Darts--May/June 2000

May/June 2000 | Contents

The Darts & Laurels column is written by Gloria Cooper, cjr's managing editor, to whom nominations should be addressed.

CAUSE FOR CONCERN

Like the Today show's Katie Couric, who was moved by her husband's death from colon cancer to anchor an exemplary public service series about the disease, television reporter Jodi Brooks of WPMI, the NBC affiliate in Mobile, Alabama, has also been inspired by personal experience to pursue an admirable, though somewhat less Laurel-worthy, crusade. Couric's series (March 6-10) objectively reported on the research, treatment, and most emphatically, prevention of colon cancer through early detection -- underscored by Couric's own unglamorous, on-air colonoscopy; Brooks has been covering a county-wide program in which participating hospitals agree to take in unwanted newborns, no questions asked. But Brooks's attention to that humane story is journalistically problematic. The "Secret Safe Place for Babies" program is, in fact, her very own brainchild (conceived after too many assignments to "dumpster baby" cases), which she promotes around the country. Further, her newborns program (which is not without its critics) enlists the cooperation of a state agency better held at arms length. Most questionable of all is her partnership with district attorney John Tyson, Jr., whose promise not to prosecute mothers, so long as the baby is unharmed, is crucial to her program's success. To borrow from Justice Holmes's observation about the law: great stories can make bad journalism. Alas.

THE INSIDERS

Journalists entrusted with material alleging serious, let alone sensational, wrongdoing do not, as a rule, kindly hand that material off to the alleged wrongdoers. An unlikely exception has recently come to light: Don Hewitt, executive producer of CBS's 60 Minutes. As revealed by Alfred Lubrano in a sidebar to his two-part series (March 12, 13) in The Philadelphia Inquirer -- a series almost too painful to read -- it all began in l998, when James Neal, the plaintiff's lawyer in a medical malpractice and research-fraud suit against two celebrity gynecologists, Camran Nezhat and his brother Farr, sent his records to Hewitt in the hope of interesting him in a 60 Minutes investigation. In 1999, Neal followed up with more material -- a list of doctors who were potential witnesses against the brothers -- but he again failed to engage Hewitt's professional interest. Hewitt's personal interest, however, was another story: his wife was among the Nezhats's satisfied patients, and Hewitt had quietly forwarded some, if not all (he says he can't recall exactly) of the lawyer's material directly on to them. ("I did it because he [Camran Nezhat] is a friend of the family's and because he's our doctor," Hewitt told the Inquirer's Lubrano and cjr.) Not surprisingly, the damaging documents wound up in the hands of the Nezhats' attorney, with disturbing results: that attorney wrote to each of those potential witnesses, sending along a copy of a letter from an official at Stanford University, where the Nezhats are based, to another doctor there who was critical of the Nezhats, threatening him with a defamation suit. It was a message, one legal ethicist told the Inquirer, that came "awfully close to threatening witnesses." Meanwhile, Hewitt, getting wind of Lubrano's pursuit of the Nezhats saga, felt compelled to phone the Inquirer and praise their work. Too bad we won't be seeing any of this on 60 Minutes -- or, for that matter, on 20/20, which earlier uncritically profiled the controversial Camran Nezhat and to whose executive producer, Meredith White, Neal sent copies of the very same material he sent to Hewitt. It seems that White is also a loyal patient (to whom the Nezhats dedicated a book). Small world, isn't it?

COMPROMISING POSITIONS

Early this year, Canada's three largest newspapers fell into bed with the country's Reform party. One by one, Conrad Black's National Post, Thomson's Globe and Mail, and the independently owned Toronto Star had been seduced by a heady proposition: the papers would get an "exclusive" advance copy of a bombshell letter to party members from Reform leader Preston Manning in which he threatened to resign if they did not endorse his plan to combine their party with the Progressive-Conservatives; in exchange, the papers had to promise that they would report the story straight, unadulterated by reaction, comment, or criticism. There was no apparent resistance. Only The Toronto Sun, whose liberal leanings rendered it literally unapproachable, escaped with its journalistic virtue intact.

COME-HITHER NEWS

In the Sunday, February 20, edition of the Butte, Montana, Standard, standards were barely evident. The broadsheet devoted the entire front page of its life-style section (plus another twenty column-inches inside) to a gratuitous glorification of the striptease in general and of the local "Billy Rays gentlemen's exotic dancing club" in particular. Fetchingly illustrated -- a twelve-inch-high, four-color photo featured the bare-breasted, g-stringed, lesbian "Rachel" bumping and grinding her "serpentine body" into a pole on-stage; another showed a close-up of her well-filled garter stuffed with dollars collected from the "upscale . . . clientele" of truckers and regulars -- the piece wasn't shy about plugging Billy Rays's other attractions, either (its "live dancing, video gaming, liquor, and food," "tasteful décor," "understated elegance," and "ideal" location), not to mention its hours ("Tuesday through Saturday nights") and its openings for the kind of classy dancers ("I'm not some street whore turning tricks," said one) starring in the story. In an apology two days later, Standard publisher Jim Filiaggi agreed with the "overwhelming negative" readers' response. "If we had this to do over again," he wrote, "we would not have run the story."