'I Don't Give A Fuck Who You Are, I'm A Fucking TV Reporter.'

Those were the words of Philadelphia anchorwoman Alycia Lane, said to an undercover New York cop just before the Emmy award-winning CBS3 anchor reportedly punched her in the face.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer after the Daily News broke the story:

CBS3 anchor Alycia Lane was arrested early yesterday after allegedly punching a
plainclothes female New York City police officer in the face around 2 a.m. in
Manhattan.

Lane, 35, was charged with assault. New York Police Sgt. Carlos
Nieves said Lane's attack left the officer bloody and lacerated.

Smith said that Lane was "accosted" by "several" plainclothes police officers as she was photographing an "altercation" between an individual in her party and the plainclothes officers at the corner of West 17th Street and Ninth Avenue.

But an amusing video on Comcast.net (via CelebTV.com) really brought home the point of this tale:

"Rule number one: as an on-air personality, you can never make yourself the story."

Oh, and one more thing: Don't punch people on the street, either.

Media reports seem to play up the lack of celebrities in Philadelphia as the reason this story got so much air, but I'm thinking it was because of an incredible lack of judgment -- not just with the punch, of course, but for daring to justify an action unrelated to the job by stating (triumphantly, at that) that "I'm a reporter."

The whole thing just makes me cringe. Oh, and in case you were wondering -- yes, she was dropped off the air. It remains to be seen where she'll end up next.

Tasting The Grass On The Other Side At CBS

Happy Thursday, everyone.

I was fortunate to have sat in on last night's live broadcast of the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, and I was stunned.

Why? Well, sometimes we print people forget about what goes on on the other side of the glass. And without fawning over broadcast people -- or saying the obvious, as in they work hard -- I'd like to say that I learned a lot in those 22 minutes.

For starters, we print people often forget about the time element. Sitting in the control room, I watched an orchestration -- choreography, really -- of events through the broadcast. Wires in ears at all times, things always changing last minute, keeping cool on camera. There's really no "hanging up the phone."

Man, it's easy to ignore everything from the newsroom, isn't it?

There's no grand lesson here besides this: journalists should every so often check out what their fellow reporters/producers do. Print journalists should stop by the TV studio during a live broadcast, TV producers should stop by the newsroom (at close!), both should stop by the radio booth and radio guys should see what the other two do.

It sounds simple, but we get wrapped up in what we do and we forget that we really are one family with seriously different styles. We're all in this together -- so why should we only see each other on Romenesko?

Just a thought.

If There Used To Be A 'Below The Belt' In Political Journalism, People Must Have Worn Belts Around Their Ankles

"There used to be a line between 'reportable' and 'keep this out of the papers,' but in recent years it's gotten rubbed out."

Is it just me, or does this strike you as naive?

These are the words of Matthew Felling, extracted from the CBS News blog. According to Felling, the media covers politicians much like the way celebrities like Lindsay Lohan are covered: Ruthlessly and nasty. He writes:

"There's no easy way to say this to candidates and their campaign staffs but to say it," Felling writes. "Put down your dog-eared copies of "The Boys on the Bus" and make The Smoking Gun your homepage.

"Media Darwinism is cruel."

Now I don't know about you, but political journalism has never been touch football. Often, when interests (or facts) contradict, it turns into a full-contact sport.

In this case, Felling is looking at the 2008 race, and he sees journalists ripping the candidates up for their personal lives. But he must remember that the lives of politicians have always been at the same level of scrutiny, and that in the Information Age, the political journalist may have more to write about because we know more about the candidate. As National Journal writer Carl Cannon writes, "YouTube, the blogs, and an unfettered cable culture did not exist in 1988 and 1992, the years that the privacy barriers came tumbling down. They do now."

Are the current candidates a crazier crop than ever before? No. We just aren't in the dark about it like we used to be. So it seems to me that political journalism is doing what it always has been -- covering politicians the way Us Weekly covers Lohan.

What is true is that political journalism goes through cycles, much in line with the state of worldy affairs at that time. An old post on Jay Rosen's PressThink blog notes the change over the last decade: "[10 years ago] there was a vacuum in journalism where political argument and imagination should be. Now there are signs that this absence of thought is ending."

So from time to time, political journalists get a little self-conscious. On the whole, however, they've been doing what they've always done.

Political journalism in America has gone on since (very nearly) Day One -- and I'm fairly sure George Washington was the Barack Obama -- or the David Beckham -- of his day. That is to say that celebrity and politics go hand in hand, and it would be impossible to state that the current way politicians are reported suddenly is without restraints that used to exist.

Have we forgotten about yellow journalism? Surely, such writing was sensational and at the time, very much "below the belt." But Felling seems to argue that we no longer charge such writing or coverage as out-of-bounds.

That, I suspect, may be because the Internet has come rushing into play -- and the average citizen journalist tends to be a bit more acerbic than the MSM reporter, at least directly.

Felling does note the influence of interest groups and YouTube and blogs on the voice of a political candidate. But he uses little proof to show that things have really changed. In one example, he mentions an Albequerque reporter who asked Bill Richardson if he had "a bimbo problem." Fifty, one hundred, two hundred years ago, that same question would have been asked by a reporter. People (and thus, reporters) are just as rough and forward and without decorum as they always have been. But in this age, there's the possibility that someone was able to record it, post it up on the web, and actually prove beyond an oral retelling that it actually happened.

So in terms of cruelty, political reporting seems to have always been the same. Likewise for political reporters. The difference this time is that we got it on tape. Scandal!

In his own words, "as a nostalgic media mind, I like living in the old days as much as anyone, but they're gone like the black and white of 'Pleasantville.' " I think, in this case, Felling undermines his own argument. He himself is looking back with rose-tinted glasses -- as he puts it, "recollect[ing] and romanticiz[ing] the past."

No Matter The Numbers, Journalists Need To Be Spartans

A recent article by Michael Schudson and Tony Dokoupil in the Columbia Journalism Review gave some new perspective to the current wave of "cost-cutting, job-eliminating, and bureau-closing" that is apparently indicative that journalism is believed to be an industry in crisis.

But judging by all the j-school nonsense that's locking up the MediaBistro forums and TheGradCafe.com, as well as the immense proliferation of independent writing, I think journalism is doing better than ever - and journalists should stop worrying about numbers and start worrying about quality. Consider this approach: journalists need to fight like they are Spartans in the movie, "300."

Schudson and Dokoupil write:
At a glance, the news is indeed bad. A systematic, national survey of journalists, conducted by a team of Indiana University scholars led by David H. Weaver, shows that the total number of print and broadcast journalists fell from an estimated 122,000 to 116,000 between 1992 and 2002. That’s a real drop in journalists per 100,000 people from forty-eight to forty, with radio and daily newspapers accounting for the greatest losses. Few can doubt that the pace of decline has quickened over the past several years. But take a longer view and the trend is significant growth. Adjusting for U.S. population growth, journalism’s flock has expanded 20 percent over three decades, comparing the 2002 figure to Weaver’s previous counts in 1992 and 1982–3, and a 1971 survey by the sociologist John Johnstone. (Absolute growth was 67 percent—from 70,000 journalists in 1971 to 116,000 in 2002.)

With all of the overhaul going on all over the industry - newspapers tightening their flabby printed guts (and newsrooms), new skyscrapers being erected, tons of new online content in the form of blogs, slideshows, podcasts and more - how is journalism stagnant?

Apparently, online-only outlets and freelancing aren't a part of these numbers, and I'd say that renders this survey useless. In this age, it's all about writing on your own. Hell, even Seventeen's former editor-in-chief Atoosa Rubenstein felt the independent fire and jumped the MSM ship, and she's apparently happier than ever.

OK, so we've established quite unscientifically that journalism is on the up-and-up instead of heading to a slump (it's about as reliable as that survey was, anyway. Our CJR authors would agree: "Lowrey’s essay is a reminder that estimating the total number of journalists has become as much a matter of philosophical argument as of careful methodology").

Journalists shouldn't be worried about how many are in their ranks. They should be worried about their reputation. Like Spartans.

For example, just this week, CBS News was caught with its head in the sand after a producer plagiarized the Wall Street Journal, arguably the most read paper in the nation. The incredible stupidity of plagiarism on that level - for a bit for Katie Couric - is so unbelieveable that even I'm worrying about how I'll be perceived when I say, "I'm a journalist."

So when University of Alabama professor Wilson Lowrey says the competition between blogs and journalists - which I extrapolate to mean independent journalists and MSM - "could benefit audiences and society" by pressuring each to be more accurate and filling empty information niches, I say great.

If we write (and fight) better, maybe there is hope after all. Then I'll be proud to say I'm a Spartan. Er, a journalist.