WHERE
TV HAS TEETH
Television does fewer probes than in the
past,
but the best of them are choice
BY
NEIL HICKEY
When
corruption rears its ghostly head, who you gonna call?
Scambusters!
For a half-century -- first during the great age of tough,
single-subject, hour-long investigative documentaries (CBS
Reports, NBC White Paper, ABC Close-Up), and
now in newsmagazines and newscasts -- television has exposed the
iniquitous, unmasked the unscrupulous, ambushed the guilty, shamed
the greedy, and censured the mendacious. An informal survey of
televised investigations indicates that the form is alive and
healthy at local stations around the U.S. and at the national
TV networks. That's the good news. The bad news is that by most
estimates there's measurably less of it than there used to be
-- and some of it is less "investigative" than small-bore consumer
reporting.
"No
other form of broadcast journalism generates more reaction, both
negative and positive," Av Westin, a former executive producer
of 20/20, writes in his handbook Best Practices for
Television Journalists. It's the type of news programming
viewers respond to the most, says Carl Gottlieb, deputy director
of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Focus groups tell
PEJ "in no uncertain terms" that they like the idea of crusading
reporters who'll stand up for the community, go where they can't,
and ask the questions they can't.
Recent
examples of good work abound. A random sample:
*
KHOU, Houston: "Treading on Danger?" -- Faulty Firestone tires
on Ford Explorers that caused hundreds of injuries and fatalities.
*
KXLY, Spokane: "Public Funds, Private Profit" -- Questionable
bookkeeping and misuse of funds for a city parking garage.
*
WCPO, Cincinnati: "I-Team Stadium Investigation" -- Shoddy planning
and conflicts of interest in a billion-dollar plan to build two
new stadiums.
*
WMAQ, Chicago: "Strip Searched at O'Hare" -- Invasive searches
of women by customs officials at O'Hare International Airport.
*
CBS Evening News: "Armed America" -- Law enforcement agencies
selling weapons, legally but unwisely, to arms dealers.
*
Dateline NBC: "The Paper Chase" -- Insurance companies
forging doctors' signatures, and citing non-existent databases
in support of their decisions to deny claims.
*
KCBS, Los Angeles: "California's Billion Dollar Rip-Off" -- Clinics
billing the state of California for health care never given.
*
WFAA, Dallas: "Costly Credit: The Investigation of First USA"
-- Credit card customers victimized by dishonest accounting procedures.
*
KTVC, Salt Lake City: "Olympics Bribery Scandal" -- Rampant corruption
and bribery within the International Olympics Committee.
*
WTVF, Nashville: "Feed the Children Investigation" -- Wholesale
theft of food and clothing intended for the needy at a Feed the
Children warehouse.
Some
stations have especially mature I-teams. WMAQ's, for example,
founded in 1978, has won scores of awards (including more than
a dozen local Emmys, plus a Peabody and three duPonts). Over one
six-month period in 1996, the team reported more than forty stories
that resulted in freedom for four innocent men who'd spent eighteen
years in prison. Its strip search story inspired a federal class
action suit and prompted both Illinois senators to demand an expanded
scrutiny of the Customs Service in all international U.S. airports.
Renee Ferguson, a top investigator at the station, says that Chicago
viewers have high interest in the I-team's efforts, even though
most watch television merely to be entertained. "It's as if you
went to the dentist's office to have your teeth whitened," Ferguson
says, "and I come along and want to give you a root canal."
Stations
and networks have no monopoly on televised investigations: one
of TV's most vigorous I-teams is at Inside Edition, owned
by the powerhouse syndicator King World Productions (Wheel
of Fortune, Jeopardy!, The Oprah Winfrey Show).
Inside Edition won a George Polk award in 1996 for an investigation
of door-to-door insurance salespeople and how they preyed on the
elderly and poor. Another looked at defective door latches on
Chrysler mini-vans that allowed rear hatches to fly open in minor
accidents, endangering passengers. (King World is now part of
the CBS/Viacom empire, but Robert Read, who runs Inside Edition's
investigative unit, says he has felt no interference. "There's
always a question when you get swallowed up by a big corporation,"
he acknowledges, "but we really are left alone.")
Investigative
stories at networks and stations are not always acts of pure altruism
and civic high-mindedness. The biggest and most eye-catching customarily
go on the air during sweeps periods, preceded by a barrage of
publicity and promotion in the effort to grab huge audiences and
thus boost advertising rates. And what too often passes for investigative
reporting is more properly consumer reporting, or what some TV
folk call "fear and loathing reporting" -- exposés of crooked
auto repairmen, diet-and-exercise fallacies, harmful cosmetics,
sex shops, money scams, fortune tellers, tainted meat, faulty
elevators -- where the object is to scare viewers into watching.
Nevertheless, much investigative stuff -- the trivial as well
as the portentous -- regularly triggers new legislation, judicial
action, and regulatory alarm.
In
Atlanta, station WSB and the Journal-Constitution -- both
owned by Cox Enterprises, Inc. -- operate an extraordinarily fruitful,
joint investigative unit that has mounted a series of impressive
probes. Most recently, in a report that ran simultaneously on
newscasts and in the paper, it scrutinized the driving and criminal
records of the state's school bus drivers and discovered a pattern
of derelictions that led to a state task force, and the firing
of more than forty drivers. In a study of felons in the classroom,
it found that more than 5,000 teachers had criminal records, resulting
in legislation that went into effect in July requiring teachers
in K-12 schoolrooms to undergo criminal checks. And during November's
elections, the unit identified 13,000 dead people whose names
were still on the voting rolls, more than 5,000 of whom, miraculously,
had actually cast votes. That caused the state legislature to
start cleaning up voting records.
That
kind of effort is expensive and time-consuming, and requires the
solid backing of managers who must face the possibility that a
prolonged investigation, tying up teams of staffers, might ultimately
produce nothing. KHOU's investigative producer, David Raziq, who
ran the station's prize-winning, nine-month-long investigation
of the Firestone tire story, insists that thinking about investigations
purely from a cost angle is short-sighted. "Our management clearly
saw the advantages," he says. "All the research shows that audiences
are very interested in investigative journalism." But the form
is a demanding one. He calls it "extreme" journalism. "You have
to be more detailed, more thorough, more fair. All of the qualities
that constitute good journalism have to be there, ten times more."
One
good reason for such rigor is that industries and individuals
under siege by TV investigators have adopted a potent counter-weapon:
they hire powerful public relations and law firms to attack a
report before it ever gets on the air in the effort to discredit
it, or even to sink it altogether. Bill Moyers learned that in
1992 while doing a documentary for Frontline on pesticide
residue in children's food. The agricultural chemical industry
hired the Washington p.r. firm Porter Novelli, Inc., to mount
a spin campaign. Quickly, television reviewers and editorial page
editors were bombarded with mail and press releases. "We've just
read a transcript of the upcoming episode of Frontline
[and] are writing to express our deep concern," said one letter.
A scathing Wall Street Journal op-ed piece on the morning
after the program aired was headlined: frontline perpetuates pesticides
myths. PBS got 4,500 pieces of mail accusing Moyers and company
of employing junk science to panic the public about agricultural
chemicals. Many TV critics, under the influence of the prodigious
p.r. campaign, simply parroted the industry's views. In the end,
Moyers's program withstood all attacks on its accuracy, but its
effect was partially smothered by the Porter Novelli campaign.
"That's
why you don't get much investigation reporting on television anymore,"
Moyers says. "The networks don't want the headaches. I spend as
much time preparing for these p.r. attacks as I do producing the
documentary." Another Moyers exposé that aired in late
March, called "Trade Secrets" and based on unpublished documents,
revealed forty years of efforts by the chemical industry to limit
regulation of toxic chemicals, during which period the manufacturers
withheld vital information from workers, the government, and the
media. In the days and weeks before the broadcast, the American
Chemistry Council attacked it in the press for "journalistic malpractice,"
and even created a Web site to purvey the chemical industry's
opposition.
"It
happens all the time," agrees the ABC News investigations specialist
Brian Ross. "The big targets have learned to fight back. Every
time we've done a story on a major corporation or industry, they
fire up in a big way with all kinds of campaigns to undermine
it." A recent Ross investigation described private seminars for
federal judges -- often at fancy golf resorts -- sponsored by
huge corporations, at which conservative, pro-business speakers
suggest to the jurists how they should rule on environmental and
other public issues that come before them. Well before the broadcast
went on the air, ABC News got a rocket from the Washington lobbying
firm Patton Boggs denouncing the program's conclusions and calling
it poor journalism.
Ross
chuckles at the recollection. "It's almost become a standard to
know if you're going after the right people," he says. "You're
sure you've hit a nerve when you hear from them -- the letters
and the threats from lawyers. If you don't hear from them,
you figure you must have done something wrong." TV news organizations
usually win lawsuits attempting prior restraint, but fighting
them is expensive and time-consuming, and can deter or delay an
investigation. Most conspicuous example: CBS's famous 1995 decision
to bump a 60 Minutes probe of the tobacco industry. (Says
Mike Wallace: "That was the only time we ever had any pressure
from management.")
In
1998, Ross felt management's mailed fist after he finished work
on an investigation of pedophilia and lax security at theme parks,
including Walt Disney World, owned by ABC News's parent company.
David Westin, the network's news president, killed the segment,
resulting in a shouting match between him and Ross during which
the reporter came to the brink of quitting. An ABC News staffer
at the time reportedly said that Ross had "tested the outer boundaries
of reporting on Disney and found them."
Such
tensions between TV investigators and their bosses are the inevitable
byproduct of the wave of consolidations that swept the industry
starting in the mid-1980s. Says Av Westin: "Michael Eisner, Jack
Welch, Mel Karmazin, and Rupert Murdoch need never worry that
a story done by their news divisions is going to rip the lid off
their company, because the guys down below are not going to OK
it. The executive producer of 20/20 will never again approve
a story investigating Disney. Why should he?"
Anyway,
at most news organizations, serious muckraking "has never been
the favorite relative at the table," says the veteran journalist
Sydney Schanberg. "It would be an astounding revelation if top
managers ever instructed their networks, 'Hey, let's do more investigative
reporting.' Or if Jack Welch ordered, 'Let's do more on PCBs in
the Hudson River.'"
At
the local level, television stations have produced fewer investigations
in recent years, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Over the last three years, says PEJ's Gottlieb, "what we're seeing
is that the whole range of enterprising reporting is going away."
The reason? Money. Investigations are often speculative, and always
expensive, like drilling for oil. It's far cheaper and more efficient
for a TV newsroom to fill its airtime with live stand-ups and
video clips of breaking news derived from the police scanner.
Fewer
than 20 percent of members of IRE, the University of Missouri-based
Investigative Reporters and Editors, are broadcasters, and the
TV members have been complaining over the last two years -- according
to Brant Houston, the group's executive director -- about their
stations' reluctance to take the risks (legal, advertising) and
to provide airtime. Nonetheless, he says, the contest entries
arriving at IRE show that "no matter how bad the conditions, some
reporters are finding ways to do terrific stories." Among this
year's winners: "First Casualty," a 60 Minutes II report
on the failure of U.S. forces to mount a rescue mission for a
Navy pilot downed in Iraq -- who may still be alive there, ten
years after the event; and "Who's Policing the Police?," an investigation
by Nashville's WTVF into improper relationships between Nashville
police and night club owners, strip-club operators, convicted
gamblers, and others.
In
September at its annual convention, the Radio-Television News
Directors Association will hand out no fewer than twenty-two Edward
R. Murrow Awards for investigative reports to stations large and
small: San Diego's XETV, Denver's KCNC, Austin's KVUE, Raleigh's
WRAL, Baton Rouge's WAFB, Philadelphia's WTXF.
At
WCBS in New York, a station plagued for years by ratings woes,
Joel Cheatwood, the news director, launched a four-person I-team
in February as part of a solution. "This is a station that desperately
needs to reconnect with its viewers," he says, "and the only way
we can do that is through good, strong local reporting that cuts
through the headlines of the day, which everybody is offering,
and gets to the issues and stories we can enterprise, and have
some ownership in." Investigative reporting, which he believes
is beginning to stage a comeback at local stations, is "one of
the absolute best ways to drive the station's roots into the community,"
Cheatwood says. Over the last ten years, however, he has observed
many stations "folding the investigative tent," declaring they
can't afford to do it anymore because of mounting legal fees and
budget cutbacks. Cheatwood, who also wears the title of news executive
vice-president for CBS's thirty-five owned stations, says he is
reminding those outlets of the value of strong localism in courting
audiences. "Nothing does that quite like investigative reporting."
At
the networks, too, fewer major investigations have received the
green light in recent years. "It's a question of time, money,
and the ratings business," Mike Wallace says. The newsmagazines
are doing "damned little" substantial investigation, and it's
"much softer than it used to be." One big problem, Wallace adds,
is that it's not easy to find good investigative reporters and
producers who know how to do the often-gruelling trench work.
Sydney Schanberg thinks the networks do too much "quick hit stuff,"
and then move on. "I always consider that investigative reporting
is wasted unless you keep going back to the story and peeling
away more layers of the onion." Says Seymour Hersh: "In all fairness
to the networks, investigative journalism is hard. When television
does it right, though, it's very powerful. But it doesn't seem
to be a big priority." Both television and print, however, are
too often late to the party, says Bob Woodward of The Washington
Post. "Why didn't we find out about Iran-Contra earlier?"
he asks. "Why was it some Beirut magazine that pulled the string
on that one? The classic case is the savings and loan crisis of
the 1980s. Why didn't we get to the bottom of the Clinton scandal
earlier? We now know that illegal behavior in the Nixon administration
preceded Watergate. Where were we?" Ironically, the TV investigations
most people remember are the ones that backfired spectacularly:
CNN's "Operation Tailwind" report, and Dateline's famous
exploding truck segment.
Woodward,
ironically, isn't fond of the term "investigative reporting" because
it implies, in most instances, the discovery of wrongdoing. He
prefers "in-depth." Some of the best investigative reporting is
more properly in-depth reporting, he believes, because it's aimed
at "getting to the bottom of what really happened," which might
not be felonious. Twenty years ago, he co-authored a book on the
Supreme Court which uncovered no malefactions. "No one was fired,
no one resigned, no one went to jail. But the book described in
depth how the institution works."
A
few veteran newsfolk feel that TV investigations shouldn't be
done at all, that too often they're initiated by somebody with
an ax to grind who throws a brown envelope over the transom. "I
don't like investigative reporters," writes Reese Schonfeld, the
founding president of CNN, in his memoir Me and Ted Against
the World. "For the most part, investigative units just provide
a convenient mail drop for whistle-blowers or malcontents to drop
their droppings."
But
television's scambusters are here to stay. Lincoln Steffens and
Ida Tarbell never imagined the tools and techniques -- spycams,
computers, Freedom of Information searches -- that now make muckraking
so potent a form of journalism. At their best, television's tireless,
dauntless investigators -- as they venture forth to slay the dragons
of infamy, knavery, and vice -- render the society a better place.
Neil
Hickey is CJR's editor at large.
