NBC`s ”Today” show, sharply criticized last week for excising all references to network owner General Electric in a taped story about defective parts being sold in the aerospace industry, will deliver a second report on the subject at 7:15 a.m. Friday.
Executive producer Marty Ryan said Peter Karl of WMAQ-Ch. 5 in Chicago, the investigative reporter who broke the story, will be on ”Today” live with a second report, which will reveal ”how GE and other large aerospace companies have been victims of these bogus bolts.”
Ryan said he cut references to GE in Karl`s initial report because he did not feel the GE connection had been sufficiently covered.
”Peter and I had an editorial difference,” Ryan said. ”I wanted to make what he had done even stronger and better. He`s a damn good reporter. He did his homework and he had proper sources.
”I figured what he had was good enough for a second part that would be clearer and refined a little bit. It (the editing of the first report) really had nothing to do with GE.”
Karl said Thursday that Ryan had told him that ”if they had talked to me in the first place about the changes, this would not have happened. He made clear that he (Ryan) knows how upset I am by statements that my piece was under-reported and undersourced.”
An NBC vice president, Tom Ross, initially said the piece had been edited to delete references to GE because of under-reporting and undersourcing.
The implication of Ryan`s comment to Karl and the decision to do a second piece is that Ross was mistaken.
Ryan said he was sorry the matter became public, prompting charges that
”Today” was trying to protect NBC`s parent company.
”If I didn`t think Peter was a good reporter, his stuff never would have gotten into my office or on the air,” he said. ”If every time a producer and a reporter argued or had a discussion about a story (and) it was in the newspaper, newspapers would be filled with those stories all the time.”
