Staggers' Revenge

TV newsmen seemingly won a large victory last summer; the House of Representatives declined to cite CBS and its then-President Frank Stanton for contempt for refusing to cooperate fully with an investigation into the controversial documentary The Selling of the Pentagon. Commerce Committee Chairman Harley O. Staggers, who had chaired the inquiry, was stunned by his defeat. He was not knocked out, however, and for months he has had investigators searching for evidence that TV newsmen have staged events so as to deceive viewers.

Staggers is now considering a new round of committee hearings and says: "We hope to have legislation." Though the networks believe that he lacks potent new material, they are nervous about the chairman's persistence. At CBS, ABC and NBC, correspondents, camera crews and others have been told in tough directives that video license must not be extended to include anything phony. An NBC rule reads that "no techniques may be used which could reasonably be anticipated to mislead the audience." ABC News Vice President William Sheehan declares that "we are not in the business of making things happen," and adds: "Everyone has the message, and anyone who doesn't won't be with us very long."

Sheehan has been touring ABC bureaus to lay down the law, and Stanton, now CBS Vice Chairman, has been using network lawyers to review purported incidents of staging. This scrutiny follows an earlier investigation conducted by Stanton's news chief, Richard Salant. CBS and ABC officials have also been eager to learn what their employees in the field have been telling Staggers' men.

The committee investigators have turned up cases in which ABC staged shots of a careening police car in Seattle last year to add drama to a story and posed professional models around a Las Vegas gambling table in a 1970 program to show how the recession was hurting business. One CBS West Coast correspondent used a colleague's daughter to illustrate a story on hitchhiking, and posed CBS employees as restaurant patrons in a story on wine drinking. In these cases, the networks have beaten the committee to the punch by suspending the personnel involved for periods of a week to 90 days. Further offenses could well bring firings.

CBS, which expects the toughest treatment from Staggers, has taken special pains to double-check incidents being looked into by committee investigators. Salant now says that he can completely refute two anticipated charges: that CBS had additional blazes set to embellish a forest fire report and strewed trash on the beach to fluff up a story on Indians being driven from their fishing grounds by tourists. He says he is looking into an accusation that the network used a former employee to pose as a buyer of dynamite and secured a shopkeeper's cooperation in a 1970 story about the ease of purchasing explosives.

Fine Line. Beyond the network's general orders about staging, Stanton has decreed that quotes from edited interviews and speeches must be used in sequence. This seems to be in response to complaints that some statements of The Selling of the Pentagon were run out of order, altering the speaker's point. Stanton has also ordered that written transcripts be made available on request to interview subjects after the broadcast. But he staunchly defends his network's basic honesty and seems to view Staggers' new effort as a personal vendetta. "It is impossible for me to psychoanalyze him," Stanton says. "He is a very intense and very bitter man." Staggers replies that he is not bitter at all, believing that the networks' self-policing "has been good for the American people."

Whatever Staggers' motives, the real issue is the validity of his implicit charge--that seeing TV news does not always merit believing. So-called staging is neither automatically evil nor restricted to TV. Still photographers sometimes pose pictures for newspapers and magazines, and print journalism could not function without selection and editing of material. Television, by its nature, requires staging of a sort: initial interviews that amount to rehearsals, placing subjects for the best sound and lighting effects, interjecting a commentator's remarks in the flow of events filmed earlier. In this process there is a fine line between innocence and deceit, and it would take a most unusual congressional investigation to make the boundary clear.

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