Cbs Defends Decision To Spike Tobacco Story

CBS News defended Sunday its decision to spike a “60 Minutes” interview about the tobacco industry, saying the piece posed enough legal risks to justify blocking its broadcast.

In a memo to company employees, CBS News President Eric Ober said some of the reaction to management’s decision was “highly inappropriate,” and he urged staffers to put the controversy behind them.

“The decision not to air the interview with a former tobacco industry executive, albeit controversial, was correct,” Ober write in CBS’ first extensive statement on its decision to withhold the story.

“We believe that the news gathering process on the story was in every respect sound and appropriate. However, we also believe that the story raised some journalistic questions and posed significant legal risk to warrant making the decision not to air the interview,” Ober wrote.

The memo didn’t say what had caused concern about the story’s preparation.

The New York Times reported Nov. 9 that CBS News managers had killed the interview with a former tobacco company executive because they feared, in part, they would be held legally responsible for violating the man’s confidentiality agreement with his former employer, Brown & Williamson.

The news magazine ultimately ran a story on how tobacco companies control information about the industry. Media critics accused CBS News of buckling under the mere threat of costly litigation.

That impression was buttressed when correspondent Mike Wallace said on the program’s Nov. 12 edition that he and his colleages were “dismayed that the management at CBS had seen fit to give in to perceived threats of legal action.”

Brown & Williamson has accused CBS of leaking a transcript of the interview with former Vice President Jeffrey Wigand and has threatened legal action. Excerpts from the spiked interview have appeared in the New York Daily News.

Ober said in the memo that the disclosure that Wigand was the confidential source represented a serious violation of journalistic ethics.

“While we do not know who released the source’s name or how a draft transcript of the report was removed from CBS News and delivered to another news organization, CBS News greatly regrets this and will provide full indemnification to the source,” Ober wrote.

On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported several seeming weaknesses in the original story: The source was paid $12,000 as a consultant on a “60 Minutes” report in 1994; he had been promised that his interview wouldn’t air without his permission but never gave that permission; and CBS had made an agreement to pay his legal costs if a libel lawsuit resulted from the story.

Ober said the fee was for an unrelated March 27, 1994, story on cigarettes posing a fire hazard, and there is “no journalistic compromise” in promising sources not to broadcast interviews without their consent.

Ober also expressed concern that a public tiff between correspondents Wallace and Morley Safer over the story could have an impact on the TV news magazine’s credibility.

Safer had complained in an interview published in Saturday’s Times that Wallace left him “twisting slowly in the wind” during an interview by not telling him about the payment to Wigand and the agreements to protect Wigand from libel and run the story only with his permission.

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