According to a report from Bay Area media blogger Rich Lieberman, KTVU executives offered “the world” to CNN senior correspondent Sara Sidner to try to get her to return to KTVU, but she ultimately passed them up and is remaining at CNN.
Sidner is based out of CNN’s Los Angeles bureau and occasionally fills in on the Los Angeles edition of CNN Newsroom that airs on CNN International and is occasionally simulcast on CNN Domestic.
Can you tell who the real Michaela Pereira is?
Fellow CNN Los Angeles-based correspondents Sara Sidner and Stephanie Elam dressed up as the HLN anchor for Halloween.
Plenty of Halloween fun going around the HLN bureaus.
(H/t Brian Stelter)
Riots and protests are usually newsworthy events. They are demonstrations of democracy and free speech and the visuals are made for television. If you were to try to listen to coverage of protests, it may be fine because of reporters’ descriptions, but the listener loses out. They are like high speed chases, television news is better handled to cover these events.
Now oftentimes if there is a group protesting, there is another group opposing the protesters. Usually, this is the police. Now in the chaos of sometimes unruly protests and the resulting crowd control methods, it is relatively common for journalists to get hit by said crowd control measures. Other times, the media is attacked by protesters, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.
However, this puts journalists into a dangerous predicament, they become part of the story. Then the question becomes how does one cover the event? Do viewers watch it happen and then it is not spoken of again? Or is the tape shown over and over again? What happens should vary on the situation. Obviously anything involving blood or serious injuries should be blanked out with the ten second delay.
It seems like the policy today is to frequently bring up the times when reporters get injured. While this invites criticism, some of the reasoning is understandable. Reporters, especially more senior ones, are seen as members of the family and familiar. Also, a frequent reaction to protests as seem on tv is “that couldn’t happen to me or my loved ones.” However seeing the reporters injured makes it come alive. This is especially so since the public is used to journalists being in dangerous places like war zones and coming back with a paper cut at best. There is something about a journalist on tv getting hit that hits closer to home than random strangers on the street.
This has been playing out in Ferguson as the media returned to chronicle the unrest. CNN’s Sara Sidner was hit by a rock while covering the protests. However, Sidner set the example for how to handle becoming part of the story, don’t feed the fire. Dare I say, she won by not playing the game.
Tyler is an employee at TKNN.info, helping to run @TKNNPolJungle. The views expressed are not necessarily held by his employer.
CNN’s Sara Sidner has been covering Ferguson, on and off, for some time now. Up until early summer, she was a senior international correspondent who eventually became a CNN Domestic correspondent, based in Los Angeles.
Today, she made quite the analysis, that, as the Erik Wemple Blog pointed out, will likely be replayed repeatedly on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show:
[H]ost Jake Tapper chatted with correspondent Sara Sidner, who was on the ground outside of the Ferguson police station. The question for Sidner was whether there had been “any movement” by protesters or law enforcement in this critical spot. In a moment that has a good shot of getting repeated on the “Daily Show,” Sidner said yes, there had been some movement: “These gentlemen were not out here a few minutes ago,” Sidner said. “They now are out here.” The camera panned to show three people. At right is how it looked.
