Regular readers know I’ve never been one to root for “Dateline NBC,” the trend-hopping newsmagazine that covers the network’s prime-time schedule like kudzu. The show is too obviously trying to target a demographically desirable audience and, much of the time, too disrespectful of that audience to tell its stories in anything but the most elementary fashion.
But the news last week that a federal appeals court had overturned most of a jury’s verdict against “Dateline” is cause for moderate — and conditional — celebration. It affirmed that news organizations have the right to use the information gathered in the course of reporting a story, and it suggested that an accurate report is a trump card. That’s encouraging to anybody who understands that news needs to be more than just blandishments and puffery. When a Maine federal jury ruled in July, 1998 that the newsmagazine had misrepresented its intentions by promising a “positive” story in its 1995 portrayal of a Maine long-haul trucker, the verdict seemed part of a general trend of anti-news media court proceedings, one more piece of evidence affirming to us in the business that, while the public may pay attention to what we do, they don’t like us very much, and the nation’s courts were starting to agree.
This was not an open-and-shut case, like the notorious staging of a gas-tank explosion “Dateline” once presented on air. Rather than inaccuracy in the report itself, the case centered more on the delicate negotiations that take place when a reporter is trying to get someone to talk to him.
From a reporter’s soothing but noncommittal remarks, a potential subject may take away the belief that he has been promised a flattering portrayal. And some reporters, certainly, are stupid or arrogant or unethical enough to make such a promise, but most know that, at minimum, you never quite tip your hand. And most people should understand, by now, that you don’t invite a reporter into your life if there is something you absolutely do not want reported.
Indeed, in an opinion in another case, the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago wrote that, “Investigative journalists well known for ruthlessness promise to wear kid gloves. They break their promise, as any person of normal sophistication would expect. If that is `fraud,’ it is the kind against which potential victims can easily arm themselves by maintaining a minimum of skepticism about journalistic goals and methods.”
Trucking company owner Raymond Veilleux, according to newspaper accounts of the trial, did not maintain that skepticism. He claimed he only agreed to let “Dateline” ride along with one of his truckers because program staffers had promised him, several times, a “positive” story. They also promised, he and his wife said, that representatives of Parents Against Tired Truckers would not be part of the broadcast.
He allowed himself to believe this despite knowing of a recent Maine tragedy in which teenagers had been killed by an apparently overtired trucker.
NBC said it made no such promises. And when its two-part story aired, it included such incendiary phrases as “American highways are a trucker’s killing field” and the “stay-awake-and-on-the-road mentality has led to many accidents and deaths,” the Boston Globe reported.
Veilleux’s driver, Peter Kennedy, with whom “Dateline” rode cross-country, was a very damning Exhibit A. The broadcast quoted him as saying he falsified his log books in order to drive more hours than allowed by law, and it reported the results of a Kennedy drug test that came up positive for marijuana and amphetamines. PATT representatives were included.
The Bangor jury, the same people who in their living rooms might have seen the “Dateline” report and appreciated the opportunity to add truckers to their list of things newsmagazines have taught them to fear, in the courtroom sympathized with Veilleux and Kennedy. It ordered “Dateline” to pay a total of $525,000.
On March 7, the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston mostly disagreed. The court said that Kennedy himself was the source of most of the negative information, that the drug test report did not invade his privacy because it was relevant to the issue of trucking safety and that alleged network promises about the story’s tone were too “vague” to be grounds for a court action. In other words, reporters have a right to tell the truth about subjects.
But the appeals court sent back to district court a significant claim of a more specific broken “Dateline” promise, the one Veilleux believed he had extracted about the nonparticipation of Parents Against Tired Truckers. On that question, the court reasoned that Veilleux was probably telling the truth because, in essence, he would have been an idiot to take part in a broadcast including that openly hostile group.
And that’s where the conditional part of this celebration comes in. If NBC really did make such a promise after, the evidence showed, it had already taped interviews with PATT members, then it did a disservice not just to Ray Veilleux but to journalists and users of journalism everywhere, and they made it deservedly more difficult for even the most fair-minded of us to secure a subject’s cooperation in the future.
Suddenly it’s creative: I think I can let stand without further comment this quote from Brooke Shields, reported on UltimateTV.com, about her sitcom “Suddenly Susan” being finished.
“It’s time for me to move on creatively,” she said.
