'60 Minutes' incident spotlights issue of corporate ties, news

NEW YORK -- Blindsided by a controversy over its corporate ties to the publisher of Richard Clarke's book, "60 Minutes" has promised that it will not happen again.

So, when it reports Sunday on Bob Woodward's book, "Plan of Attack," "60 Minutes" will say that publisher Simon & Schuster and CBS are both owned by Viacom.

When that wasn't said during the March 21 report on Simon & Schuster subsidiary Free Press' Clarke book -- a week later, correspondent Lesley Stahl called it an oversight -- it provided fuel for Clarke's critics.

"If you're looking to deflect attention from the content of what was in the Clarke piece, this was a good way to do it," said "60 Minutes" executive editor Josh Howard, "and we walked right into the trap."

Consider it a foreshadowing, however, of questions that TV news organizations are likely to face more often in this world of media consolidation.

Plenty of news divisions and publishers are corporate cousins: Hyperion Books and ABC News; Time Warner Trade Publishing and CNN; HarperCollins and the Fox News Channel.

And those are just individual strings in a larger web that ties news organizations with entertainment companies. Viacom also owns Paramount Pictures and cable channels MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, for example. ("60 Minutes" mentioned the Viacom connection three years ago when Steve Kroft profiled Jon Stewart of Comedy Central.)

Internet columnist Matt Drudge first raised the Viacom issue in connection with Clarke, and some conservative critics questioned whether "60 Minutes" was helping to drive profits to another Viacom division.

"We thought the news was in what Clarke was saying, rather than in who published his book," Howard said. "We planned to interview him even before he had a publisher."

There's no special relationship between Simon & Schuster and CBS, the network said. Of 29 books featured on the newsmagazine since 1998, seven were S&S books. "60 Minutes" would have loved the first interview with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton about her Simon & Schuster book, but that went to ABC's Barbara Walters, Howard said.

Subsequent events made clear that what Clarke had to say was newsworthy, he said.

Standard of toughness

Many conservatives are suspicious because within four months, "60 Minutes" will feature three books that are either critical of Bush or are expected to raise tough questions about his leadership, said Rich Noyes, research director of the Media Research Center.

Besides the Clarke book and upcoming feature on Woodward's account of the administration's planning for the Iraq war, the newsmagazine in January interviewed former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill about his criticisms of Bush in the book "The Price of Loyalty."

Noyes also said Stahl's interview with Clarke didn't match the "60 Minutes" standard of toughness.

"'60 Minutes' had made it a practice its whole life of telling corporate America to come clean and tell America what is going on," Noyes said. "They should be held to the same standards themselves."

Howard noted that "60 Minutes" interviewed national security adviser Condoleezza Rice the week after Clarke, and Mike Wallace reported critically on Democratic efforts to hold up Bush's appointment of Mississippi Judge Charles Pickering to an appeals court.

"The idea that we have any political agenda is silly," he said. "We want to make news. That's what our agenda is."

Still, the raising of corporate ownership as an issue is likely to make news organizations more sensitive to it.

"The country right now is very polarized," said CBS News spokeswoman Sandra Genelius. "To the extent that a couple of extra seconds on the air with a disclaimer will preclude some of this frenzied reaction, then it's probably worth it."

ABC News, owned by Walt Disney Corp., discloses any corporate conflict at the top of stories, spokesman Jeffrey Schneider said.

NBC will soon face the issue much more frequently, with the network's pending purchase of Universal's assets, including a movie studio, several cable channels, stakes in five theme parks and the Telemundo network.

The network will disclose the relationships in stories, said NBC News President Neal Shapiro.

"To some viewers it will be important and to some it won't," Shapiro said. "To most, I suspect, it doesn't make a difference. But to those who really care about it, you want to be upfront with them."

One journalism ethics expert said it's a wise thing for the news networks to do.

"As much of an arms-length approach that they manage to accomplish, the better off they are," said Aly Colon, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute.

What's unknown is whether the sheer volume of synergistic situations will undermine any effort to be transparent with viewers. News shows are filled with interviews with people trying to sell things -- books, CDs, movies. "The Early Show" on CBS gets big ratings each Friday by interviewing "Survivor" contestants knocked off the CBS entertainment show the night before.

"Dateline NBC" this week is doing at least two hours of stories on the NBC entertainment show, "The Apprentice," surrounding its climactic episode. The news division argues the show is a cultural phenomenon, and therefore newsworthy.

"I think we have a far more sophisticated news consumer these days," Colon said. "They're pretty savvy. What happens then is they become so savvy that they may believe, in their own perceptions, that there is little difference between news, promotion, advertising and selling the show."