This is why we can’t have nice things.

To do something that directly feeds in to that threat to your own employment–and the employment of your co-workers–ain’t exactly playing with the team.

That’s funny.  I thought the “team” was the American people?  Silly me.

(This part below isn’t to you, okalokee)

Man, this thread was getting crazy. The dude(s) with the sockpuppets were forgetting which posts to answer to and began answering for their other sockpuppets by mistake with the wrong sockpuppets. You trolls are losing your touch.

And, I hate to break it to you, but the more rabid you guys get… the more we know OWS is working. Thank you for your inspiration and thank you for your unwitting efforts to keep more and more Americans dedicated to strengthening the OWS movement. Tony Baloney would be proud and I’m sure he would be thrilled to know I’m dedicating this video link in his name.

Ms Curran does not seem to have set out to make herself “part of the story,” but her well-written protest sign *became* a story. Pitching a take on that story to The Takeaway seems not only reasonable, but responsible. Imagine that a competing show, like MarketPlace, ran with her story and she *hadn’t* pitched it to The Takeaway?

So really The Takeaway ends up sounding not like Howard Stern but more like boring morning pablum. No reason for me to listen to it anyway.

I also see a lot of people here with the argument that the conservative media (Fox) shows bias and lack of integrity, so we should too.

Blatant false argument. No one is saying that at ALL.

Fox News purports to be fair and balanced and is NOT.  Their reporting is an ongoing series of half-truths and outright lies.

No one is saying this woman should report half-truth and lies.  AT ALL.  If anything, we want more HONESTY.  If this woman is reporting dishonestly, then let us know… thanks.

Vast difference there from mimicking Fox News who is the epitome of dishonesty.

This, however, doesn’t really bother me. It seems pretty clear. Murder is bad. Cheating is bad. Stealing is bad. Lieing is generally bad… particularly when it’s to clients with whom you are ethically obligated to not lie to under any circumstances. Why is it bad to say, even as a journalist, that lieing and stealing is wrong? If a democrat or republican lies, it’s wrong. If a banker cheats, lies, and steals from his clients, it’s wrong. I don’t really see much of a bias there. And, who out there will actually tell me, with a straight face, that there’s any doubt that this institutionally backed fraud did not actually happen?

I’m a pretty conservative guy, fiscally, but there’s no way to spin this any other way than there are an aweful lot of people who need to go to jail for what they knowingly and willingly did.

Who cares that this lady stated the obvious?

I wholeheartedly support the OWS movement, and if I was her boss, I would’ve fired her too. Pitching a story where you are the subject at a political rally? Honestly she must’ve been out of her mind to think that would fly. Unless you are suggesting that NPR become the liberal version of Fox News, I don’t know how you could get behind such a thing.

You don’t understand, they are actually more like FOX “News” because they fired her.

Fox News repeatedly champions itself as fair and balanced, but they purposefully and dishonestly fail at that job miserably.  They have plenty of people that work for Fox News that blatantly call themselves journalists, but they are also blatant liars.  It’s obvious the Fox News “journalists” true agenda is to help support and prop up the pundits through “selective”, dishonest reporting.

To honestly report on yourself while everyone knows your potential bias.. is, well… HONEST.

If NPR wants to be more like Fox News, then they should stay on course and continue to fire honest people.  If NPR wants to be less like Fox News, they should simply be more open, transparent and honest.  If NPR found that she was being dishonest in her reporting then that’s one thing, but this is quite another.

And if they want to stay journalists, they’ll keep those opinions to themselves. We know unconscious bias probably comes through anyway in subtle ways.  An openly biased and opinionated journalist cannot be relied upon to tell the unvarnished truth. Period

At first I thought you were being sarcastic, but then I slowly realized the sad, unvarnished truth… some of you just have totally different mindsets that desire to live in an impractical, unrealistic world.

I would much rather read news reports from honest and open journalists than from those journalists that attempt to conceal their honest opinions at all costs.

I will allow my own critical thinking skills and ability to cross-check facts to be my judge of whether they are honestly reporting on stories or not.

As a matter of fact, I think it’s much more honest and ethical to be upfront about your opinions no matter who you are in this world; especially if you are a journalist or other public figure.

Keep playing charades all you want… reality is still knocking.

Let’s create a hypothetical scenario: a popular movement known as *teabaggers* have been occupying the streets of *DC* for weeks, protesting the powers that be on *K street*, when a *Fox News* reporter sharing their opinions joins their ranks to protest, is photographed as such, then tries to pitch themselves as a subject of a story relaying the opinions of the occupying group.

Now that we’ve removed OWS from the picture, would you defend the Fox reporter’s journalistic integrity in producing a piece on the topic of teabagger protests after having participated with a particular bias? That’s the crux. Perhaps firing Curran was too harsh, but I would certainly question her judgement as the employer. If your reply is that “journalistic integrity died a long time ago and is no longer an expectation”, than the only end game I see in this cynical world is that we can no longer trust anyone at anytime. There is a difference between honest attempts toward objectivity and complete subjectivity.

The picture was taken and spread virally across the internet and became news. She pitched an idea to talk about what was already news every where else. Should the station have just pretended there were not people all over the place talking about this exact same thing?

a) She was not working for NPR

b) No one has indicated the specific way in which this code of ethics was violated (beyond your admonition to “read it more clearly,” a common Internet dodge by those who hope no one will check). Perhaps you could assist me in reading more clearly by quoting the section of NPR’s ethics code that Curran violated.

c) According to NPR’s code of ethics (which obviously weren’t applied here), the correct response would have been to kill the story.

What is an ethical violation is in participating in something like a protest, and then attempting to run a story about yourself and your involvement in it.  That’s like… a big deal.

Yeah, it’s really honest reporting.  We certainly can’t have that in this day and age.

So it’s okay to have a bias as long as you publicly pretend that you do not?

Yes, that’s what most of her detractors here are basically saying.

Many are ridiculous and archaic at best…. or here with (ironically) dishonest, ulterior motives with anti-OWS agendas at worst.

Further, no one has alleged that Curran was biased in her news reporting. She merely pitched a story in which she herself was a character, which, as many commenters have demonstrated, is quite common under a variety of circumstances. 

But in any case, the story she pitched was never undertaken, and it appears that you have no other materials by which to judge Ms. Curran’s impartiality or lack thereof.

Laugh out loud over that one.  Well said.

The same gold standard that produced Judith Miller? The same gold standard that buries OWS news in the back pages? The same gold standard that midwifed the Iraq War? I do not think that word means what you think it means. And please tell all of this to the ghost of Jacob Riis. We need fiery muckraker activists, not professional stenographers for the wealthy power elite.

Amen.  ….and a double-backflip, Amen.