Story-Sitting Really Just Falling Down On The Job

I’m having a difficult time trying to understand CNN’s decision to sit on golfer Fuzzy Zoeller’s ill-advised and intemperate comments of a few weeks ago about newly crowned Masters champ Tiger Woods.

That’s right. It took a full week for one of this country’s premiere news organizations to let the public know golf professional Zoeller had made perhaps the biggest bogey of his career. Some might call it something else.

Zoeller was recorded in a CNN interview as referring to Woods, whose ancestry is both African American and Asian, as a “little boy” who might consider “fried chicken” and “collard greens” as a couple of items for next year’s Masters banquet.

The comments, for which Zoeller has since apologized to Woods and golf, were made on the final day of the Augusta, Ga., tournament. But we didn’t learn about the racially insensitive remarks until the following week, because CNN, demonstrably never shy about interrupting its news for so-called breaking news, decided to withhold the information from its viewers.

In the parlance of the news profession, they sat on it.

CNN executives haven’t been entirely clear about why the controversial Zoeller decision was made. But from all indications, it looks as if the 24-hour Cable News Network was trying to avert controversy by allowing Woods to have his day in the sun.

Instead, the Time Warner company has created an even greater controversy by taking editorial management to an enigmatic level.

“You know, in retrospect, we might have done it differently,” Steve Robinson, managing editor of CNN Sports, told USA Today. “But we felt we couldn’t just spill it out as just another post-tournament sound bite.”

I don’t know of any established news organization that hasn’t at some time had to wrestle with the decision to go or not go with a story. But that usually involves issues of accuracy, safety or national security - especially if it’s a network news organization. In this instance, it was neither.

It should have been a relatively easy call. Our republic was not in danger, no one was being threatened - and Zoeller’s actual words were on tape.

At worst, it might have been a remote connection for an organization, up against a deadline, being between the proverbial rock and a hard place. But that’s not the case. And that’s why network executives are paid the big bucks they are - to make the right call, which they obviously failed to do in this case.

Just think. What kind of heat would CBS have gotten if it had decided to delay those racist comments from the late “Jimmy the Greek” when he opined a decade ago about the anatomy of black athletes and their eventual takeover of executive suites in sports?

Or what about the Al Campanis bombshell of 10 years ago, when the then-longtime Dodgers executive questioned the mental acuity of African Americans and their inability, in his view, to perform in baseball’s front office?

What about golf analyst Ben Wright’s CBS debacle a few years ago, when he questioned women’s protruding anatomy and the ability to get it out of the way of their golf swing?

Further, do you think my former employer, ABC News, would have been able to withstand an almost certain firestorm from the public in 1983, when my late hallmate, Howard Cosell, called a black Washington Redskins player “a little monkey” during a live “Monday Night Football” game, and ABC attempted to foolishly edit the comments out for subsequent tape use?

ABC never tried, of course, to sweep Cosell’s comments under the rug. But any concealment, delay or improper editing of material by any of these organizations would have - correctly - brought about universal condemnation.

CNN deserves no different treatment.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Fred Davis Washington State University