Michael, thou doth protest too much. You were teaching them how to walk up to influential people and make their acquaintance. Safer shorthanded that to "handshaking and eye contact" to make it simpler (and yes, to play into the geek stereotype). Welcome to television. If you're that thin-skinned, it's probably a medium you should stay away from.

"doth protest too much"

Funny exactly the thought that came to my mind as well.

And then again the linkbait headline is without merit: "Watch Morley Safer Lie". We don't know who was behind this (even if you want to consider it a lie). Morly has input but I'm not aware that he (and not the producers and editors) make the determination of what makes it "in the can" on a report like this.

I have an experience with 60 minutes that similarly gave me concern about the integrity of their reporting. I was born and raised in Las Vegas. When I was a teenager, 60 minutes did a report the message of which was something along the lines of "look at the poor youth of Las Vegas and how they are the victims of this grown up town with its neglectful gambling parents and are spending their time around casinos, etc. etc." Fine - for some reason people feel free to say rude things to people from Vegas about Vegas. Me and many I know have routinely heard things like, "I hate Vegas" and "How awful for you" when we say we're from there. The problem with the 60 minutes spot was that they did things like show an establishing shot of the strip and then cut to a bunch of teenagers hanging out in front of the Red Rock movie theaters that's many miles from the strip, but which had a blinking marquee that might look like something on the strip. It clearly was meant to appear like the kids were handing out on the strip. At the theater, they interviewed a girl I happened to know and I can't help but think that they cherry-picked her. She was a goth chick - very smart and loved to be odd and controversial. She said all kinds of things about her neglectful mother and other things that fed into their premise. 60 minutes has done some excellent reporting that's directly resulted in positive change and Vegas is not a shangri-la for kids, but the manner of that report has forever made me question the show's integrity.

That was a tv cheap shot and classic spin method using editing and voiceover. The media wanted a particular viewpoint expressed and in the process they offended somebody. I suspect they didn't mean to personally offend but they did. And so the blogger blogs about the offense. I think his reaction was reasonable and provides a good reminder of how media operates sometimes.

That might be the case had the author not used words like lie and slander, which are big charges. Similar to plagiarizing in an educational context, you don't ring that bell unless you know exactly what it means.

Interesting rant. So the author seems to completely "miss" the point of television and web based "news."

   Priority #1: Get ratings, everything else is subservient to this.
   Priority #2: Make your advertisers happy.
   Priority #3: Inform the public.

Really, they are in that order. So if you're not working on #1 you're working on #2 and if you aren't working on that only then are you working on #3. Generally organizations stay away from making up news from whole cloth (as wonderfully lampooned in Dave Barry's "Big Trouble") but they 'film' to get stuff for someone's eyes to look at during the story, not necessarily to report on what is being filmed. Then they tell their story and some film editor goes and cuts in bits of video that 'look like' what the story is saying at the moment.

So the fact that they filmed a talk you gave can have nothing at all to do with the story they are writing. So complaining that they used footage of you doing one thing, while they talked about something else, well that is their right, you signed the release. Now if you had added a codicil which said "My only use my image when reporting on this talk about this topic." That would have prevented them from using your likeness in the story.

True story, had a friend at a sports bar when a film crew came in to pick up background video. After the fact they passed around releases for folks to sign, and my friend, being precise, added a clause like the above to his release. The station used the film on a story about sports and drinking and his face was a big blur :-) It was kind of hilarious but they take those things seriously.

As a long-time 60 minutes viewer I was actually a little shocked by what a dick Morely was last night. The piece really did seem very slanted against Thiel, with not much substance to back it up.

Business schools also teach students how to play golf, why doesn't he mock business schools for taking $200K off people to teach them to play golf?

There might be a lot to mock business schools about, but the piece was about Thiel's school, which has apparently earned some mockery as well.

60 Minutes has been burned in the past by people who did their own taping of an interview and were able to demonstrate that 60 Minutes cherry-picked.

tl;dr. Guy upset with the tiny snippet of himself on 60 minutes and how it was used to illustrate one of their points and not make his.

tl;dr Guy upset with the tiny snippet of himself on 60 minutes and how it made a false claim about what he was teaching.

At worse, a mis-representation, but hardly a "lie" or "false claim".

The armchair lawyer in me cringed reading this entry. Black Rock's lawyers could swoop in and eat the author for lunch, given the legally-strong words he's throwing around in his prose. This is dangerous, dangerous territory and take heed, folks; any chance you have for legal recourse in a case such as this is completely and irrevocably undermined by temperamental writing in the heat of the moment. This has liability written all over it for the author, in fact, and one should really think twice before squaring off against a legal team that has been in the trenches against all of big tobacco for the very same program.

Morley Safer is one of the old guard, one of the few journalists (the traditional meaning, not a blogger) left who has actually seen Vietnam. His work on 60 Minutes is, typically, quite strong, and he has doubtlessly been on 60 Minutes longer than this person has been alive. I find myself siding with Safer here instead of this blogger, and that's even with a deep-seated distaste for the media these days; that's merely on the credibility that 60 Minutes has established, in my mind, and I really hope the author is prepared for many people with similar mindset to mine.

Namedropping your blog on Forbes isn't something that gives weight to your argument, since they've been comically easy to get for the last couple of years (troubling for Forbes's image, in my opinion). I don't think this entry will have the effect the author intended, as I'm more prone to indict the author instead of the person he wanted me to condemn.

EDIT: Clarifying a remark that confused my intent.

The blog post makes a substantive charge of journalistic misconduct against 60 Minutes and includes evidence supporting the charge. What do Vietnam and Morely Safer's age have to do with it? Why are you siding with anyone if you haven't seen the evidence? Are you too lazy* to watch the video, yet nonetheless possessed of a need to share your opinion about it?

What, exactly, do you want to accomplish with this comment?

* EDIT: this is inappropriately unpleasant language on my part, I apologize

> Why are you siding with anyone if you haven't seen the evidence?

Why are you assuming I haven't? Anybody that disagrees with the author automatically hasn't done the necessary research, in your mind?

I appealed to Morley Safer's incredibly long history with the program for a specific reason. The author of this piece charges 60 Minutes with slander, which is a very big word, and journalists don't have multi-decade careers when they're stupid enough to open up their company to claims of slander. Particularly on a (to them) relatively unimportant story.

Because you did not engage at all with the facts of this specific complaint. You still have not done so.

It's not clear what a long career in broadcasting has to do with any of this. You're talking about credibility. Credibility has it's place, but it's a heuristic for evaluating claims in the absence of facts. When the facts are available it counts for nothing.

If you want to know whether it's raining outside, don't ask Morley Safer--look out the window.

You completely missed the point of my comment. I am completely noncommittal on this specific allegation, and my comment remains a generality. You clearly read it and assumed I implied the author is wrong or that I disagree with the allegations, which I most certainly did not.

I reacted to the presence of words like slander, which is an entirely different ballgame from accusing Morley Safer of skewing the truth. Slander is a big, legally-actionable word, and you don't bang that drum unless you're ready to march behind it. My point about siding with Safer is that due to his credibility, I'm prejudiced to his side even before being told of this issue.

Nowhere in my comment did I address this specific issue.

I agree that slander is too strong a word. In my opinion a class on business networking sounds a lot like learning to shake hands and make eye contact. Safer trivialized the class, but it hardly rises to the level of slander.

At first I thought that you were veering into dangerous chair by armchair lawyering, but then I read the article. It is borderline libel (meaning that a jury could find the statements libelous). [Note: For legal purposes, libel is written/published while slander is spoken and they have different material elements but they otherwise refer to the same concept.]

Also, curiously, other than accusing Safer of outright lying, the article does not actual refute anything that Safer claims. Safer notes that Thiels fellows are provided social instruction (specifically, "networking skills"), but that clip is merely an aside to a longer video piece on the nature of the fellowships themselves and place in the national discussion on education.