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Maryland Journalism Professor Faults ABC News and "Loose Nukes"

By Eric McErlain
The bad reviews keep coming for "Loose Nukes" and ABC News. Here's what a journalism professor from the University of Maryland had to tell their campus paper, The Diamondback:
University journalism professor Chris Hanson viewed the report yesterday and discussed it with his graduate journalism ethics class.

He said he would not have trusted reporters with a graduate student’s level of experience to gather the footage by themselves, and that the network should ideally have sent a nuclear expert and news producer to the reactor sites with the students.

“I think they should have had the experts on security do more than just look at the tape,” Hanson said. “I’d like to feel more comfortable that the information was accurate ... You don’t know whether the footage shows what they say it shows. I think the problem is more of a general one — do we know the researchers know enough?”
Sounds a lot like the sort of points we've been making for more than a few weeks now.

POSTSCRIPT: Later in the article, the author, Maryland student Kate Campbell, had an interesting exchange with Jeffrey Schneider, Vice President of Public Relations at ABC:
Jacques Gansler, vice president for research at this university, said the report failed to highlight the multi-layered security system the school employs to protect the reactor, including several locked and alarmed doors, thick concrete and a surveillance camera monitored constantly by University Police.

When asked why the ABC report did not mention Maryland’s security measures, Schneider said, “It seems you’ve had a lot of time to talk to a lot of people who have a vested interest in this.”
I bet. Too bad ABC News didn't bother to give those people a real say in their report.

For other stories from The Diamondback, click here and here. Thanks to Joseph Talnagi from Ohio State for a pointer to the info.

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Comments

Solomon2 said…
I bet that's the same Jacques Gansler who used to be Undersecretary of Defense for Research at the Pentagon. He authored the book "The Defense Industry" in the early 80s. Do we put our trust in him, or in ABC?
October 20, 2005 at 9:57 AM
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