Journalism Fights
Corporate, Legal Battles

8.29 a.m. ET (1329 GMT) November 19, 1999

By Tracey Middlekauff

NEW YORK — There’s a fair chance the evening
news you watched last night, the movie you’re going to see this weekend
and the book you just ordered online are all brought to you by the same
umbrella company.

Over the past two decades, giant media corporations have been on a mergers
and acquisitions binges involving both journalistic and entertainment
enterprises.

The recent Michael Mann film The Insider depicts this relationship
between journalism and big business. The film dramatizes how CBS News
allegedly bowed to corporate pressure when it decided to pull an interview
Mike Wallace conducted with Jeffrey Wigand, a whistle-blower from the
tobacco behemoth of Brown & Williamson.

In the actual incident upon which The Insider is based, CBS News,
its lawyers claimed, could be subject to a lawsuit by Brown & Williamson
for what they called “tortious interference,” or inducing a source (Wigand)
to break a binding contract, in this case his non-disclosure agreement
with Brown & Williamson.

But some believe CBS’ more pressing concern was their impending purchase
by Westinghouse. If they were in the midst of a lawsuit, big money could
be lost.

Was this just an isolated incident? Or is journalism in the age of big
business and the multimedia corporation doomed?

Paul Janensch, a 30-year journalism veteran and professor of mass communications
and journalism at Quinnipiac College in Connecticut, believes there is
cause for concern.

“I teach students that in this country, the mission of the news media
is to make money and serve the public,” he says. “You can’t do good journalism
unless you’re part of a thriving business. But the primary mission is
to serve the public, and that’s being overwhelmed by money, big money.”

As for the CBS case, Janensch says, “I’ve dealt with lawyers a lot when
preparing sensitive stories, and I’ve never heard of tortious interference.
That’s totally obscure. It was clear their concern was over their negotiations
with Westinghouse.”

AP/Wide World Al Pacino plays ‘60 Minutes’ producer Lowell Bergman in ‘The Insider’

Another problem, according to Janensch, is that those in charge of corporations
with news branches don’t have any newsroom experience themselves. Bob
Giles, senior vice president of the Freedom Forum, agrees.

“I think the people who are running newsrooms are as committed to the
core values of journalism as ever,” Giles says. But, he adds, “Some of
the people who run these big corporations don’t share the values of the
people who run the newsrooms.”

Case in point: The L.A. Times-Staples Center Arena story. The
October 10, 1999 edition of the L.A. Times Sunday magazine was
devoted solely to the Staples Center Arena. Unbeknownst to the editorial
staff of the Times, publisher Kathryn Downing had agreed to a deal
to share advertising revenue with the owners of the arena. The editorial
staff was outraged the sacred wall between the advertising and editorial
departments had been breached in this way.

Another trend in journalism is what Dirk Smillie calls “cross-promotion.”
Smillie, the director of the New-York based News Research Group, a non-partisan
media research organization, believes investigative journalism is being
replaced by cross-promotional journalism. He cites as an example Time magazine’s nine-page cover story on the Pokémon movie. Warner Bros.
distributes the film and the WB network owns the TV series, both of which
are sister corporations under the same umbrella corporation (Time Warner)
as Time magazine.

Smillie, like Janensch and Giles, believes money is one of the culprits.
“You have a lot of MBAs running corporations,” he says. “Those values
get telegraphed down.”

While the above example indicates how a product may get promoted when
it’s in the interests of a corporation, the case of Thomas Maier illustrates
what can happen when a huge publishing concern is threatened by unfavorable
information.

In 1997, Maier, now a reporter for New York’s Newsday, published
a book about publishing giant Si Newhouse, then-owner of Random House,
the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and one of the nation’s largest
newspaper chains. Maier had a tough time getting his book out. He says,
“Nobody wanted to publish a book about the biggest guy in book publishing
at the time.”

Even though the book was voted Best Media Book of the Year by the National
Honor Society in Journalism, it went unreviewed in any Newhouse publication.
Later, after Maier wrote another book, this time about baby-care guru
Dr. Spock, he says, “I shopped that around, but the world where I could
shop it was much narrower. … I’m proud of (Newhouse) but I was unaware
of the consequences.”

For Janensch, the inevitable result of so many conflicting interests
will be the erosion of the media’s credibility. “Fundamentally, I’m an
optimistic person,” he says, “but I see this as part of a continuing trend.”

What can be done about it? Some might call for more regulation, but
Gregg Leslie, the acting executive director for the Reporters Committee
for Freedom of the Press, a group primarily concerned with media law,
does not see legislation as a viable answer.

“We see the temptation (in journalism) towards more business-related
dealings,” Leslie says. “We hope they’ll learn their lessons early on.
… Once you get a news organization doing promotion for a commercial
venture, the biggest risk is to their credibility. But we would object
if the government tried to regulate that. … The government shouldn’t
decide news content.”

Perhaps the role of watchdog should be placed in the hands of the consumer.
Dirk Smillie points out in the current climate, “It’s left up to the news
customer to figure out what’s the news angle on a particular story. …
It gets so complicated.”

Complicated, indeed. But Smillie adds, “Traditional news organizations
have been compromised, so people are going to look elsewhere. The Web
has a good chance of being the fourth rail of American journalism.”

However, he warns that people should be cautious about what they accept
as fact. For example, Matt Drudge, Smillie believes, may be called a columnist,
or an information provider, but “he doesn’t have an editor; so he’s not
a journalist. Journalism is a collaborative effort.”