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REWIND
Grodin's miscast role...Ted Turner's hot war...Vanity Fair's misplaced women...ABC stars menaced ny a mouse...A killer 60 Minutes...The New York Post takes the lead...Why Marcia?
by Steven Brill
Issue Date: February 1999
ACTOR/ANCHORS
I try not to be a snob about politicians or even showbiz people becoming television journalists, but MSNBC went too far even for me on the night in November that we almost bombed Iraq. Just after the White House had announced on Saturday evening, November 14, that Saddam's letter of apparent capitulation was unacceptable, we were all treated to actor Charles Grodin anchoring MSNBC's coverage. Grodin, whom I remember fondly as the hapless father in Beethoven (the hilarious movie about a crazy family dog) and who had a gig as a weeknight talk-show host on sister cable channel CNBC that has now moved to MSNBC on Saturday nights, questioned NBC reporters live from Baghdad, Washington, and the United Nations. Meantime, CNN had its usual first team on air.
It wasn't that Grodin or his questions were stupid; he isn't and they weren't. Rather, it's a matter of what might have happened had some sudden news erupted, as was quite possible. It's also a matter of whether MSNBC and NBC News, which runs the cable channel, really believe - and want to tell the world - that when it comes to live coverage of a possible war there's no difference between an actor and, say, Tom Brokaw or Brian Williams.
A HERO
Our "Heroes" column rewards journalists doing great journalism, but I want to reward a businessman and sometime blowhard for doing great journalism. I'm referring to Ted Turner. And as I watched another installment of CNN's Cold War the other night, I noticed that the closing credits said that he came up with the idea for the series. Was the staff just trying to butter up the mercurial (a true euphemism) boss? Not in Ted's case.
"It was in 1994 at the Goodwill Games in Saint Petersburg [Russia] that Ted took me to breakfast and said we should do a series on the Cold War now that the files were open...with live eyewitnesses and eyewitness footage," recalls Patricia Mitchell, who, with Jeremy Isaacs, is the series' coexecutive producer. In fact, says Mitchell, "when we finished scripting twenty hours, Ted read through it and asked us to make it twenty-four hours....I've never had someone in his position ask me to make something longer and spend more money....Ted told me on that very first day that we talked about this that his grandchildren were not going to know what the Cold War was all about unless we did this - that the impact was not simply now but all the runs this series will have in the future."
Although Cold War is not a ratings blockbuster, it's doing about 20 percent better than what had been in that CNN time slot. With advance ad sales, tape sales, and rights purchases by television networks around the world, the $12 million cost of the series is already covered, says Mitchell, meaning that future runs and tape sales will produce a profit.
Nonetheless, I'm told by four other people at CNN, including one who doesn't like Turner at all, that he pushed the idea hard against the eye-rolling skepticism of some of his company's financial people and professional programmers. These pros no doubt remembered some of the boss's other well-intentioned ideas that bombed. But for me that's what's great about Turner. He has all kinds of ideas and isn't afraid to push them. One result of that, of course, is CNN itself, which everyone said was a nutty venture and which now stands as probably the most important journalism creation of the century. The result in this case is a documentary series about us against the USSR that has kept me and my kids glued to the set. It's great stuff, with great footage, crystal-clear writing, painstaking reporting, terrific interviews with the important players, and a good follow-up discussion after each show anchored by CNN global-affairs correspondent Ralph Begleiter. If you've missed the weekly series of 24 one-hour shows, which began in September and airs at 8 p.m. (EST) on Sundays (with reruns three hours later that night and on Friday and Saturday nights at 10 p.m. and 1a.m.), start watching or buy the tapes.
WRONG ANSWER
When Walker Art Center director Kathy Halbreich was named in Vanity Fair's special November issue as one of America's 200 most influential women, she wrote the magazine saying she was honored to have been chosen but that "the real story is framed by the photograph of Brad Pitt on the cover of the same issue. Wasn't there a single woman among your list...who could equal his accomplishments and sell the magazine?" To which editor Graydon Carter replied, "We would like to note that of the 24 artists featured in solo or small group exhibitions organized by Halbreich's Walker Art Center between this March and April 2000, 80 percent are men."
Huh? Why couldn't he just admit that his magazine's readers are about 80 percent female and that putting a young Hollywood male on the cover helps to sell it? "Because it's not true," Carter maintains. "We wanted to do a cover with eight of the women, but the logistics became impossible." So why not say that in his answer? "Because it was a snotty letter and it was none of her damn business."
VICTIMS
"You really need to write something about how they killed Brian's story...I wish I could speak out, but you can speak out for us....It's so important." That was what one of ABC's major on-camera news people said to me just before we published last issue's story about how ABC News killed Brian Ross's report about pedophile problems at Disney theme parks. In fact, before the story was published and in its aftermath, I've now had similar conversations with four different ABC news "stars" about how important it was for us to do something because they couldn't.
This is pathetic. The average salary of these four people claiming to be held in silent captivity over at ABC is, I'd guess, more than a million dollars. All have contracts that I bet don't prohibit them from publicly questioning this kind of core-issue editorial decision; even if they don't, they're all eminently employable elsewhere. It's just plain sad that none of them have the guts to do anything other than assume the role of victims forced to retreat to the corner of some cocktail party and whisper about what is supposed to be the bedrock principle of their work.
FAME
Can anyone tell me why Marcia Clark has a job as an NBC News legal analyst and as Geraldo's regular Friday-night substitute on CNBC? This is, after all, the woman who lost the easiest-to-win celebrity murder trial of the century. And she didn't lose it only because of a misguided jury. As someone who used to write about trials for a living and who watched the O.J. Simpson case intensely, I can promise you that she did a truly horrible job, taking days to question witnesses who deserved an hour, putting the wrong witnesses on, and self-destructing whenever she tried cross-examination. So, why is she rewarded by becoming a television expert? Perhaps because she got hugely famous in the O.J. case. And fame seems to be its own validator, regardless of what you get famous for.
DEATH WATCH
When 60 Minutes showed Dr. Kevorkian killing one of his "patients," I was asked by lots of news organizations what I thought, and I guess my response disappointed them because I wasn't quoted in their resulting stories. I watched most of the show and thought it was done well. Mike Wallace pulled no punches about Dr. Death's hunger for publicity and Wallace did a good job of highlighting an important issue that needs to be debated. Television journalism's great strength, as compared to print, is in driving home the human dimension and often hard-to-take reality of an abstract idea. (Showing us the reality of the Vietnam War is another great example of that.) If, in fact, it is too hard to take, there's always the channel changer - which we found ourselves using when Kevorkian began to inject the poison.
STANDARD SETTER
On November 25, the New York Post, the trashy daily comic book that is a hoot to read but can usually be safely ignored, achieved a prominence that must make its editors (and proprietor Rupert Murdoch) proud. The paper became the standard setter for dozens of other news outlets on an issue of editorial discretion that until then had been one area where the press had done itself proud. That morning, the Post ran a screaming front-pager about Chelsea Clinton and a romance she was supposedly having or not having at Stanford. There were only anonymous sources, but these sources helpfully weaved together a story about her love life and supposed emotional distress and linked it to the presence of Ken Starr's daughter on the same campus, and, yes, the Monica scandal. As ridiculous as this all seems, it was enough to give dozens of other usually serious news organizations the excuse to break an admirable silence that the press had until now observed on anything having to do with Chelsea's personal life. By 6:30 a.m. my local cable news outlet, the heretofore serious Time Warner-owned New York 1, was reporting on the Post's story. And our check of TV and print news outlets found dozens of these Chelsea reports on, among other stations, the New York and Los Angeles CBS-owned local news affiliates, and in The Boston Globe (owned by The New York Times), The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, The Arizona Republic, the Houston Chronicle, and other smaller newspapers from Sacramento to Dayton to New Orleans. All had similarly wormed their way into the story by reporting that the Post was reporting such and such about Chelsea. In short, they had all allowed Rupert Murdoch to become their editor.
That's, of course, the same thing that happened with the story of Henry Hyde's long-ago affair. One web magazine, Salon, broke a story that many other news organizations had deliberately decided not to run, whereupon they all ran the story about the Salon story. This downward competitive cycle, in which the editor with the lowest standards ultimately sets the acceptable standard, is poison that ultimately only the marketplace can stop. If your favorite TV news organization or newspaper didn't run the Chelsea story, write the editor a thank-you note.
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February 1999
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