This omission left the show’s defenders “twisting slowly in the wind,” as Morley Safer angrily put it. (He and Wallace now claim to have patched up their feud.) Hewitt opted for what the Nixon White House called a “modified, limited hangout,” telling his people to shut up and conceding no error beyond inept spin-doctoring. Ironically, the program that has done so much to inspire investigative reporting may have made the work of future would-be Wood-wards and Bernsteins more difficult. And the true villains of the piece get to relax and take a cigarette break.
To recap briefly: at first it looked as if “60 Minutes” had been intimidated out of running an important story because of tobacco’s proven legal muscle, a pending CBS-Westinghouse merger, a corporate family connection to tobacco (network chief Laurence Tisch also owns Lorillard) or some combination of the above. CBS’s stated reason for killing the piece–that an insider source had signed a nondisclosure agreement with Brown & Williamson Tobacco, exposing the network to a breach-of-contract suit-seemed a strange and lame excuse for running scared. Wallace and many critics (including me) publicly cried foul, arguing that honest, aggressive journalism can’t withstand such lawyerly wimpiness.
Then The Wall Street Journal reported that CBS had a deal with the source, later identified as Jeffrey Wigand, that included indemnifying him in the event of a lawsuit, the right to approve the story’s timing and a $12,000 consulting fee for work performed on an earlier tobacco piece. Why hadn’t Wallace and Hewitt disclosed these details when first questioned about the story? Wigand’s fee from CBS might well have seemed to a jury like a financial inducement from the network to break his contract with Brown & Williamson. “60 Minutes” should have had the fortitude to air the story anyway, but Wallace and Hewitt looked negligent for mounting their high horse without revealing that they knew at a minimum about the consulting fee. As a result, the public debate swung from whether Big Tobacco gags the media to whether “60 Minutes” uses the same kind of checkbook journalism as “Hard Copy.”
But that wasn’t right, either. The tabloids routinely pay sources for a few minutes of dishing about celebrities. The money tends to enhance memory at the expense of accuracy. Hiring consultants, as “60 Minutes” does 10 or 12 times a year, is not a backdoor way of doing the same thing. The consultants usually put in many hours reviewing documents or steering producers through a story’s complexities. But this points up another little-understood reality of TV news magazines. Not only do correspondents themselves rarely dig for stories, but even their producers commonly rely on others-experts or local reporters–who undertake the bulk of the original spadework and often receive no on-air credit.
Over the years, “60 Minutes” has been especially reluctant to admit to depending on the reporting of outsiders. To do so would supposedly dim the cowboy aura of Mike or Ed or Lesley singlehandedly busting the bad guys. But there’s no shame in using consultants for difficult investigative work. Deals are occasionally necessary for news gathering. The problem arises when the exchange of money or major favors is not disclosed. Then the reporters begin to resemble the fatuous fanny-coverers they expose.
Of course, as Nixon partisans liked to say, no one ever died in Watergate– or as a result of “60 Minutes,” either. TV’s ethical lapses are small compared with tobacco’s. In a transcript of the “60 Minutes” show patriotically leaked to the New York Daily News, Wigand–one of the highest-ranking tobacco executives ever to indicate he has a conscience–charged that Brown & Williamson doctored documents and knowingly added to its pipe tobacco a carcinogenic flavoring called coumarin at 100 times the safe level. Brown & Williamson denied the accusation and announced last week that it is suing Wigand, who once earned six figures and now makes $30,000 as a Kentucky schoolteacher. Fortunately, CBS will make good on paying for his defense. Whatever happens to him personally, Wigand’s brave story may illuminate tobacco-company motives–a key to establishing liability.
In some future ease, the news media must test whether they are required to uphold the contracts that sources sign with employers. Book publishers hoping to take readers inside business or government may also be at risk, bemuse many of the sources are-or soon will be-bound by confidentiality agreements. Without whistle-blowers, all that’s left is journalism-by-press-release. We may someday point back to “60 Minutes,” of all places, to find when the dock started winding down on real investigative reporting.
