ABC to Air Parts of DiCaprio-Clinton Talk

The world will soon get to evaluate actor Leonardo DiCaprio’s journalistic skills: ABC News said it will air its Earth Day special--complete with excerpts of DiCaprio’s controversial interview with President Clinton--at 8 p.m. on April 22.

After screening a raw version of the program, the network decided Tuesday to include portions of the March 31 interview, which had sparked internal dissent among ABC News journalists who said the plum assignment to interview the president shouldn’t be ceded to an actor.

ABC News spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said that the DiCaprio material was included because “we think that, based on what we’ve seen, it’s entirely appropriate that in the end there is a way to do a program like this and include someone like Leonard DiCaprio and meet our editorial standards.”

ABC News President David Westin, who found himself in the middle of the dispute between the White House, the show’s producers and opposing staffers, would not comment Tuesday. Murphy said: “He believes we should be judged by the program we put on the air.”

The controversy grew when ABC executives, who had hoped to lure younger viewers by using DiCaprio in the special, blamed the White House for turning what ABC insisted had been scheduled as a “walking tour” of the landmark’s energy-saving features into an “interview.” Westin insisted in an e-mail to his staffers that “all roles of journalists must be played by journalists” at ABC News.

The White House, which said that the encounter had been planned as an interview all along, got its revenge at the recent annual Radio and Television Correspondents Assn. dinner, where the president quipped, “Don’t you news people ever learn? It isn’t the mistake that kills you, it’s the cover-up.”

The one-hour special on global warming and other environmental issues, dubbed “Planet Earth 2000,” will be hosted by ABC News correspondent Chris Cuomo. He’ll be joined by DiCaprio, a celebrity chairman of this year’s 30th annual Earth Day celebration, which is also on the 22nd.

ABC is expected to air only portions of DiCaprio’s 15-minute sit-down with the president; other segments will include a look at an underwater habitat in Key Largo, Fla., and the impact that global warming has had on a Native American community in Alaska.