Eminentoes: CNN's Real Mistake
Collins, Reid
EMINENTOES by Reid Collins CNN's Real Mistake H ang in there, Peter Arnett. It has happened before, with a bigger star and a bigger network. Only, that network didn't have to apologize. It...
...No network president will be invited to say a little prayer with a committee chairman...
...President Frank Stanton was dispatched to Washington, where his reported confrontations with Chairman Staggers provided much amusement for the press corps...
...Congressman Staggers was said to have suggested that they pray together...
...Millions of the American taxpayer's dollars are spent each year," said producer Peter Davis...
...And he reportedly offered a compromise: if Dr...
...Congress was never even raised...
...It stonewalled and won awards in the process...
...41 60 September 19 9 8 • The American Spectator...
...Stanton would just show him the outtakes, that might be sufficient...
...The First Amendment shield CBS had so effectively applied in dueling with the U.S...
...And Davis would later be honored by Hollywood with an Academy Award for his film, again critical of the U.S...
...On February 23,1971, CBS News broadcast an hour-long documentary, "The Selling of the Pentagon," an examination of the Pentagon's public relations activities, the network said...
...If CNN had thrown up a First Amendment shield around the notes of producers April Oliver and Jack Smith, refusing to reveal the outtakes, who could have said what the network really knew or should have known...
...True also, the sum of the CBS allegations would not approach a violation of international law...
...While Stanton was guarding the portcullis in Washington, News President Dick Salant changed some filming and editing procedures inside the castle in New York...
...Within a year, Peter Davis was out of CBS...
...In what is presumed to be an exculpatory phrase, the Abrams report says "Tailwind" "reflected the deeply held beliefs of the CNN journalists who prepared it...
...Citing the First Amendment, CBS defied Congress...
...But what if CNN had taken its cue from CBS, the broadcast behemoth Ted Turner once longed to own...
...Outtakes are the DNA of journalistic truth...
...Does the thought ever occur to CNN President Tom Johnson as sleep approaches...
...Hell, they could have trotted out Arnett's old Pulitzer from Vietnam, too...
...What if it had stonewalled...
...What a far cry from the time when CBS refused to explore in public any of its employees' "deeply held beliefs...
...Emmys went without saying...
...True, the early seventies were different times...
...CBS rebroadcast the program allowing airtime for some critics at the end...
...We'll never know what would have happened...
...Networks were few and powerful...
...And no new rules will have to be written for the documentation of deeply held beliefs...
...We plan to look at how and why that money is being spent...
...But at the time, CBS was greatly supported by the awards committees that showered kudos on its broadcast: The University of Georgia's journalism school broke with its own tradition to confer a special Peabody on "The Selling ofthe Pentagon" even though it occurred after the close of the calendar year...
...Some of the participants claimed they had been had, their remarks distorted, answers deftly rearranged...
...CNN apologized, retracted, sacked two producers, put a reprimand in Arnett's paycheck, and invited the sobriquet, the Culpa News Network...
...The Staggers committee subpoenaed the material that went into the broadcast and, particularly, the "outtakes," the material not used but which, compared with that which was, would render the extent of distortion or bias...
...Anything anti-military and anti-war was looked upon with favor...
...But does Ted Turner—the man who sleeps with Jane Fonda, gives a billion dollars to the United Nations, and wants to junk the "Star Spangled Banner" because it's a war song—sound like a guy who fears offending the military...
...CBS escaped a contempt-of-Congress citation by a vote of 226 to 181...
...The awards committees will never get their chance at a supporting role this time...
...The Selling of the Pentagon" produced an outcry...
...In the space of a week's study, Abrams, aided by CNN's own lawyer, concluded that the outtakes did not support the broadcast (the "intakes...
...It had stonewalled and won, to the cheers of other media stirred by the specter of legislative oversight of the Fourth Estate...
...In one such meeting REID COLLINS is a former CBS and CNN correspondent...
...presence in Indochina, Hearts and Minds...
...It was widely accepted in network circles that the correspondent who narrated the program, Roger Mudd, had no role in the editing process, and the brickbats went past him to the producer Davis and to the network brass...
...It gave away the outtakes from "Tailwind," supplied them willingly to the outside investigator, Floyd Abrams, with the producers' notes to boot...
...An assistant secretary of defense charged "unethical" editing of his remarks...
...Stanton would neither pray nor bargain...
...Oliver and Smith contend that their bosses caved early for fear of Pentagon reprisal...
...That the United States had used nerve gas in Laos, perhaps against its own, was an unwarranted charge...
...In 1998, CNN took just the opposite tack from CBS's...
...At the Awards Ceremony his co-producer read a thank you message from the Vietcong...
...Richard Nixon was president...
...A House Commerce Subcommittee chaired by Harley Staggers, a West Virginia Democrat, prepared hearings...
Vol. 31 • September 1998 • No. 9
