Skip to main content

Maryland Journalism Professor Faults ABC News and "Loose Nukes"

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.

Technorati tags: , , , ,

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?

Popular posts from this blog

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu

Why Ex-Im Bank Board Nominations Will Turn the Page on a Dysfunctional Chapter in Washington

In our present era of political discord, could Washington agree to support an agency that creates thousands of American jobs by enabling U.S. companies of all sizes to compete in foreign markets? What if that agency generated nearly billions of dollars more in revenue than the cost of its operations and returned that money – $7 billion over the past two decades – to U.S. taxpayers? In fact, that agency, the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank), was reauthorized by a large majority of Congress in 2015. To be sure, the matter was not without controversy. A bipartisan House coalition resorted to a rarely-used parliamentary maneuver in order to force a vote. But when Congress voted, Ex-Im Bank won a supermajority in the House and a large majority in the Senate. For almost two years, however, Ex-Im Bank has been unable to function fully because a single Senate committee chairman prevented the confirmation of nominees to its Board of Directors. Without a quorum

NEI Praises Connecticut Action in Support of Nuclear Energy

Earlier this week, Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed SB-1501 into law, legislation that puts nuclear energy on an equal footing with other non-emitting sources of energy in the state’s electricity marketplace. “Gov. Malloy and the state legislature deserve praise for their decision to support Dominion’s Millstone Power Station and the 1,500 Connecticut residents who work there," said NEI President and CEO Maria Korsnick. "By opening the door to Millstone having equal access to auctions open to other non-emitting sources of electricity, the state will help preserve $1.5 billion in economic activity, grid resiliency and reliability, and clean air that all residents of the state can enjoy," Korsnick said. Millstone Power Station Korsnick continued, "Connecticut is the third state to re-balance its electricity marketplace, joining New York and Illinois, which took their own legislative paths to preserving nuclear power plants in 2016. Now attention should