Salon Decries Ambush Video Journalism – Except When Their Reporter Does It

Gabriel Winant at Salon.com has a high-minded and sober criticism of Bill O’Reilly’s “Ambush Video” of Al Gore.  Winant decries this kind of “gotcha” journalism as mis-leading and exploitative:

O’Reilly, as Salon has pointed out before, is fond of the ambush interview. It’s an unfair gimmick to begin with, and the O’Reilly Factor has always relied on that inherent unbalanced quality to produce some incredibly misleading and exploitative footage. Yesterday, the Factor showed footage of its ambush specialist, the impossibly smug producer Jesse Watters, badgering Al Gore before a lecture at Duke University.

Nice to see Salon.com take a such a stalwart stance on this kind of thing.  To think, a punk kid with a camera tracking down and following a public figure to try to get them to say something damaging on video.  Oh wait, isn’t that exactly what Editor-in-chief Joan Walsh of Salon.com gleefully celebrated in February after her reporter, Mike Madden, used the same tactic on Big Journalism publisher Andrew Breitbart?  The title of her article:  ”Breitbart’s Breakdown: a Video Tour.”

Mr. Winant should probably run these things by Ms. Walsh before posting them, otherwise Salon.com might appear to have a double-standard when it comes to this sort of thing.

Read the rest here.