A Tabloid Pattern of Behavior at NBC

Last week’s “Dateline NBC” debacle was a cannon blast that roared across the bow of the television news business.

NBC’s extraordinary, General Motors Corp.-coerced confession that “Dateline” rigged test crashes of GM pickup trucks for a Nov. 17 segment on safety--hiding remote-controlled incendiary devices under the vehicles to assure that they’d burst into flames at impact--created more than just a juicy scandal that NBC’s competitors, ABC and CBS, could crow about.

It was an electronic Titanic, an unprecedented disaster in the annals of network news and perhaps the biggest TV scam since the Quiz Scandals. Although eclipsed by the carnival of publicity over Michael Jackson’s television interview, of all things, the NBC/GM story is one with epic implications because of what it says about standards of journalism, at least in some circles.

It is one more blemish--the indelible Big One--on the integrity of a once-admired news organization. From now on, NBC News will wear this mark like a Scarlet Letter.

While being the butt of jokes.

In reading his Top 10 list of things revealed during Jackson’s interview with Oprah Winfrey last week, David Letterman quipped that one of them was that incendiary devices planted by NBC caused Jackson’s hair to catch fire while making a Pepsi commercial in 1984.

Last Monday, GM sued NBC for defamation. At the end of Tuesday’s “Dateline” episode, NBC came clean about the crash tests and apologized as part of settling the suit. On Wednesday’s “NBC Nightly News,” Tom Brokaw gave the matter short shrift, covering it in a brief “tell” story. Contrast that with the thorough way CBS News has covered its own corporate problems.

While making its crash test disclosures, NBC moved with . . . uh . . . dispatch, vowing to review its overall news policies concerning such matters. That’s like Dr. Mengele promising to review his surgical policies: No mutilations!

What’s to review? A high school journalism student knows that staging or faking or fabricating or falsifying news is, under any circumstances, absolutely forbidden. The big lie, the ultimate corruption. Sweep that ethic under the rug, and a news organization becomes morally barren.

Just where do the buck--and muck--stop regarding the “Dateline” fiasco and everything else that’s been happening at NBC News?

Far from being an isolated example of shoddiness at NBC News, the GM incident is part of a tabloidesque pattern that’s been developing for at least a couple of years under the division’s president, Michael G. Gartner.

A brief review:

- NBC was the network that joined a few other media renegades and publicly “outed” alleged rape victim Patricia Bowman as the accuser of William Kennedy Smith on a 1991 evening newscast prior to Bowman herself coming forward after Smith was acquitted. Even tabloid shows didn’t do that. In discussing the issue on ABC’s “Nightline” that evening, Gartner mentioned her name again.

- NBC was the only network that recently aired footage in its evening newscast of a woman being gunned down--shot to death in front of a TV camera--by her former husband at a cemetery in suburban Miami.

- NBC was the network that led an evening newscast last year with footage of a car chase in which police pursued a motorist from Central California to Los Angeles.

- NBC was the network that canceled anti-nuclear crusader Helen Caldicott’s scheduled appearance on its morning show last year because, network insiders insisted, her new book criticized NBC’s corporate parent, General Electric. The network’s denials sounded hollow.

- NBC was the network that aired a story about Betty Friedan in its evening newscast last week using 5-year-old “Today” show sound bites of people commenting on the pioneer feminist, presenting the comments as if they were current. Did these people still feel the same about Friedan as they did then? Were all of them even still alive?

The much bigger question that Gartner should be addressing is whether NBC News--the capable, responsible organization we once knew and respected--is still alive. And if it isn’t, who, if not the head of the division, is responsible?