Conan Shows Us That Main Stream Media Is Scripted

DAN SCHILLINGER: Yeah, I can’t speak for the other stations but, obviously, we all subscribe to various news services. We subscribe to the Associated Press, we subscribe to a service from NBC. This story was a CNN story and CNN sent out the copy with the, the joke, and we all copied and pasted it. And I think what’s happened over the last few years, as we keep asking producers and writers to do more and more work but we don't devote any more resources, so they’re forced to kind of find shortcuts, and one of the easiest shortcuts is I’m just gonna copy and paste this story that was sent to me and drop it into my newscast.

BOB GARFIELD: Look, no animals were harmed in the making of that segment. No viewer was exactly misled. But you don't like “rip ‘n read,” why?

DAN SCHILLINGER: I remember distinctly the first time they brought a computer into my newsroom and somebody showed me how easy it was to copy and paste an AP story and drop it into my newscast, and my immediate thought was, oh my God, I’ve just cut 50 percent of my work time. And then after doing it for a while, I realized, oh, this is a bad thing. [LAUGHS] Journalists are supposed to write, not copy and paste.