Every profession has its touchstones. For journalists, the touchstones are honesty, accuracy, fairness, and truth. For airlines, the touchstone is safety. So when television journalists allege that an airline is deliberately jeopardizing the safety of its passengers, well, those are fighting words.

Combine those provocative words with sensational TV promos showing an airplane apparently heading for a crash, and you have a dogfight of extraordinary dimensions. This was the backdrop for the journalistic drama in Minnesota pitting the CBS affiliate WCCO-TV and its award-winning investigative reporter and anchor Don Shelby against Northwest Airlines, the nation's fourth-largest air carrier.

Arguing that the two-part series totaling some twenty-three minutes that aired during the April sweeps rating period had "dishonored" its reputation, the Minnesota-based airline took its complaint not to court but to the Minnesota News Council, an independent nonprofit organization. For twenty-six years it has quietly been adjudicating complaints against the state's media outlets.

 After agreeing to leave their lawyers at ringside (complainants must waive their right to sue for libel before the council will hear the dispute), representatives of both parties climbed into the public arena to duke it out over WCCO's I-Team series (the "I" stands for Investigative) and the promotional spots that advertised it.

 The winner would take home no monetary damages, nor would the loser be able to appeal. At stake for both the airline and the station were honor and reputation - no more, no less. At stake for every journalist was an old question given new urgency by this high-profile case: how to resolve disputes between the press and a subject that feels wronged.

For sheer real-life drama, it's hard to beat the WCCO-Northwest hearing, held in Minneapolis last October. As a Minnesota Supreme Court justice presided over the non-judicial hearing, twenty-one of the twenty-four news council members - half of them current or former journalists and other media professionals, and half "public" members - heard testimony from both sides. Meanwhile, an audience of about 300 - including a Wall Street Journal reporter, local media, and a hundred or so uniformed Northwest employees - looked on. Also on hand with a 60 Minutes film crew was CBS correspondent Mike Wallace, who supports the news council idea as a way to resolve complaints against the media [see page 38].

Northwest claimed the WCCO report painted an "untruthful" and "distorted" picture of the airline's safety record and maintenance practices. WCCO countered that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) documents it had obtained and a large fine the airline had agreed to pay the agency supported its core allegation - that operational pressures to maintain its on-time record placed undue pressure on the airline's mechanics and jeopardized safety.

 Council members, each of whom had viewed the series and the promos, sharply questioned WCCO journalists and executives during the three-hour hearing. Why did the series rely so heavily on the allegations of a disgruntled ex-employee? Why weren't more reliable sources quoted? Why wasn't more emphasis placed on Northwest's overall safety record, generally acknowledged to be among the best in the business? Why did the second part stray from the reports' central theme of safety into a rambling discussion of sexual harassment cases and even the unsolved murder of a female employee in Boston?

 The barrage left WCCO representatives defensive. "We got it right, we simply got it right,'' protested John Culliton, then WCCO's station manager, who now holds the same position at CBS's Los Angeles affiliate.

 But the council overwhelmingly said WCCO got it wrong. By a vote of nineteen to two (three members of the council did not vote - see box, next page) the council agreed with Northwest's complaint that the WCCO series "painted a distorted, untruthful picture of Northwest Airlines . . . through its choice of images, words, and narrative, its improper juxtaposition of unrelated facts and events, its failure to provide any appropriate context, and its failure to present any comment from regulators or from independent third-party experts.''

 Shelby was stunned. In a dramatic closing statement, the anchorman told the council: "In nineteen years, I've never lied on television. You've taken the wind out of my sails considerably today. This is a dishonor to me.''

 Three months after his October surprise, in an interview with CJR, Shelby reflected on the most embarrassing chapter in an otherwise distinguished career. Where had WCCO gone wrong? How could nineteen Minnesotans see a story so different from the one Shelby intended to deliver?

 "I think we produced a piece of factual journalism that looked like tabloid television,'' Shelby said. "And tabloid television looks like fiction. I think [viewers] saw the medium as the message. And because we use the medium, we didn't see [what the viewers saw] until it was too late."

The most troublesome image in the series was a four-second shot of a Northwest Boeing 747 taken from a camera angle that suggested the plane was about to crash. The shot appeared in a promo aired more than nineteen times in a five-day period preceding the series. When he learned from some of his interview subjects that the shot was igniting outrage inside the airline, Shelby insisted that the footage be cut from the promos. "I told everyone we were going to get our asses beaten on,'' Shelby said. But that shot had already set the tabloid-style tone for the series.

 And there were other problems. WCCO's leading on-air source, a dismissed welder who was suing the airline over his firing, was inaccurately described as a mechanic even though he had never earned an FAA mechanic's license. That invested the welder, said Jon Austin, Northwest's managing director of corporate communications, "with an unwarranted level of credibility.''

"It's wrong, an error in fact," Shelby admitted.

 Shelby also came to believe that the sexual harassment angle - included in the second part in an attempt to show a pattern of intimidation and harassment directed at employees who "rock the boat'' - was a mistake, too. "It seemed like nonlinear story-telling,'' Shelby said. "It did not stand up." To deny that now, he said, "would be silly.''

The council viewed as particularly inflammatory WCCO's use of the story of a murdered Northwest employee. The woman, Su Taraskiewicz, had worked at Boston's Logan airport as a ground service worker and had complained to her bosses of sexual harassment by co-workers. But the 1992 beating and stabbing death was never solved. Northwest accused WCCO not only of exploiting Taraskiewicz's death, but also of using "her memory to deliver the most ominous, offensive message of all: troublemakers end up dead at Northwest Airlines.''

Said Shelby: "Clearly the promotions distorted the story. The sexual harassment material was distortive in that it confused the issue of airline safety."

 About airline safety WCCO had a powerful story to tell. The most compelling footage showed a Northwest Boeing 747 with an engine dragging on the runway while rescue crews sprayed foam on the airplane to prevent a fire. The 1994 incident at Tokyo's Narita Airport occurred as the 747 landed; no one was hurt. But if the engine had separated during a more critical stage of flight, the result could have been catastrophic. The cause of the separation was traced to faulty maintenance procedures by inexperienced mechanics at the airline's Minneapolis maintenance base.

 For this and other lapses, in January 1996 the airline was fined $725,000 by the FAA for violations that dated to 1989. Local newspapers did report about the fine and the violations. But WCCO's series attempted to get behind the FAA proclamations to find out why the incidents occurred - a laudable journalistic goal.

 The working hypothesis for the story was that pressure to keep the planes running on time led to maintenance shortcuts, Shelby said. In addition to the dismissed welder, he said there were about twenty-five Northwest employees who talked privately to the station but would not go on the record. He added that FAA documents the station obtained through the Freedom of Information Act suggested that some of Northwest's violations were of a kind that would fall into the category of willful.

 For example, FAA inspectors repeatedly attempted to make the airline correct improper wiring of video terminals installed in the passenger cabin of some Northwest jumbo jets, a condition that could lead to short circuits and fire. Although Northwest said the responsibility lay with its subcontractor, FAA inspectors concluded that "The tendency to not follow NWA procedures for the installation . . . and the apparent lack of NWA responsibility to ensure proper work accomplishment resulted in various areas of the aircraft being improperly altered.''

 Shelby said work on the story started in the first half of 1995 with WCCO producer Beth Pearlman. By February of 1996, the story was handed over to the I-team, headed by Jacquee Petchel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. Shelby, who had won Emmy and Peabody awards for I-Team stories in the 1980s before becoming anchor, was asked by station management to be the lead reporter for the series. Executives believed that returning him to the field on a hard-hitting series would be good for him and good for the station.

 But much of the groundwork had been laid by the time Shelby came on board. And at the hearing, Petchel said that the bulk of the FAA documents the series relied upon arrived in mid-April of 1996. The series aired on April 29 and 30 - a relatively short time in which to digest and interpret the 412 pages of complicated and arcane FAA documents.

 Was the series rushed onto the air for sweeps week? While not explicitly conceding it was, Shelby acknowledged that "We could have benefited from some additional time," particularly for WCCO people to weigh whether the sexual harassment angle should be mentioned in the series.

But he vigorously defended WCCO's reporting of the facts, and rejected criticism that he entirely failed to place Northwest's maintenance problems in proper context. "The story would have been made healthier if it contained graphics of Northwest's safety record and the others,'' he conceded, but he pointed out that during each broadcast he did take pains to tell viewers that Northwest "had one of the best - if not the best - safety records in the industry.''

 During the hearings, Shelby argued that because most Twin Cities travelers must fly on Northwest - which controls as much as 80 percent of the Minneapolis-St. Paul market - making specific safety comparisons with other airlines would be irrelevant for his viewers. But council members disagreed. Tom Keller, an attorney and a public member of the group, said that without those comparisons, viewing the report "was a little like going in for a check-up and being told you have a cholesterol level of 200, and at that point the doctor walks out. You don't know what it means."

Shelby insisted the bottom-line message of the series was that Northwest was a safe airline but that it could be safer. That's not, alas, how it came across to the council.

Bob Shaw, a retired newspaper executive and a founding member of the news council, applauded the station in principle for attempting the story in the first place - it was, he said, "exactly the kind of journalism'' that should be done - but faulted its emphasis. "I was left with the impression . . . that things were radically wrong in their maintenance department, that things were bad and getting worse, rapidly," Shaw said. "I think they had a good story in the FAA report, and they goofed it up.''

Council member Maureen Reeder, a former reporter for the independent Twin Cities station KMSP, agreed. "In one sense, this is the best of television journalism. And in another sense, it is the worst of television journalism. And in a greater sense, it's the state of television journalism today. This is the kind of story that a lot of our peers would be very proud to broadcast. It also had all the things in it that I think the public today doesn't like. It's a style of reporting that doesn't allow for a good amount of context."

Will the council's decision have a chilling effect on WCCO, as Shelby declared at the hearing? While he doesn't rule out the possibility, three months after the decision Shelby said the message from the news council was clear. "They did not say ‘Don't do investigative journalism.' They said ‘Don't do investigative journalism that way.'" For example, he said, the promos "inflamed passions and fears. The promos were bad. That taught us a lesson.''

 In the end, a handful of mistakes and misjudgments effectively neutralized months' worth of painstaking reporting. For nineteen out of twenty-one people to conclude that this series was untruthful remains a stunning defeat, Shelby admitted. "If the public is not willing to believe, then we are failing as communicators."

Besides the airline, the Minnesota News Council appears to be a winner in this episode. Gary Gilson, a former TV reporter who is now executive director of the council, said people from twenty-two states have asked him for information about setting up similar panels. To date, there are only two other news councils operating in the United States - in Honolulu and in the Northwest - but both are much smaller and less active than Minnesota's.

In the current legal climate, where journalists' tactics can be on trial as much as the facts they report, news councils can be looked upon as "a fabulous legal deal,'' says Bill Babcock, a University of Minnesota Journalism professor and director of the university's Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law. What WCCO learned about the public's perception of its series may have been painful, Babcock says. But it didn't cost the station millions of dollars, as the Food Lion case did ABC [see page 28].

Nor did it tarnish the station's standing among its peers. Twenty-four hours after the decision, WCCO won a Midwest-chapter Emmy for the series.

For its part, Northwest was clearly more interested in getting a hearing than a windfall. "There is a big gap between writing a letter to the editor and filing a libel suit," Austin said. "There ought to be something in between that. We weren't looking for money. We were looking for a court of opinion in which to say ‘we were done wrong.'"

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