'60 minutes' in the Dock

...OnTelevision 60 MINUTES' IN THE DOCK BY MARVIN KITMAN was fascinated by Dr Carl A Galloway's recent $30 million slander suit against Dan Rather, CBS News and 60 Minutes m Los Angeles The doctor claimed that a 1979 segment of the show, "It's No Accident," wrongly linked him to an insurance fraud ring The trial was starting to be my favorite minisenes on Cable News Network (CNN) when the June 6 jury decision in favor of CBS suddenly ended the suspense, much in the style of a legal soap opera, or an authentic People's Court The coverage on TV was great, particularly on the days when Rather himself took the witness stand He had the haggard demeanor of a real person, a look that might be a refreshing change of pace at his present job anchoring The CBS Evening News The various media also ran many commentaries, with the prize going to CNN correspondent Daniel Schorr's observations on National Public Radio's All Things Considered "The public," he said among other things, "will not forgive us our press passes One of the most provocative points regarding the nature of TV journalism was raised by Bruce A Friedman, the doctor s attorney He accused Rather of being an actor Touche, I thought Friedman was referring to the criterion for advancement in the news business?physical appearance In my biased mind, though, the trial eventually became a battle between CBS News and the forces of evil As a result, I was taken aback by the growing suspicion of 60 Minutes that the case stirred up The feehng was becoming widespread that something about the TV magazine was reprehensible, as if it were suddenly a combination of the Na-tional Enquirer and Pravda The resentment has not abated, despite the ruling for the network Much of the hand-wringing has been conducted in print The pundits claim that the program now needs special restraints, that its responsibility must be greater because of its enormous audience 60 Minutes should take care not to practice "bad" journalism, as was supposedly demonstrated at the trial The holier-than-thou attitude of my colleagues baffles me I can't tell whether they are comparing 60 Minutes to20/20, local TV journalism, newspapers, or what My own ruminations on the subject, which I have been sorting out since the trial, are as follows First, 60 Minutes is not reallyanews show Whatever the network calls it, it's entertainment In fact, 60Minutes is a Western The major segment each Sunday (7 00p m -8 00p m ) is always a simple drama, a two-character morality play—the white hats against the black hats Mike Wallace usually plays Randolph Scott, a role sometimes filled as well by Morley Safer ox Ed Bradley (Dan used to be one of the troupe, until he rode off into the sunset for fame and fortune on The CBS Evening News) The format is predictable You know that one of the investigative beagles is going to be fed a fat business cat Every week the powers of darkness are corporations, vested interests and sundry other barnacles The show attacks villains who are despoiling society, polluting the environment, leaving dioxin drums uncapped to make a few extra bucks, and manufacturing awful cars knowing they are faulty In general, the targets are those who lack concern for our common welfare The bad guy's role is to belittle the charges, deny any wrongdoing and head off the CBS posse at the pass before the buried loot is discovered He is also supposed to look guilty as hell, whether his hand is actually in the cookie jar or not I have always wondered why anyone would tolerate this kind of third degree The villains must know they are the breast of turkey, destined to be carved Mike has to be very persuasive, I'm sure he keeps calling every week to cajole the wary into camera range As a network newsman once explained to me, too, the tube has the power of deluding its victims into believing they are going to emerge unscathed from a tussle with Mike Certain people are positive they can beat the odds and be like the quickwitted who best William F Buckley on Firing Line Mike, however, never loses He wears a wonderfully sweet smile while he is bullying some slick organization man, asking "Whs are you robbing the country blind'" When 60 Minutes runs a dull piece ot footage, you can be certain Mike will ask his most barbed question and not wait tor an answer \t its most refined the technique resembles those old Journal-American or World Telegram headlines?woman on relief wears mink coat "Of course, they never told you that the shmata was 14 years old and had no hair left Whenever I pass the kids' rooms on Sunday mght, Mike is grilling some authonty type who is sweating away?a form of self-incrimination in the electronic age After a steady diet of this hard-nosed fare, every corporation and every official seems crooked Some education they have been getting from TV On balance, though, I think the skepticism the show encourages has been a good foundation for the young ones to build on It should be obvious that I have from the outset been a fan of Mike, Morley, Ed and Dan (when he was there) Hove to see the powerful squirm They are the bad guys, that's why 60 Minutes goes after them, and that's the pubhc's perception, otherwise, the show wouldn't register consistently high Nielsens As for boiling down the issues in a simplistic manner, 60 Minutes did not invent the pattern Everything in our culture is divided the same way Outer space itself is squared off into good galaxies and bad, as we know from Star Wars My second major reflection in the light of the slander trial is that TV journalism, whether entertainment news or news news, is mimical to impartial reporting The medium is inherently slanted toward the dramatic, making so-called objectivity impossible Selectivity is all At 60 Minutes they record an hour of film for every minute on the air—that's the standard in the best operations A 60 Minutes segment is assembled from "bites" of film to illustrate a point What we see are dramas based on the facts The secret of 60 Minutes' popularity lies in the vividness of its presentation Show me one story on 60 Minutes that is genuinely evenhanded and I'll be surprised With "balance" you would have a boring string of documentaries scoring zero ratings Balance is a funny notion, anyway, and it eludes our newspapers, too They did not present the dark side of Hitler before the StahnHitler Pact of 1939 Nor have I ever noticed any defenses of concentration camps in print And the papers hardly gave a fair shake to Truman when he was running against Dewey in 1948, or to Stevenson when he was trying to compete with Ike in 1952 Moving to the present, is our most distinguished newspaper of record, the New York Times, entirely unprejudiced' A single column by William Safire is equal to two weeks of someone else's one-sided reporting on an issue T -Jk...

...he outtakes from 60 Minutes, introduced during the Galloway suit, alarmed the more naive members of the press Outtakes are always dismaying?they are the bloopers In TV news they reveal journalists fluffing their lines and their hair, cursing at jets passing overhead that blot out their voices, and rearranging their faces and thoughts What gets cut out is incriminating in one way or another The accusation persists that 60 Minutes struck low blows in editing, quoting people out of context Yet here again, newspapers edit all the time Otherwise they would have to throw out a lot of ads to report everything said in Congress yesterday The prestigious daily network news shows edit, too, it should be pointed out Ferociously A recent article in the A tlantic Monthly illustrates the fate of Kenneth Adelman in his initial hearing for confirmation as director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency By using only the first sentence of one of his replies?Senator Pell, I just have no thoughts in that area "—all three networks made Reagan's nominee sound like a dolt This takes place constantly in the reporting from Washington, or anywhere The standards 60 Minutes adheres to in using these tools of the trade are about as high as you will find in a lowly profession like TV journalism To be sure, there were real shortcomings and inexcusable shortcuts in the Rather case—most notably, not getting in touch with Galloway even though he did not return any of 60Minutes' calls Deadline pressure is the explanation, not an adequate excuse Still, if 60 Minutes makes a mistake—as it obviously did in the Galloway story and perhaps in plenty of others—that only means nobody in TV is perfect Even a Rolls Royce may have to be fixed occasionally—yet you don't junk the Rolls because the spark plugs have to be replaced or the ashtray needs emptying Sure, 60 Minutes is mean They play hardball But the bad guys—the corporations and the others who have been messing up society—play hardball, too Honestly Remember that for 30 years TV News was biased in favor of corporations You never heard any business executives complaining about that slant Today the corporations are gunning for 60 Minutes, trying to convince us that executives are the wronged parties, being taken advantage of by wicked old CBS News Picture the poor defenseless Fortune 500, huddling with the multimilhon dollar PR firms to come up with emergency 60 Minutes strategies They have a PR school that offers courses in how to answer Mike Wallace's questions Forgotten in the uproar is the fact that 60 Minutes is on the side of the angels A lengthy analysis of the show in Variety concluded, "Not in the Mur-row tradition " Baloney The grandfather of TV journalism also hounded the bad guys—sometimes Often CBS would hamstring him To the everlasting credit of today's CBS, they let 60 Minutes be—and do its work I want the pressure maintained on the plutocrats who are duphcitously trashing the quality of our lives I want Mike and crew fighting for truth, justice, the American way, and me Not in the Murrow tradition, indeed—Edward R would have loved the exposes My hunch is that the press is ganging up on 60 Minutes out of jealousy It has done an astounding thing—created what is often the nation' s most watched program in the toughest field, news and public affairs Apparently the American fondness for turning on success is at work here So 60 Minutes is in for a rough remainder of the century...