Documenting the Documentary
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television DOCUMENTING THE DOCUMENTARY By Reuven Frank On Thursday, September 25, the ABC News magazine 20/20 included a 10-minute report by Peter Jennings, an occasional contributor,...
...This was not only at the insistence of the news division but of the network itself, under prodding from the law department, which dealt with Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC...
...Hersh excised the disputed stuff from his book, and his publisher, Little, Brown, has stuck with its original November publication date...
...News alone is done inside the networks...
...ABC established what was almost a trend for three-hour programs with a historical survey of the entire African continent...
...Reactions among journalists and news hobbyists have alternated between a schadenfreude festival of those who over the years have grown to dislike Hersh and the frustration of those who hate Kennedys...
...Approached first, it agreed to pay an initial $600,000 for the right to do the program...
...Although ABC News was widely believed to have paid Hersh and his collaborators some $2 million to produce the documentary, it not only exposed the hoax but alerted the press that it was going to do so...
...Instead, the market for scandal will grow, and to feed that market, there will be documents, some of them forged...
...It also turned out that serious journalism could get you into trouble...
...They would magnify each other's public attention, it was felt, and help ABC achieve high ratings during a "sweeps" month...
...It's called the law of supply and demand...
...For example, policy held that outtakes—pictures not broadcast—should never be surrendered unless subpoenaed, and subpoenas would be fought...
...In 1960, ABC's vice president for news and public affairs resigned to protest its fanning out documentaries...
...But the program will be aired December 4,8-10 P.M., EST...
...Before long, this gave rise to the current wave of TV magazines...
...Or that the entertainment division of another network got only somewhat less deeply committed without its news division participating at all...
...Then several things happened...
...Since it is aimed at the program's larger audience, though, crime, scandal or medicine tend to be the focus...
...The book and the documentary were both due to appear in November...
...When its inquiries led it to move away from the project—or, as one published account declared, when a higher executive overruled the subordinate who made the deal—NBC paid an additional $400,000 as a "kill" fee...
...What changed NBC's mind has still not been divulged...
...But if no one takes into account the changing nature of news in the last decade, or the different economic forces that now act on its broadcasting or publication, sloganeering speeches will not improve it...
...By the mid-1980s, the documentary production of the commercial networks had slacked off to the point approaching zero that still allowed an occasional effort, if only to flatter the evening news anchorman by affording him a more contemplative role...
...Occasionally a whole hour of a magazine is devoted to a single subject and is, in fact, a documentary...
...Specifically cited were those purporting to show that John F. Kennedy had undertaken to set up a trust fund to support Marilyn Monroe's institutionalized mother in return for the film star's silence about their sexual relationship and, more significantly, whatever contacts she knew of between the Kennedys and a Mafia chieftain named Sam Giancana...
...Everything else they buy...
...Congress and the Nixon White House, an important new book by Corydon B. Dunham...
...They called it censorship, but the networks did not budge...
...That is why one can say that 20 years ago, perhaps even 10, no network would have been embarrassed by learning that it was basing a documentary on false documents...
...CBS spent several hours trying to explain the Warren Report...
...ABC News, despite purging its documentary as well, held many management huddles about whether it should be broadcast...
...It was something you learned to live with, but one could not be sure that an outside producer would know how...
...It is an important distinction that most laity and too many in broadcasting fail to appreciate: News is the only thing the networks do...
...News executives were conditioned to assume that any story, any broadcast they were involved in might cause an inquiry by a Congressional committee or the FCC...
...CBS did a notable hour on Nigeria, NBC an hour each on Ghana and Rhodesia...
...A CBS Reports documentary called The Selling of the Pentagon, detailing the military's large, slick and coordinated propaganda effort aimed at Congress and the public, came close to getting the president of CBS jailed for contempt of Congress...
...Meantime, CBS' 60 Minutes had demonstrated that if you did it right you could have prestige and maks money...
...They were meant to be, and acknowledged to be, the networks' best face...
...After ABC News entered the picture, it took the additional precaution of sending them to document experts...
...Hersh had those pertaining to Marilyn Monroe authenticated by a handwriting expert...
...What has happened to documentaries since is what happened to all network news, to all television news, to all news: entropy...
...Thus the New York Times and Washington Post carried stories in advance of the September 25 broadcast...
...CBS had the strongest such policy...
...the documents had been found among his father's papers...
...This gave the networks an excuse to lessen an economic burden...
...Free-lancers could be hired for specific jobs, or short periods, but editorial control remained within the network news division...
...Nonfiction projects like Jacques Cousteau's underwater pictures or the National Geographic films were the exception by unspoken consensus...
...Reports kept dribbling into print about collectors of documents and Presidential memorabilia who had paid large sums for some of Cusack's papers —encouraged, at least in part, by the anticipated cachet to come from a book by someone of Hersh's stature and from a network documentary...
...American television has retreated a long way in a relatively short period...
...The incident and its ramifications are detailed in Fighting for the First Amendment: Stanton of CBS vs...
...The current mode is for grandstanding denunciations of the trivializing or the cheapening or the vulgarization of news, with television in the vanguard yet affecting American journalism in every medium...
...About the sheet where Kennedy supposedly listed the amount each of his siblings was contributing to help out with the fund for Monroe's mother, Gore smirked, "I thought it was extremely touching, the fact that he couldn't add...
...The network magazine, by contrast, has been fruitful and multiplied...
...That is true even now that networks may share in the "ownership" of entertainment programs—meaning participation in the profits earned when they are sold for reuse after their initial showings...
...They found a zip code on one bearing a date before zip codes were in use, and on several they discovered the characteristics of a typewriter that had not yet been invented at the supposed time of writing...
...This was to be based on The Dark Side of Camelot, a new book by Seymour M. Hersh, the investigative reporter best known for uncovering the My Lai massacre...
...Next, there were the documentaries that moved Generals William Westmoreland and Ariel Sharon to sue for libel...
...The whole affair seems to have started with a hoard of material brought to Hersh by a man named Lawrence Cusack...
...All of those documentaries were done by staff employees of the networks...
...See It Now, ABC News Closeup and NBC News White Paper were just a few of the recognizable and recognized rubrics used for the sort of program he had in mind...
...The 20/20 segment included an interview with Cusack on camera nervously denying anything wrong...
...today there are about a dozen, all of them good earners...
...ABC the weakest...
...Some of this is before a grand jury...
...Public television emerged and eventually started to produce respectable, occasionally notable, documentaries...
...The sniping has gone on for months in magazines such as George and Vanity Fair, in the "Style" section of the Washington Post, and on CNN's Larry King Live—until even the last insider has probably lost interest...
...On 20/20 that night, Jennings, who was to be the reporter and anchor for the documentary, said ABC News had established that at least some of the documents supporting Hersh's charges were forgeries...
...Or so it used to be...
...When the networks were embarrassed by the quiz show scandals, documentaries were moved to prime time and their frequency was increased...
...Outside producers could not be relied on to hold that line...
...Chief among the latter is Gore Vidal, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' cousin and one of Hersh's sources, who told the Washington Post that what he was shown looked to him like JFK's handwriting, "a sort of vigorous 9-year-old valiantly combating dyslexia...
...A few days later, the Times reported that NBC had also been a player...
...The programs are produced and delivered for broadcast by the usual Hollywood cat's cradle of major companies, one-shot corporations, partnerships, contracts, etc...
...No one seems concerned that the news division of a major network paid $2 million to a producer not in its employ to do a documentary alleging scandal, corruption and lawbreaking at the highest level of government...
...In addition, yesterday's documentaries took us through Africa in the wake of the winds of change...
...The commercial networks are no longer committed to expending money, manpower and, most important, broadcast hours "to inform, and to reveal in compelling personal terms the human drama which lies behind the complex and important events of our time," in the words of the late pioneer documentary producer Irving Gitlin...
...When Congressmen complained about sex and violence in television entertainment, the networks pointed with pride to their documentaries...
...NBC gave us a three-hour review of the civil rights struggle in 1963, and later a series of annual three-hour overviews of American foreign policy...
...Finally, no matter how well you controlled an outsider, you could be aware of only what he used, not what he left out...
...On Television DOCUMENTING THE DOCUMENTARY By Reuven Frank On Thursday, September 25, the ABC News magazine 20/20 included a 10-minute report by Peter Jennings, an occasional contributor, detailing the network's involvement over the past year in what was to be a two-hour documentary about unsavory and perhaps unlawful activities of the brothers John and Robert Kennedy...
...He said his late father and namesake had been an attorney for the New York Archdiocese and, secretly, for the Kennedy families...
...One finds almost nothing at present comparable to the documentaries of the past about migrant workers or racial confrontation or Vietnam that helped to illuminate many difficult years for us...
...But no one has so far dealt with what the controversy reveals about the current sorry state of the network news documentary...
...In that case, however, it was the network's entertainment division, not NBC News, that had considered the project...
...Independent producers objected furiously that they were being denied outlet for their work and a source of income...
Vol. 80 • November 1997 • No. 17
