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The Rise of TV News Fakery
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10909 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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5 / 1993 |
2,381 Words |
| Author
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Lou Prato
Lou Prato, a former university journalism teacher, is a
broadcast writing consultant and freelance writer who has
written extensively about radio and television news. |
The public's increasing mistrust of the media, particularly television news, gained momentum in the wake of NBC's shocking admission that it rigged the safety test of a controversial General Motors truck. What NBC first reported on its Dateline magazine program in November and the arrogant way it handled the correction damaged the credibility of all journalists.
Unfortunately, this was not an isolated case. Even as critical reaction to the GM story continued to fester, NBC embarrassingly admitted to another case of fraudulent reporting, this time involving the use of inaccurate video in three separate elements of a Nightly News environmental story in January. The video had supported NBC's allegations that loggers over cutting in Idaho's Clearwater National Forest had polluted streams and killed fish.
The same week, two former staffers of the CBS-owned station in Alexandria, Minnesota, pleaded guilty to buying alcohol for minors in a case involving the staging of a teenage drinking party for a news report. Unlike the NBC fakers, the two 23 year olds were fired almost immediately last December by managers at KCCO-TV and face up to a year in prison.
Because the networks traditionally have set the news standards in television, these recent perversions are traumatic to TV journalism idealists. Also upsetting is the seeming indifference to the lessons of the past. Fakery and staging have happened before at network properties and local stations, frequently with serious consequences for the participants.
In a highly publicized incident in 1990, an award-winning reporter at an NBC-owned station in Denver was forced to resign and later was convicted for staging a pit-bull fight for TV cameras. She could have faced imprisonment and a major fine. The judge was lenient, however, and fined her only $20,000.
HISTORY OF FAKERY
Twenty-five years ago, two of the most memorable staging incidents in TV news history threatened the licenses of stations. CBS network president Frank Stanton and other top executives were called before Congress and the Federal Communications Commission after disclosure that news personnel at its Chicago station, WBBM-TV, arranged a marijuana party at Northwestern University as part of an "investigative" series. That 1967 incident cost the news director and others their jobs.
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