on today's edition of ABC World News Tonight. As we've mentioned before, what we've seen so far doesn't lend us a whole lot of confidence that we're going to see anything but a well-packaged piece of sensationalism -- click here to see exactly what I'm talking about.

Come back later this evening after I've had a chance to view the report.

UPDATE: ABC News just aired a report on World News Tonight that served as more of an overview for the series, and didn't share too many details. Click here for the text version of the story that aired tonight. Click here for the home page for the series at ABC News.com. Finally, click here to see photos of the ABC News interns who took part in the piece of the investigation that dealt with the test reactors. To review, their actions in pursuit of the story weren't exactly the most professional. Here's what Earl Holland of Ohio State University told Inside NEC about his experiences with an intern that tried to catch Holland trying to contradict himself during a followup interview:
But at one point during the conversation, he said he told her that her question had been answered by the reactor staff during her June 22 visit. "There was a pregnant pause for about 15 or 20 seconds" before she acknowledged that she had been at the site, he said.

Holland said he responded, "You were wearing a denim skirt and a red top and you have dark brown hair, and you said this, and you said that, and here's the license number of your car."
It doesn't sound to me like these "undercover" reporters actually passed unnoticed. We'll have more later in the week as the reports are issued.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Our friend Stewart Peterson has some other thoughts.

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Comments

Anonymous said…
Wow. Lessee, physicists, engineers, and their staff vs "journalists". Wonder which set posseses more intelligence. Oops, forgot, the "journalists" have a wide open "stuck on stupid" conduit.
October 13, 2005 at 5:11 PM
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