Beth Sanders & Randy Baker | 30.05.2002 17:38

To be shown at the S.D. IMC film night June 11, Fear and Favor in the Newsroom exposes the myth that journalists working for media owned by wealthy individuals or corporations can be independent of the economic interests of their owners. Among the cases shown are an Atlanta Journal-Constitution editor forced out for challenging Coca-Cola, a New York Times reporter fired for writing anti-nuclear power stories, and an internationally known New York Times editor fired for criticizing corruption in his city. The film ends with a timely look at media jingoism during the 1991 Gulf War.

“Fear and Favor in the Newsroom,” California Newsreel/KTEH-PBS San Jose documentary, 1996 (narrated by Studs Terkel; Beth Sanders, director, co-producer; Randy Baker, writer, co-producer)

Studs Terkel: Hello, I’m Studs Terkel. There’s only one business protected by the United States Constitution, and that’s the press. The reason is simple. Only a strong, free press can tell us how those with power are using it. And only if we’re informed can we protect ourselves against abuses of power. Yet what happens when the press is owned by the powerful? How do journalists report on the environment, business, issues of war and peace, when these same issues touch on the interests of the people they work for? In 1986, Bill Kovach was named executive editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Wendell Rawls, Jr. [former assistant to the executive editor, Atlanta Journal-Constitution]: We had reporters that were fired up, and they were doing the best work of their lives, but they were all out there going for those really good stories.

Bill Dedman [former reporter, Atlanta Journal-Constitution]: There was an attitude at the Atlanta paper under Bill Kovach that we were going to go out and find all the sacred cows, and have barbecues.

Terkel: Bill Dedman’s series exposing race-biased lending at Atlanta’s banks exemplified the paper’s new, hard-hitting reporting.

Rawls: In five times more cases than the other, Blacks were refused loans with identical credit histories and identical financial conditions.

Terkel: Even middle-class [Black] homeowners were being denied loans.

Dedman: This was not a shocking revelation, that the banks did not make loans in Black neighborhoods. Everybody knew that. We had merely documented the obvious.

Rawls: Well, we got an enormous response from readers who — particularly in the Black community — who basically told us that it had been going on for years. Why is it just now being talked about?

Terkel: Before Kovach had arrived at the paper, another reporter had come up with the same idea. But an editor told him not to pursue the story.

Dedman: Three years later, I didn’t even know that he had come up with this. I said, “Well, gee, why don’t we do that?” And it wasn’t because it was a novel idea, it was just that at this point it was received. There was soil to germinate in.

Terkel: Dedman won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, for the banking series. But good journalism does not please everyone.

Dedman: The bank stories were mentioned at a board meeting of the Atlanta newspapers: “Aren’t we going a little too far on this? It’s making some people angry.” Some of the members of the board and other major advertisers all do business with the banks, so that there’s a web of interests there.

Terkel: Kovach and his staff didn’t back off from that tough investigative reporting. Soon they disturbed another sacred cow. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Coca-Cola was under investigation by a grand jury for alleged criminal activity. Anne Cox Chambers, one of the owners of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, also sat on the board of Coca-Cola.

Rawls: I wasn’t at the board meeting, but I am told that a member of the board stood up and addressed Anne Cox Chambers and asked her why the — why her editor had a take-no-prisoners policy of covering business.

Dedman: Cox Newspapers is owned by the Cox family, that has a lot of money. You’ll see both of the Cox sisters in the lists of the 10 richest Americans.

Terkel: In fact, Forbes magazine estimates their wealth at over $4 billion — which is roughly twice the size of Ross Perot’s fortune.

Rawls: I think that they weren’t accustomed to that kind of journalism. I think they weren’t accustomed to their newspaper putting a magnifying glass on the city, and holding a mirror up to the city every day. And they weren’t used to that, and I think a lot of their friends weren’t used to that.

Terkel: Less than two years after taking the job, Bill Kovach resigned as editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Dedman: His resignation was completely a surprise. It was a shock to us. We were planning to spend the rest of our careers there, and then suddenly we were journalistic boat people. We were out without an editor.

Terkel: The reaction to Kovach’s departure was extraordinary. Reporters at the Journal-Constitution took out an ad in the paper calling for Kovach’s return. They met with the publisher to try to reverse the decision. And members of the community joined with staff members in a public protest march.

Newscaster [film clip]: Like mourners in a New Orleans-style funeral, several hundred angry readers and employees of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspapers draped themselves in black and carried a coffin stuffed with newsprint through the streets of downtown Atlanta. The pallbearers were to protest the recent resignation of editor Bill Kovach. The marchers dropped off the coffin at the steps of the Journal-Constitution, with a sign reading, “Here lies the truth.”

African-American Rally Speaker [film clip]: I believe that a few days ago, honest journalism suffered a serious heart attack, and right now it is on intensive care at Grady Hospital.

Ben Bagdikian [media professor, author of The Media Monopoly]: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Kovach was told, “Listen, I want you to have this paper a vibrant, investigatory paper.” And he did it. And it turned out he did things that the business establishment of Atlanta didn’t like.

Dedman: It’s not been proven that that’s why Bill Kovach is not the editor of the Atlanta paper, because of some pressure of the business community. What is known is that the editor, Kovach, and the publisher and Cox Newspapers fell out over time.

Rawls: Bill had a vision of greatness for the newspaper, and that vision was not shared by the leadership above him.

Dedman: And of course when he left, the publisher came out and said, “No, we’re not trying to turn the Atlanta paper into USA Today.”

Terkel: Kovach was replaced by Ron Martin, former executive editor of USA Today. Many members of the paper’s staff resigned, including Dedman and Rawls.

Rawls: I couldn’t stay and practice the kind of journalism that I had — that I valued.

Terkel: Bill Kovach refused to discuss his resignation on camera. Jay Smith, then publisher of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, also refused to discuss the Kovach resignation. However, Smith did assert the paper’s respect for journalistic integrity.

Jay Smith: There is one set of standards, and frankly, what we need to do is to make sure that that same set of standards apply — and this was my point — whether it’s the parent corporation, your largest advertiser, or an individual no one has ever heard of until we write about that person.

Terkel: Since Kovach’s departure, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has devoted much less attention to stories which might disturb big business and the powerful. Its reporting on Coca-Cola, for instance, seems to differ little from what Coca-Cola itself might say if it were writing the story. Indeed, a 1994 speech to business leaders on the Olympics by the chairman of Coca-Cola not only received front-page coverage, but for the following five days the speech was reprinted, praised in two columns and in an editorial.

Rawls: This attitude pervades the entire newspaper: that we are trying to make people feel better about themselves, somehow, rather than letting them hold a mirror up to themselves.

Terkel: Other newspapers covered Kovach’s departure as the story of a big-city news editor running up against provincial newspaper owners. But are the owners of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution really that different from owners of America’s other news outlets? For example, the Washington Post is owned by the Graham family, whose fortune is estimated by Forbes magazine to exceed $500 million. In fact, virtually every major news organization is owned by members of the same tiny elite, the extremely wealthy.

Slides:
Washington Post, Graham family, $565 million
Los Angeles Times, Chandler family, $1.6 billion [since sold to the Chicago Tribune]
New York Times and Boston Globe, Sulzberger family, $490 million
Cincinnati Post, Scripps family, $2.5 billion
The Oregonian, Newhouse family, $8.5 billion
ABC network: Disney, CEO Michael Eisner, net worth: $460 million
NBC network: General Electric, CEO John Welch [since retired], 1995 salary: $17 million
CBS network: Westinghouse Electric, CEO Michael Jordan, 1995 salary: $4 million

Terkel: Is tough reporting on the interests of these big boys any easier at other news organizations?

Lowell Bergman [former producer, 60 Minutes]: I have been able to get stories on that were very critical of the U.S. government; of employees and executives at ABC News when I worked there; of friends of my bosses at 60 Minutes; on the air. I’ve also had some trouble getting some stories either approved or on the air that related to similar individuals. But, you know, it has never been as heavy-handed as somebody saying, “You can’t do that story.” But I think it’s understood that when you get into that area, you’re in a dangerous area.

Bagdikian: Regularly, some of our most distinguished editors are fired or pushed out of their jobs because they did those stories too often.

Michael Gartner [president, NBC News, 1988-1993]: In the four years I’ve been here I’ve never been asked by GE or any of its representatives to put anything on the air, or not to put anything on the air, concerning GE or any of their friends or associates.

Bagdikian: First of all, no executive producer at NBC needs an angel from heaven to tell him that if he has a highly damaging story about General Electric, the owner of NBC, that he’s spending a lot of capital on his job. He might be gutsy, and he might do it, but he knows that this is going to have problems.

Terkel: In fact, there have been several reported cases in which journalists at NBC deleted information critical of General Electric, their parent corporation.

Richard Cohen [former CBS producer]: It’s not just so simple as GE and news about nuclear power, or about defense contractors that rip off the government — both of which apply to GE. But it’s not limited to that. It has to do with the simple presentation of establishment news as opposed to tough, questioning news.

Lawrence Grossman [former president, NBC News]: Not that GE, if it has any brains — and it does — is going to call up a correspondent and say, “You cannot tread on this territory, because we have a particular interest in it.” But there’s an atmosphere that is generated, of an environment in which rebels, unconventional thinking, those who do not sort-of operate comfortably within a corporate environment, tend to be discouraged, tend not to be hired, tend not to last at companies like that. And I think it interferes with the quality and character and diversity of the news that’s being presented.

Jon Alpert [former NBC freelance reporter]: Whether NBC is owned by GE or whether they’re owned by just the same type of people in corporate America that own all the networks, it probably doesn’t make much difference, because in general all the networks are similarly owned at this particular time.

Terkel: The community of interests shared by the owners of America’s television and press, and America’s other corporate giants, is so tight that even their boards of directors are interlocking.

Slides: Linking Directorates:
NBC: J. P. Morgan & Company, General Mills, Goodyear Tire, Kimberly-Clark, R. H. Macy
CBS: Arco, Amoco Corporation, Chase Manhattan, First National Bank (Chicago), New York Life Insurance
New York Times: IBM, Bristol Myers, New York Life Insurance, Phelps Dodge, Texaco
Chicago Tribune: Allstate, Commonwealth Edison, Corning

Jonathan Kwitny [former reporter, Wall Street Journal; since deceased]: The point is, the more powerful they are, the more their interests tend to be similar. And if they control, also, the means of communications, then the more limited are the kinds of things that are going over those means of communications.

Terkel: Most editors discourage reporting which the owner of their news organization might dislike. How does the individual reporter get the message?

Bagdikian: What the journalist is told, when there’s something that doesn’t fit in, is, “Nobody’s interested in that.” And that’s, you know, it’s an acceptable reason — if it’s true.

Dedman: It happens less often that the stories are actually written and then they’re spiked. It’s really more subtle than that. You have an idea, and then the editor says, “No, I don’t think we’d be much interested in that.” And that’s all it takes.

Sydney Schanberg [former correspondent, city editor and columnist, New York Times]: It happens sort of by osmosis. There are no notes posted on the bulletin board, and senior editors usually do not tell desk editors, like the city editor, “We don’t want you to cover this. We want you to cover that instead.”

Rawls: “Gee, I don’t know. How long do you think that would take?” “Gee, I don’t know. Would you have to do any traveling?” “Gee, I don’t know. Do you — what else have you got on your plate right now?” So all of those are negative expressions to the reporter, that’s basically telling him, “There’s not a lot of enthusiasm for this.”

Cohen: Everybody plays the game. And if you’re at NBC or CBS or ABC, I don’t care where, you’re going to play whatever game exists in that news organization. And if you know that they don’t want certain kinds of stories at the top, then you’re not going to do those stories.

Terkel: Frances Cerra, an award-winning investigative reporter, ignored the cues she was getting from her editors at the New York Times to play the game.

Frances Cerra: They wanted me, supposedly, to do the same kind of consumer reporting which I had specialized in at Newsday, which was investigative reporting.

John L. Hess [former editor, New York Times]: So when you take a young reporter who’s hired full of beans, like Frances Cerra, and she wants to do a good, hard-hitting investigative reporting job, she found herself up against the editors. They were very unhappy with her.

Terkel: When she arrived at the Times, Cerra often wrote articles exposing wrongdoing at large corporations. After writing a series of investigative pieces on the insurance industry, Cerra received some editorial guidance.

Cerra: I was called in by the assistant to the executive editor and asked, “Did I have an interest in insurance?,” or “I see you have an interest in insurance.” Which was, of course, a very backhanded way of saying, “Why are you doing this?” And my answer was I thought these were very good, legitimate stories. And he let me know that they wanted to see more “news you can use” types of stories.

Hess: They wanted somebody to say where could you get a bargain in caviar; where the pickles are interesting; where the quail eggs are on sale. Arugula. And something — where to spend your money on chic products.

Cerra: I mean, it was just clear that this was — you know, that the investigative stories were not what they wanted. Just not what they wanted.

Terkel: Displeased with her work, Cerra’s editors reassigned her to Long Island. The biggest story on Long Island was the controversial Shoreham nuclear power plant, then under construction by LILCO, the Long Island Lighting Company.

Cerra: LILCO invited me — gave me my very own hard hat with my name on it, so I could tour the site.

Terkel: Cerra wrote dozens of articles regarding the controversy over the construction of the Shoreham nuclear power plant, covering Shoreham’s opponents as well as its supporters. On one side were residents of Long Island, who argued that the nuclear power plant was a threat to public safety; and that LILCO, not consumers, should pay the $5 billion cost overruns for Shoreham’s construction. On the other side, arguing that the plant was safe and the rate increase fair, stood much of New York’s business establishment. This included the New York Times, which published dozens of editorials advocating the position of the business establishment. And then, in 1982, Cerra’s editors asked her to write an update on the Shoreham project itself. The story never ran.

Cerra: So I wrote a story in which the lead was that the situation was so serious for LILCO financially that it might force them into bankruptcy. About two weeks passed, and I heard nothing, didn’t see it in the paper, so I naturally called one day to talk to my editor and say, “What gives?” And he said, “Oh, we’re not going to use that story.” “Why?” “Well, because it’s biased. You’re biased about this issue.” I said, “Well, let me come in, and I’ll go over the story with you, and anything you feel isn’t balanced, I’ll change.”

“No,” he said, “it’s beyond that point. We can’t print a story like that. It would affect LILCO’s stock.” I said, “Well?” And he said, “Furthermore, you are — you’re no longer to write about LILCO at all.” I said, “Well, LILCO is the biggest story on Long Island. How can I be the Long Island reporter and not write about LILCO? I want to speak to your boss,” essentially, is what I said. He said, “Fine, I’ll put you on with the secretary, and you can make an appointment.”

I waited a minute, and to my surprise the editor himself, who was Peter Molones, got on the phone, and his opening statement to me was, “I hear you’re causing trouble.” It went downhill from there. And he, right on the spot, said, “Fine, you are no longer assigned to Long Island. Report into the city tomorrow,” or the next day, whatever. So I was summarily yanked from that beat.

Terkel: Both the editor who killed the story and the editor who removed Cerra from the Long Island beat refused to respond on camera to Cerra’s account of the incident. As to the charge that Cerra had some sort of an axe to grind —

Hess: That’s right! The axe to grind is journalism. It’s journalism. She was trying to practice journalism, and she had a story that was a tremendous story, which is that the lifeblood of Long Island, the light company, was headed for bankruptcy because of this extravagant and incompetent investment in this nuclear power plant.

Terkel: Within a year after Cerra was pulled off Long Island, LILCO stopped issuing dividends, confirming Cerra’s report that LILCO was in serious financial trouble. In the end, Shoreham never opened. A jury found that LILCO had violated federal racketeering law, and LILCO sold the reactor to New York State for $1 to settle the racketeering suit. LILCO was then granted $3.5 billion in rate increases to help cover Shoreham’s cost overruns. This left Long Island’s consumers with the highest electricity rates in the country. As for Cerra, she waited one year for a new assignment, but she never received one. So Cerra resigned from the New York Times and abandoned her career in journalism.

Cerra: I came to understand that freedom of the press is only guaranteed when you own the press. This was something I learned from the New York Times.

Terkel: Balanced reporting on the nuclear power industry is difficult at all major news organizations. Peter Graumann covered the controversy over building a radioactive waste facility in Ward Valley, near Needles, California. He found that he could get only half the story on PBS’s MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour.

Peter Graumann: There was a movement of tremendous concern over whether this low-level waste dump would be safe; how long it would be safe; what kind of design should be put on this; and whether in fact it should be built at all. And that’s what this story looked at.

Senior Woman [in film clip]: Needles has always been a safe and a healthy place to live, especially to raise children. But it’s no longer going to be a fact if this radioactive waste dump is allowed to come in. So we just need everybody to help us and to stop this thing. We do not want it!

Terkel: Like Shoreham, which Frances Cerra had covered, the Ward Valley facility was strongly supported by the nuclear power industry and the government; and strongly opposed by local citizens and environmental groups. And, like Frances Cerra’s stories on Shoreham, Graumann’s story on the waste facility included facts cited by the project’s opponents as well as its supporters.

Graumann: I was shocked, when I saw the piece on the air, to see how much it was cut.

Terkel: When Graumann’s story aired on January 8, 1992, the segment which described the proposed storage facility had been deleted.

Voice-Over [from deleted footage]: The operation at Ward Valley will be similar to the Nevada dump. Unlined pits are filled with barrels containing low-level wastes. The hazardous lives of these wastes range from a few months to millions of years. The trenches are covered with dirt. Monitoring wells are drilled around the perimeter to detect leaks.

Graumann: You know, I can’t imagine why, in a story about a nuclear waste dump, that you would cut the part of the story that talks about what, physically, the dump is, which is the basis for a lot of the controversy: whether this should be above ground or underground; whether this will be in unlined pits — just holes in the ground — as is in fact being proposed — or whether one would use some other kind of technology to try to contain the waste. I mean, that’s the crux of the story.

Terkel: The story originally reported leaks of radioactive materials at other waste storage sites, including those run by U.S. Ecology, the operator of the proposed Ward Valley site. This section was also deleted by MacNeil-Lehrer.

Voice-Over [from deleted footage]: The radioactive waste dump at West Valley, New York, was closed in 1972 after liquid waste leaked into the surrounding soil. The cleanup may cost the taxpayers billions. At Maxey Flats, Kentucky, rainwater seeped in and spread dangerous isotopes around the site. The state took over the dump from U.S. Ecology in 1977. Maxey Flats is now on the federal Superfund clean-up list. The dump at Sheffield, Illinois was shut down in 1978 after radioactive tritium was found to have migrated to an adjoining stream and lake. The state of Illinois sued U.S. Ecology to block it from abandoning the site, and forced the company to pay several million dollars for the cleanup.

Terkel: The editor who made the cuts for MacNeil-Lehrer refused an on-camera interview.

Graumann: I came to the realization that the effect of the editing was to make the local residents around Ward Valley look like complete kooks, complete anti-technology nuts. The editing removed any foundation for their suspicions. It removed any context. All of the examples of other places, other dumps, that had leaked — virtually all of that was cut out. And the result was to completely reinforce the government, which is endorsing this, and the big companies that are trying to build it.

Ralph Nader: Nuclear power means Westinghouse, General Electric, the local electric company, all their P.R., all their advertising. It’s a huge industry.

Terkel: This means that serious threats to public safety and the environment often go unreported.

Robert Pollard [Union of Concerned Scientists]: Most of the press coverage is — this particular valve failed. The utility says it’s not a problem, it didn’t mean anything, nobody’s dead. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission perhaps saying they’re going to investigate. And that’s the end of it.

Connie Chung [film clip, CBS, 11/24/91]: Radioactive gases are being released today from a South Carolina nuclear plant. Officials at Ocony Nuclear Power Plant in Seneca say the release is the first step in yesterday’s leak of contaminated water. Officials say there is no health threat.

Terkel: Since the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island, two U.S. nuclear power plants have suffered a loss of electrical power: accidents whose seriousness the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ranked just below a nuclear core meltdown. A meltdown is a Chernobyl-type accident which could kill thousands of people and render entire regions uninhabitable.

Pollard: If you look at the analyses of all the possible ways in which a major meltdown accident could occur in some plant designs, of the total causes of accidents, station blackout is the highest-likelihood event. More than 90 percent of the total risk of a major accident comes precisely from loss of electrical power.

Terkel: NBC, ABC and most newspapers didn’t even report the accidents. CBS distinguished itself with the following report on one of the accidents.

Dan Rather [film clip, CBS, 8/13/91]: In Oswego, New York officials at a nuclear power plant declared the second-highest state of emergency after an alarm system broke down. There was no release of radiation. In Berlin —

Michael Gartner: Nuclear power is one of the many things in the world that I don’t know anything about. It’s also one of the things that, when it comes to matters of great interest to the public, it’s not high on the list of subjects you want to devote much time to in a 22-minute newscast in the evening.

Terkel: Is it really fear of boring the public that prevents the press from covering the nuclear power industry effectively?

Nader: I think people have shown, and the polls have shown, that consumer news, environmental news, news about abuse of power — whether it’s Watergate or a local scandal in City Hall, or local corporate shenanigans — are of great appeal to people. They want to know what’s going on. They want to be alerted.

Bagdikian: You know, the newspaper and the news broadcast industry are a combination of a cathedral and a bank. The cathedral has this kind of religious obligation to tell the public what each member of the public needs most to know, right? And the bank’s side is it’s a free enterprise. It’s supposed to be in there for profit, and it does whatever it can. But they’re supposed to be separate. And increasingly the bank’s been taking over the altar and the pews, and involving the preachers into making money. And that’s changing everything.

Terkel: Newspapers earn 75 percent of their revenues from ads. And for broadcast outlets, it’s 100 percent. Yet some industry representatives insist that the press doesn’t slant news to satisfy advertisers.

Jay Smith: I’m not going to kid you. I mean, there have been moments I’ve had very difficult discussions. But invariably, the people who run businesses are also fair-minded. They understand that if we were to sugar-coat or to ignore or to avoid that tough reporting, we’d lose credibility very quickly with the readers, those same readers that they hope to reach through the ads they buy in our paper.

Terkel: Are advertisers invariably fair-minded? Consider what happened at the San Jose Mercury-News in 1994, after the paper ran an article about buying a car and an auto dealer’s profit margins.

Headline [San Jose Mercury-News, 6/30/94]: “Angry Auto Dealers Pull Ads from Mercury-News. They withdrew 52 pages of ads after saying a newspaper story depicted them as dishonest profiteers.”

Terkel: The Mercury-News tried to woo back the dealers by publishing its own full-page ad in the paper, encouraging readers to buy cars from factory-authorized dealers. Most of the dealers then resumed advertising in the paper.

Hess: A self-respecting editor won’t allow an advertiser to come around telling him what to do or what not to do — most of the time. But it doesn’t work so much the other way. More and more, the editor considers the demographics. At the [New York] Times, when they started calling the paper “the product,” and they’re considering that they want to make a pitch to the upper-middle class, and they direct their copy in that manner.

Cerra: At least when I was at the New York Times, there was no reporter assigned to Brooklyn. There was no reporter assigned to the Bronx. I mean, you’re talking about cities, you know, what in other parts of the country are entire cities, that had no reporter assigned to those entire areas.

Sydney Schanberg [former correspondent, city editor and columnist, New York Times]: Every time I wanted to assign a reporter to cover the Bronx, I was told that that was a bad idea. Which meant that in order to do it, I would have had to defy the executive editor.

Sydney Gruson [former vice-president, New York Times Corporation]: If I’ve given the impression, which I didn’t mean to, that there is no commercial pressure on news departments — there is. There always is. And I’m not sure it’s wrong for advertising/business departments to bring this pressure. It is up to the news departments to resist the pressure. That they do so, to a greater or lesser extent, depends on the news department; depends on the editors involved; and depends a great deal on the support the editors get from the publisher of the newspaper.

Bagdikian: The staff says, “Listen, we’re ignoring the lower economic half of our community in terms of picking news that they — that affects them.” They could get a few stories in, but they aren’t going to make a major shift, because that’s bad for the demographics of advertising. They want the affluent consumers. And they also don’t like the kind of news that will affect the lower half of income in the American population, because that will begin to affect corporate tax and regulatory laws which are now highly favorable to the owning corporations.

Terkel: The Public Broadcasting System is supposed to be immune from corporate pressure, and PBS does occasionally air hard-hitting news programs. The half-hour weekly Kwitny Report, which first aired in 1988, was such a program. Produced by former Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitny, the show frequently exposed hidden skeletons in the closets of the powerful.

Kwitny: WETA in Washington and WNET in New York both welcomed us, invited us to come produce out of their studios, and would feed us to the system which wanted to broadcast us. The trick is that in order to do that, you have to pay them for those studios. They expect you to go out and raise the money, which means getting underwriting from corporations.

Nader: They are heavily based on local business donations, national corporate donations like AT&T and IBM, and also corporate foundations. And they have clipped their wings, and they’re as much subject to self-censorship as the commercial media.

Terkel: Shows such as this one, which examined the U.S. links to Guatemala’s dictatorship, did not endear The Kwitny Report to corporate sponsors.

Kwitny [voice-over film clip]: Guatemala. Thirty-five years after we intervened in that then-peaceful and democratic country, human rights groups say Guatemala runs on state-sponsored murder, torture and pillage of property from the destitute millions. And just as American business had spearheaded the overthrow of Arbenz in 1954, it was deeply involved in the new repression.

Speaker [source shown on the Kwitny Report]: In all, there were more than a dozen American firms where workers attempting to organize unions were assassinated. At the Coca-Cola plant, more than a dozen workers were assassinated.

Kwitny: The public-affairs shows are funded by corporations who want certain views put forward. Take a guy like John McLaughlin — bear him no animosity — but what kind of reporting credentials? He was a kind of cantankerous editor of a conservative publication, the National Review. I don’t know of a single story he broke, or a reporting award he ever won. But the head of GE loved McLaughlin to such a degree that they gave him three — not one, which is all I ever wanted; not two; but three national television shows, because he was saying the kinds of things that the number two defense contractor and major corporation would like to have said on television. And they could spend out of their pockets as much as it took to put him on.

Terkel: After its second year, in which it won the prestigious Polk Award for investigative journalism, The Kwitny Report went off the air because it could not secure corporate funding.

Kwitny: I’d like to see just some hard-nosed reporting who doesn’t care who it hurts, and is just going after whoever is in power, because that’s our job, is to watch people in power.

Schanberg: Publishers are always going to be nervous with reporters who are determined to get at the insides of a story, because sometimes that will co-opt the establishment.

Terkel: For many years, Sydney Schanberg had enjoyed an extraordinary career at the New York Times. He started in 1959 as a clerk, and quickly advanced to foreign correspondent. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the genocide in Cambodia [the inspiration for the film The Killing Fields, in which Sam Waterston played Schanberg], and in 1976 Schanberg was promoted once again, this time to city editor. Yet even though he had become one of the most respected journalists in the country, Schanberg ran into the same walls that other journalists run into when he tried to practice his aggressive brand of reporting at home.

Schanberg: I just knew I was unhappy, because I was involved in an arm-wrestling match every day. You can’t come into work and know that you’re going to be defeated, or you’re going to have to fight every day just to get little increments of the things you want in the paper. You’re not going to get the big stuff.

Hess: I was fighting the desk to try to continue a really marvelously rich story of municipal corruption, and I was having increasing difficulty getting it into the paper. And Sydney took me aside and said, “You know, John, the trouble with you is you’re trying to cover New York as if you were still a foreign correspondent.” So I said, “What’s wrong with that?” He said, “Well, John, when you and I were overseas we could write, ‘This government is a corrupt government.’ But you can’t say that the government of New York is corrupt.” He meant that the editors would not tolerate it.

Terkel: In 1980, the Times removed Schanberg from the city desk and gave him an urban-affairs column, “New York.”

Schanberg: It was really a column about the uses of power: who had it in the city, what they did with it, how they abused it, those that used it well, those that used it to exclude people from having power.

Terkel: In one column, Schanberg criticized the lack of press coverage of scandals concerning the Westway project, a proposed multi-billion dollar underground freeway for the West Side of Manhattan. The project, which would have opened very lucrative investment opportunities for New York’s most powerful real estate developers, had been backed by New York real estate magnates, the governor, the mayor — and the New York Times.

Schanberg: The newspapers in this city didn’t have time or space to cover it. But they had plenty of time and space to cover frivolous stories, such as Paul Prudhomme opening up a cholesterol-ridden restaurant on the Upper West Side. Although I didn’t mention the New York Times in that column, it was implicit that the Times was part of the newspaper scene that I was criticizing. In fact, central to it.

Terkel: That column turned out to be Schanberg’s last.

Schanberg: What did they imagine that I was going to write about? It was the same kinds of things that I wasn’t being allowed to cover as city editor.

Hess: I find that the paper finds it very hard to tolerate this kind of hard, controversial journalism about the people that they — that the publisher is eating with every day.

Gruson: Well, Sydney had a very shrill column. And that was all right, but Sydney at one point went farther than I thought, or anybody else thought, was necessary for us to accept when he in effect implied that the Times itself was venal. Now, if you want to call the Times venal, that’s one thing. But I don’t think it’s proper to do it as a member of the staff. And that was, in effect, a very brief account of what led to Sydney’s departure from the paper.

Terkel: As to the message his departure from the Times conveyed to other journalists, Schanberg would only say:

Schanberg: I can’t imagine that it sent out anything more than a chilling suggestion that if you followed in Schanberg’s journalistic footsteps, the same thing could happen to you.

Terkel: Whatever the issue, whether it’s nuclear power or a freeway project, if the reporting doesn’t fit the establishment view, a journalist’s career is on the line. So most reporters didn’t ask questions when the President of the United States decided to go to war with Iraq.

Richard Cohen: When the Bush drumbeat started, the press picked it up. And the press held on to that and was very supportive of the President, and never questioned the wisdom of sending this massive number of troops to Saudi Arabia.

Dan Rather [film clip, CBS, 8/8/90]: President Bush went on nationwide radio and television early this morning to explain to the American public, in simple, direct, heartfelt language, why he decided to send U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia and what he believes is at stake.

Peter Jennings [film clip, ABC, 8/15/90]: In Washington today, President Bush was meeting with his military strategists at the Pentagon, where he also told the American people that “their way of life is at stake” in the Persian Gulf.

President George H. W. Bush [film clip, 11/2/90]: We cannot compromise with brutal, naked aggression. We cannot permit one country to bully a neighbor and take it over without making ’em pay the price.

Terkel: Yet there was reason to believe that the administration had other purposes in mind, and this is what the press left out.

Admiral Eugene Carroll [U.S. Navy, retired]: We were not seeking a resolution by non-violent means. We were going to seek a military outcome. And the buildup that began in September was not for defensive purposes at all. It was to create the offensive capabilities capable of moving against Iraq.

Joel Beinin [professor of history, Stanford University]: Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait removed the Sabakh family from power, and they were and are extremely close to the United States.

Terkel: The Sabakh family is not only close to the U.S. government, it is also close to a number of major corporations.

Slides: Kuwaiti Investments in the U.S.:
Stocks and Bonds: $20 billion: managed by Citibank, J. P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley
Santa Fe International: $2.5 billion
Georgetown Industries: $850 million
Atlanta Hilton: $185 million

Beinin: The Sabakh family really is more concerned with its investments in London and New York than it was with the production of oil per se, because the regime had already, by the time of the Iraq invasion of Kuwait, been making more money from its investments in Western stock markets than it was from the sale of oil.

Terkel: By using U.S. military force to remove Iraq from Kuwait, the Bush administration assured the return of the Sabakh family dictatorship to power in Kuwait.

Beinin: The basic purpose of the Gulf War, as I see it, was to establish a Pax Americana in the Middle East and to make the point that the United States is the ultimate arbiter of all things of any significance in the region.

Chanting [film clip of anti-Gulf War protest]: Hell no, we won’t go! We won’t fight for Texaco!

Terkel: There was a debate over whether the administration was telling the truth about its reasons for going to war. But it wasn’t in the press. Evidence that the administration was seeking to display U.S. military power, or to perpetuate a Middle East run by compliant dictatorships, was virtually excluded from the news. Instead, the press often seemed to be doing public relations for the war.

Cohen: By the time the troop buildup occurred in Saudi Arabia, you saw news organizations doing bumpers of troops waving and saying, “Hi, Mom! I’m so-and-so from such-and-such a place,” which is what NBC did.

Servicemember [film clip, NBC, 8/23/90]: I just want to say hi to my folks in Massachusetts; my grandmother in Ohio; and my grandparents in New Hampshire. I look forward to seeing you when I get home, and we’re all well here in paradise.

Cohen: And it was jingoism, and it was very implicitly saying, “We support the troops. We think this is the right thing to do.” I mean, WCBS radio here in New York was organizing letter-writing campaigns to the troops. What are news organizations doing that for? I mean, news organizations should have been asking questions — asking tough questions — about what was going on in the Gulf.

Tom Brokaw [film clip, NBC, 1/17/91]: American cruise missiles and waves of bombers. War by night and by day. President Bush says it will not stop until Iraq gives up Kuwait.

Announcer: This is NBC Nightly News, with Tom Brokaw. Tonight, America at war.

Brokaw: Good evening. Operation Desert Storm rages on. The bombing in Iraq began 24 hours ago. It is still going on, and more and more bombs are being dropped.

Peter Jennings [film clip, ABC, 1/17/91]: Gary Shepherd, ABC’s Gary Shepherd, was on the phone to us from Baghdad. The night sky, he was saying, was lighting up like a hundred Fourth of July’s.

Correspondent [film clip, CBS, 1/17/91]: One of the first shots fired was this: a cruise missile launched from an American warship in the Persian Gulf.

Carroll: We were inundated with nightly examples of how smart we were and how smart our weapons were. Only seven percent of the weapons were so-called “smart weapons” that could be aimed with precision, and not all of those performed successfully.

Gruson: The coverage of the war, of the Gulf War, was certainly one-sided. But that had less to do with the newspapers than it had to do with the U.S. military. The military set the rules for coverage, the papers went — maybe even went too far to go along with the rules. But they had very little choice.

Terkel: When the government announced its restriction on journalists’ access to U.S. troops, Sydney Schanberg and a handful of individuals and small news organizations challenged the restrictions in court as a violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of the press.

Schanberg: The purpose of the lawsuit was to show that this was a political decision; that these controls, the motive was political. They weren’t going to allow us even to take pictures of bodies being brought home to the Dover Air Force Base mortuary. What did that have to do with putting men at risk? Nothing whatsoever. What did that have to do with security? Nothing. It was simply to control the words and images of the war.

Terkel: Neither the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS nor any other large news organization joined the lawsuit.

Schanberg: Not only did they refuse to join in or file amicus curiae briefs, but you’ll look hard and long before you will find any coverage of this lawsuit.

Terkel: The major news organizations didn’t cover the lawsuit, nor did they show much interest in covering anything else about the war that the government didn’t want reported. Jon Alpert had received six Emmy Awards for his reporting.

Jon Alpert: You know, one day I was watching TV, like every other American was, about the war. And I was watching one of these briefings, and there was an officer standing up there, and he was showing the reporters a videotape of some bomb or missile coming right in at its target, laser-guided, pinpoint accuracy.

And one of the reporters in the audience, I guess, had enough courage to get up and ask, “Well, gee, officer, we’ve seen only 100 percent accuracy. But do you have any knowledge at all of any missile or any bomb that might have missed its target? Just one?” And the guy said, “Nope. I don’t have any information about that at all. Nope. Don’t think so.” So I said, “Gee, this is — you know, I’ve been to about 10 wars. That’s ludicrous. They’re not telling the truth.” And it’s the job of the reporters to find out what the truth is.

Terkel: Jon Alpert and Mary Andolino were the first American reporters to provide uncensored footage of the effects of the bombing of Iraq during the Persian Gulf War.

Alpert: Well, right away on the road, you began to see evidence of destruction from the war, the vehicles that had been hit. Every city that we went to had no electricity, had no telephones, had no running water. We saw evidence of very, very accurate pinpoint bombing. And then we saw evidences of what appeared to be extreme inaccuracy. For example, in Basra, we saw residential neighborhoods that were just wiped out.

[Alpert interview of English-speaking Iraqi woman from his footage:]

Alpert: Your family was hurt? Your father was hurt?

Woman: Yes.

Alpert: What happened to your father?

Woman: His leg is broken, and his hand, and his whole face —

Alpert: Burned up?

Woman: No face. No eyes or anything.

[End of film clip.]

Alpert: The Iraqis wanted very much to bottle us up and to spoon-feed us. It wasn’t easy, but we beat them. And we were able to get around their attempts to control us, and were able to see and record what maybe they didn’t want us to see, but we thought was the truth. So we won that contest in Iraq. But unfortunately, when we got back to the United States, we lost because we couldn’t get it on the air.

Anyone who saw the tape realized its value and knew that it would make a good contribution to their news broadcast from a selfish standpoint, but also it was information that nobody else had. Everyone did want it broadcast — except Michael Gartner.

Terkel: Michael Gartner was president of NBC News at the time.

Gartner: He was a man with a cause and a mission, and I didn’t believe that that cause and that mission fit the overall belief of NBC News. He staged an event when he was doing something for NBC News, and he engaged in practices that I didn’t believe were principled or appropriate for any journalist.

Terkel: The event Gartner was referring to was in 1989, when Alpert arrived late to a flag-raising and shot a re-enactment. Asked why he’d waited two years to spike one of Alpert’s stories, and to fire him on the spot, Gartner answered:

Gartner: I simply don’t trust him, and I have to trust — I have to trust the people whose material I put on the air. I must — I don’t have to like them, but I have to trust them. And I didn’t trust him.

Terkel: As for the accuracy of Alpert’s story, after the cease-fire independent observers confirmed that the war had devastated Iraq’s civilian population. An international medical team went into Iraq and estimated that 175,000 children would die as a result of the war, far more than any estimate of the number of Iraqi soldiers killed in battle. The press provided scant coverage of the war’s impact on Iraq’s civilians. The victory celebrations, however, were not ignored.

Correspondent [film clip, ABC, 6/8/91]: A national victory celebration in the nation’s capital. The manpower and machinery of Operation Desert Storm.

Brokaw [film clip, NBC, 6/10/91]: Almost five million in New York cheer the triumph of Operation Desert Storm.

Correspondent [film clip, CBS, 6/10/91]: The Patriot missile got the loudest applause of the day.

Correspondent [film clip, CBS, 6/8/91]: A day for the heroes of Desert Storm to strut their stuff.

Correspondent [film clip, NBC, 6/10/91]: Lower Broadway, the financial district. A canyon created by money was again a canyon of heroes.

Dan Rather [film clip, CBS, ]: Again, congratulations on a job well done.

Terkel: Was the war against Iraq really necessary? Will the next war be? In a democracy, we need a free flow of information to decide such questions: not only about war, but about nuclear power, economic policy, government corruption and all the other issues which affect our daily lives. But if journalists cannot freely report news which disturbs the wealthy and the powerful, then we’ll learn only what the big boys want us to learn — and they’ll make our political decisions for us.

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