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After the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, many Americans were eager and proud to visibly affirm their support for their country by adorning themselves, their homes, their workplaces, and their cars with various patriotic symbols: U.S. flags; red, white, and blue ribbons; flag lapel pins; flag posters; and the like. This outbreak of patriotic fervor created a dilemma for the news departments of television networks, however. It had been a long-standing practice among all the networks (going back decades before the 9/11 attacks) that on-air journalistic personnel should not visibly wear or otherwise display lapel pins, ribbons, buttons bearing national flags or national colors, or any other form of patriotic adornments or insignia. After the 9/11 attacks, some on-air personnel in network news departments expressed interest in bending that rule, a circumstance that led to a contentious public debate about the appropriateness of such displays, with one side claiming that journalists should be allowed to exhibit symbols of their patriotism just as much as any other Americans, the other holding that journalists should refrain from wearing such items in order to maintain an image of impartial neutrality and lessen the chances that they (especially reporters working overseas) could be harmed by those who might view them as an arm of the American government. ABC's continued observation of a long-standing policy was quickly spun into the false claim that ABC had just banned journalists from engaging in a practice previously allowed to them: The ABC network was singled out for especially heavy criticism in this regard, due in large part to articles such as the following: But as ABC News senior vice president Jeffrey Schneider told us, it had been standard journalistic practice at that network for on-air news personnel to refrain from wearing such symbolic items long before 11 September 2001; it was not a new practice instituted after the 9/11 attacks. Former ABC News president David Westin also confirmed in a 2012 interview that the policy had been in place long before 9/11: Many newspeople at various networks and affiliate stations did begin donning U.S. flag lapel pins and other patriotic insignia after 9/11, although one of the most prominent news anchors of that period, Bill O'Reilly of Fox News, surprisingly did not. O'Reilly explained his decision by stating that I'm just a regular guy. Watch me and you'll know what I think without [my] wearing a pin. Reaction to the no flags issue ranged from disagreement voiced by newspeople at local television stations to outrage expressed by conservative pundits: Nonetheless, the claim that ABC has banned their on-air personnel from wearing U.S. flag pins wasn't true in 2001, and it isn't true now (despite commonly being reported in e-mail forwards as if it were a recent occurrence). And ABC News couldn't have joined President Obama in this endeavor (as asserted in the second example above), as the latter never instituted any ban on U.S. flag pins either. (Barack Obama, then a presidential candidate, announced in October 2007 that he had stopped wearing a flag pin himself, but he resumed the practice several months later.)
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