NBC Criticized for Rigging Crash : Television: Officials at other networks worry the credibility of their own news programs could be harmed by that use of ‘theatrics.’

News executives at ABC, CBS and CNN on Wednesday criticized NBC’s journalistic practices in a story about General Motors trucks for “Dateline NBC” and expressed concern that the credibility of all TV news organizations could be undermined as a result.

“This story hurts NBC News, and we all pay,” said Ed Turner, vice president in charge of news gathering at Cable News Network. “I commend NBC for rectifying their error, but the fact that they added rockets in the first place is appalling. There are not four or five little rockets underneath a (real) GM pickup truck. That is theatrics.”

Turner and counterparts at ABC and CBS said their standards forbid the sort of staging that got NBC into trouble.

In a remarkable on-air apology, NBC said Tuesday that it had erred in staging a test crash of a GM pickup truck as part of a report last Nov. 17 on the safety of the vehicle. The network said that viewers had not been told that incendiary “sparking devices” were placed on the truck to ensure that a fire would erupt if the gas tank leaked.

Turner, who said that CNN’s practice was “no staging, period,” related the NBC incident to what he saw as new pressures on news organizations to compete in prime time.

“When people see a program with the imprimatur of news, they believe that they’re seeing journalism,” he said. “But when entertainment becomes a factor in news, and newsmagazines are competing for dramatic stories in prime time, there can be a pressure to make news more dramatic than it really is.”

At CBS News, vice president Joe Peyronin said, “I am concerned about the impact of NBC’s admission on all news organizations. I think it’s a reminder of how careful we have to be to do our reporting fairly and accurately.”

Walter Porges, the ABC News vice president in charge of news standards, acknowledged that there is the potential for fakery when an outside consultant is used. But he differentiated between reporting the extensive testing of an auto-safety organization and NBC’s hiring of an outside consultant to do the tests and not informing viewers that rockets had been added.

“We did a story on ‘20/20’ in 1990 involving allegations about the incidence of ‘rollovers’ in a certain model of Jeep,” Porges said. “We did our own reporting on the story, and we also used existing footage from a reputable auto-safety testing organization, reporting on the results of the tests they had conducted. NBC hired an outside consultant and apparently decided that it was not necessary to tell viewers that something had been added, changing the equation of the test. That may have been a good-faith error, but I think that was a mistake.”