Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 7, 1993 TAG: 9303040127
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DANIEL SCHORR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
TV'S TRICKS ARE A STANDARD OF THE TRADE
I was not surprised that NBC's "Dateline" program would stage an explosion and fire in a collision between a car and a General Motors truck. What many call a hoax is just television's way of making a visual point.After NBC apologized for the car collision hoax, it had to apologize again, for showing dead fish from another location in a Jan. 4 "Nightly News" piece on the danger of clear-cutting to fish in a national forest in Idaho.
The resignation this week of NBC News president Michael Gartner makes him the scapegoat for what happened at NBC, but other networks have deceived in other ways. In July 1989, ABC's "World News Tonight," in what looked like secret surveillance film, showed Felix Bloch, an American diplomat in Vienna, handing a briefcase full of secrets to a Russian spy. As an afterthought, ABC acknowledged that the scene was a simulation, acted out by ABC employees. (Bloch, drummed out of the Foreign Service, was never charged with espionage, but many who thought they "saw it with our own eyes" remain convinced that he was guilty.)
In June 1991, the "CBS Evening News" dramatized the hazards of automatic seat-belts by showing a dummy falling out of a tipped-over car and being crushed beneath the vehicle. CBS did not say that the tape was created by a private institute backed by negligence lawyers.
Mike Wallace, lately so visible on TV talk shows shaking his head about NBC deception, in 1982 narrated a CBS Reports documentary advertised as exposing a high-level "conspiracy" to undercount enemy strength in Vietnam. Denounced by TV Guide as a "smear" and the subject of a suit by Gen. William Westmoreland, the program was subjected to an intensive in-house investigation by the late and highly respected Burton Benjamin, former director of CBS News. He found it to be "flawed," "out of balance," with friendly witnesses "coddled" and opposing witnesses "treated harshly," and isolated segments of interviews combined for dramatic effect.
In other words, "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception" was itself a study in deception by documentary producers, too anxious to use the tools of television to simplify and dramatize a complicated point. Now, NBC has engaged not its own executives, but two outside lawyers to investigate where the producers of "Dateline" went wrong.
But, for Gartner, this should be deja vu all over again. In 1989, NBC News experimented with a program called "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow," mingling anchormen and actors in re-creations. When the program was criticized for calling itself "news," Gartner gave it to the entertainment department, saying, "We have determined that re-creations can result in confusion to the viewer."
Why do they keep doing this to us? (I myself joined "us" after 30 years among "them" in television - 25 years with CBS and five with CNN.) It is because television, not a natural medium for information, is irresistibly drawn to illusion to tell its story.
Small deceptions become so commonplace as not to be thought about. Coming to television from a newspaper career in 1953, I learned my right shade of pancake makeup and how to look down from the TelePrompTer to make the reading seem more natural. I learned how to look into the camera after a filmed interview to enact a gamut of reactions - sympathetic, bemused, skeptical - to be edited into the finished version as though contemporaneous.
A producer once advised me about the secret of success in television. "Sincerity - if you can fake that, you've got it made."
Edward R. Murrow warned of deception 30 years ago. "There will always be some errors in news-gathering, but the tricks that microphones, cameras and film make possible should never be contrived to document an event that we missed or may never have happened."
Murrow hated fakery on television. So did the late CBS News president Richard N. Salant, who would not even allow a musical theme on a documentary. But that was before television became "reality-based."
\ AUTHOR Daniel Schorr is a senior news analyst for National Public Radio. He wrote this article for Newsday.