‘Frontline’ Asks: Who Was Blowing the Smoke?

Tuesday’s “Frontline” documentary, “Smoke in the Eye,” delivers no banner headlines concerning last year’s wheezing, coughing, tobacco-reporting calamities at ABC and CBS. After all, these titanic clashes of network news divisions and corporate interests already have been widely covered, dissected and debated.

Yet the clarity of what’s at stake is much more acute when they converge in a single, incisive PBS hour, one co-produced with a respected Canadian series, “The 5th Estate.”

As “Smoke in the Eye” implies, this is not a story primarily about mighty companies being intimidated by even mightier ones but, more significantly, about the threat posed to news-gathering--and the public’s right to know--by apparent conflicts of interests far above us in the cloud-touched penthouses of corporate muscle and decision making.

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These networks buckled under pressure--ABC settling a $10-billion lawsuit with Philip Morris over a “Day One” story, CBS pulling a “60 Minutes” segment that attacked Brown & Williamson--while in the midst of corporate mergers that likely would have been imperiled by epic litigation. Who would want to acquire a company encumbered by a multibillion-dollar lawsuit?

The mergers went smoothly, as it turned out, with CBS joining Westinghouse and Capital Cities/ABC being absorbed by the Walt Disney Co.

And in February, “60 Minutes” at last aired its Brown & Williamson story, after much of it first surfaced in print.

Are obfuscation and hidden agenda the subtext here? “I think that we were deceived and lied to,” “Frontline” is told by Lowell Bergman, producer of the “60 Minutes” segment that caused such consternation. “I think that more is going on here than we even know now.”

Not that CBS feels compelled to fully enlighten anyone, despite being a public company that profits from using public airwaves and influences public opinion in its choices of which news stories to run and which to omit.

“It’s not necessarily our obligation to make sure that everybody understands why any decision is made in this company,” CBS senior vice president Martin Franks arrogantly huffs to “Frontline” correspondent Daniel Schorr.

The veteran Schorr is a former CBS News correspondent whose own career is a reminder that tug-of-wars at networks over contested stories hardly began in 1995. Almost 20 years earlier, Schorr himself was fried in sizzling controversy when he gave to the Village Voice a full copy of a House report on improper activities by the CIA and FBI that had been leaked to him.

Elements of the report had already been disclosed by the New York Times and on CBS News by Schorr, but he was forbidden by his bosses from doing further stories after the House belatedly voted to classify the damaging document as secret.

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Some of his own colleagues reproached Schorr for the manner in which he handled the dispute. Yet the primary issue with Schorr, who ultimately lost his job over the incident, was whether in this case the public’s right to know overrode the judgment and action of Congress.

Less lofty was the issue with CBS in last year’s “60 Minutes” incident: Whether the public’s right to know overrode the fiscal prospects of CBS and some of its top executives, who personally stood to gain millions by the company’s merger with Westinghouse.

“What happens when the public interest runs afoul of a business interest?” Schorr asks on the “Frontline” program, which is produced by Neil Docherty and Jim Gilmore.

Is this what happens? As the story was reported last November, “60 Minutes” was ordered to scratch its Brown & Williamson story because senior management feared the tobacco giant might sue the network over a seemingly obscure legal point related to a whistle-blower’s disclosure of the material. As the Wall Street Journal later reported, however, when CBS owner Lawrence Tisch was negotiating his network’s sale, his family’s own tobacco company, Lorrillard, was simultaneously purchasing new cigarette brands from Brown & Williamson.

The merger, the purchase of the Brown & Williamson brands, the killing of the Brown & Williamson story? How could they not be connected? “It beggars belief,” says Mike Wallace, who reported the Brown & Williamson segment for “60 Minutes.”

All of this was preceded by the ABC News incident in which the network stood by most of its “Day One” newsmagazine story but erased the $10-billion lawsuit by publicly apologizing and saying it was wrong to report that Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds “add significant amounts of nicotine from outside sources” to their cigarettes.

According to “Frontline,” ABC documents indicate the network was confident of winning the suit, but in a case that could be expected to drag on for years. Thus, “the overriding factor [in settling] was the immediacy of the takeover by ABC of Disney,” insists an attorney who “Frontline” says is a veteran of many legal battles with tobacco companies.

Happily, the number of TV stories about the tobacco industry is now on the rise, and only recently “60 Minutes” reported that Brown & Williamson executives cynically had pushed the company to market a nicotine patch so that it could profit from its customers’ attempts to stop smoking.

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On the same program, a scientist said that Philip Morris hired him to create a “safer” cigarette, but later aborted most of his research out of fear of regulation and possible lawsuits. And ABC News is said to be working on its own documentary about the tobacco industry. Very good.

When it comes to a news documentary exploring potential conflicts of interest at top levels of network-dom in an era of mergermania, though, note that “Smoke in the Eye” is on PBS, not General Electric-owned NBC, Westinghouse-owned CBS or Disney-owned ABC.

In a telling moment in Tuesday’s program, Wallace expresses “the hope” that no matter who owns a network or newspaper, “they’ll have the courage and the sense of obligation to let the truth be told.”

“You very carefully said ‘the hope,’ ” Schorr responds. “The confidence?” Wallace pauses a few seconds. “The hope,” he says.

* “Smoke in the Eye” airs on “Frontline” Tuesday at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28.