by Lawrence K. Grossman
Lawrence K. Grossman, a former president of NBC News and PBS, is a regular columnist for CJR.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who’s worried about becoming a victim of the press. What do you do to fight back? Now there’s a powerful new online weapon you can deploy that even the press should cheer. It’s better than battling a lawsuit.

Last October, one company made an audacious and original preemptive strike against ABC News. That company was Metabolife International, which markets a phenomenally popular but controversial herbal diet pill. ABC News’s 20/20 had spent four months looking into claims that Metabolife’s weight loss pill can cause severe and harmful side effects. Anticipating that the 20/20 report would be hostile, the company decided to beat ABC News to the punch.

Media-savvy interviewees often tape their interviews with reporters as a way to check the accuracy of the excerpts the press chooses to use. On a special Web site, www.newsinterview.com, Metabolife posted its complete transcript and video of the seventy-minute interview with its president, Michael Ellis, that 20/20 correspondent Arnold Diaz had conducted in preparation for his story. To tout the existence of newsinterview.com, Metabolife bought full-page ads in The New York Times and New York Post and ran radio commercials across the country. The company also made sure to alert newspaper TV critics to its path-breaking strategy of using the Internet to challenge a story that had not yet run. Posting online the complete TV interview, along with additional “supporting information,” prior to the story’s appearance on the air was a new and intriguing public relations ploy.

Viewers were asked to watch the 20/20 investigative report in light of the information the company had made available, and to vote for whether they thought it was “balanced or unbalanced.” (Note that Metabolife didn’t ask if the story was fair or accurate, only if it was “balanced.” The online voters split down the middle, according to the company.)

The Internet strategy had been devised “as a last resort,” says p.r. consultant Michael Sitrik, because he had reason to believe his client was about to get clobbered by ABC News. Two weeks before 20/20 called Metabolife to ask for an interview with its president, the network’s Boston affiliate, WCVB, had carried a damaging story about the diet pill. WCVB quoted a doctor who alleged that people could die from Metabolife diet pills’ harmful side effects, a quote Sitrik insisted was taken out of context. What the doctor actually said, according to Sitrik, was, “if you abuse the product,” the Metabolife diet pill could cause serious side effects. “Abuse any product, even the most harmless, and it can be harmful,” Sitrik says. “Editing out the doctor’s comment was misleading, and in view of what happened in Boston we turned to the Internet to let the public in on ABC’s editorial process instead of letting ABC edit the piece behind closed doors.” Both Sitrik and Ellis are convinced their Web site strategy made the ABC News investigative report fairer and more balanced than it otherwise would have been.

As it turned out, 20/20 used only three minutes of Diaz’s seventy-minute interview with Ellis, who designed the diet pill. But Diaz did bring out the fact that the Metabolife president, an ex-police officer with a criminal conviction for drug trafficking, has no medical or scientific training, which Ellis in the interview admitted was true. That may help explain why Metabolife was perhaps not really as eager as it claimed to be to have the millions of people who clicked on its Web site actually read or watch the unedited, uncut interview. Certainly the imposition of onerous pre-conditions — including the threat of an “Improper Conduct service fee” — did not encourage the curious.

20/20 executive producer Victor Neufeld and ABC News president David Westin insist that Metabolife’s use of the Internet did not affect the story in any way. For Neufeld, what Metabolife did “was a non-event that may even have helped our ratings slightly.” ABC News president Westin did suggest, though, that in the future ABC may seek to prohibit interviewees from going public with their interviews before they are broadcast, a dubious restriction for the press to advocate since it would prevent people from using their own words as they see fit.

Some journalism pooh-bahs — apostles of the old saw that “everybody’s business is the business of the press but the business of the press is nobody’s business” — were critical of Metabolife’s use of the Internet. Shelby Coffey, then executive vice president of ABC News, now president of CNN/fn, told The New York Times last fall, “We don’t want other people attempting to get into and shift the journalism process.” But if “other people” have a stake in the outcome, why shouldn’t they get into the journalism process? What’s wrong with putting one’s own version of the facts online to counter a news report that might be unfair and damaging?

ABC News’s veteran editorial standards and practices consultant Richard C. Wald, now Fred W. Friendly Professor of Media and Society at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, called Metabolife’s Internet strategy, “a not-so-subtle form of intimidation.” Wald is undoubtedly right; the strategy seems to have had more to do with planting the idea that the 20/20 piece was likely to be unbalanced than with truly informing the public about the facts.

Once, fisticuffs and dueling pistols were thought to be the most efficient way to gain redress against an offending press. Later, libel and defamation suits became the prime weapons of choice. In recent times, however, although plaintiffs often succeed in winning multimillion-dollar jury verdicts against media defendants after long and costly trials, most of those verdicts routinely get overturned by judges on appeal. So aggrieved parties continue to search for new and speedier tactics to counter what they view as damaging or unfair treatment by the press.

Regardless of Metabolife’s possible motives in this instance –– and at the risk of receiving self-interested and possibly misleading information –– the tactic of going online rather than going to court has much to recommend it. The Internet lets aggrieved parties get their own stories out directly to the public. It offers a more constructive, less expensive, and faster alternative than a libel or defamation suit. It’s a tactic that shouldn’t muzzle legitimate news stories, stop good reporters from investigating real problems, or threaten to bankrupt the press as many lawsuits do. It’s a way of arming viewers and readers with more information than they’d otherwise get. It enables people to look over the shoulders of reporters to check the accuracy and fairness of what is being reported. And it helps make the editorial processes of the press more open and transparent than ever before.

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