ABC News Steps Up to the Plate Again

Seven months after settling a $10-billion lawsuit by issuing an extraordinary on-air apology over a story about nicotine in cigarettes, ABC News is quietly working on an hourlong documentary about the tobacco industry.

The program, which will be anchored by Peter Jennings, is being produced by Tom Yellin, Walt Bogdanich and others who put together the 1994 “Day One” newsmagazine story that prompted the defamation lawsuit by the Philip Morris tobacco company. ABC executives declined to talk about the thrust of the report but said it will include coverage of Philip Morris.

The documentary could be on the air in the next few months under the “Peter Jennings Reporting” banner and is a sign of a thaw in TV coverage of the tobacco industry.

“In the first six months of 1994, before Philip Morris sued ABC for libel, the three broadcast networks devoted 177 minutes to the tobacco story,” said Andrew Tyndall, editor of the Tyndall Report, an analysis of the content of the network newscasts. “In the second half of 1994, after the lawsuit was filed that May, the coverage dropped to 43 minutes. There definitely was a chilling effect from the lawsuit.”

And it seemed to get chillier when CBS management, worried about a possible lawsuit, ordered “60 Minutes” last November to kill a story it was working on about tobacco industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand.

But Wigand’s allegations about his former employer, Brown & Williamson, eventually came out in print, and CBS, by then under new ownership, aired its report last month. Indeed, recent revelations about practices in the tobacco industry have prompted an increase in coverage by the networks, according to Tyndall, with 72 minutes of air time devoted to the subject on the evening newscasts already this year.

The latest disclosures--affidavits by three former Philip Morris officials that were released Monday by the Food and Drug Administration--were relevant to the “Day One” report for which ABC came under fire. The former employees said the company manipulated the nicotine level in cigarettes to get users hooked.

In its on-air apology last August, ABC said it had been a mistake to report that Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds “add significant amounts of nicotine from outside sources” to their cigarettes. But it did not back down on the suggestion that cigarette companies seek to “control the levels of nicotine in cigarettes in order to keep people smoking.”

In one of the affidavits released this week, former Philip Morris employee Ian L. Uydess said that “nicotine levels were routinely targeted and adjusted by Philip Morris in its various products. . . .”

Paul Friedman, executive vice president of ABC News, declined to say whether the network feels vindicated by the disclosures but noted that “there was such a high profile for the apology that people forget that we stood by the report.”

The settlement of the lawsuit and the on-air apology have been sore points within ABC News. Many producers and executives felt their corporate bosses were wrong not to have battled the tobacco companies in court, and the network was criticized for giving in to pressure on a story that broke new ground and was substantially accurate.

The settlement came as Capital Cities/ABC was in the process of being acquired by the Walt Disney Co. and faced increased scrutiny from government agencies and Congress.