Television: Fighting Film Fakery

The cardinal sin of any news correspondent is misrepresentation, and it applies equally to print and electronic journalists. Television newsmen have been understandably touchy about any hint of film fakery ever since CBS had to admit in hearings before the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee last June that one sequence in a controversial documentary, The Selling of the Pentagon, had been used out of context. CBS declined to supply its film files to the committee, claiming that unused "outtakes" could be kept as confidential as a reporter's notes under the First Amendment press-freedom guarantees. Congressman Harley Staggers of West Virginia, the committee's chairman, lost out in an effort to have CBS cited for contempt of Congress.

Staggers has not given up. Investigators for his committee have quietly been seeking evidence of other misrepresentations, prompting CBS to undertake its own internal investigation. Last week the network quietly sent Los Angeles Correspondent Terry Drinkwater on a 90-day "leave of absence" without pay. His seemingly innocent offense—which was caught before it was ever screened—was posing a wine-company employee as a satisfied drinker of those carbonated wines. Los Angeles Bureau Chief John Harris was simultaneously dropped to the post of producer, though he insisted the demotion had nothing to do with either Drink-water's leave or the Staggers probe.

Severe Action. Ironically, network insiders reported that Drinkwater was saved from being fired by more prominent staffers, who argued ground rules on staging had never been defined. In New York, CBS officials would not comment beyond describing the affair as an "internal matter." But the network clearly intends to avoid further fakery of any kind. A recent memo from CBS News President Richard Salant admonished that "staging, or any false depiction, through editing or any other means, is intolerable." He promised severe disciplinary action against violators.

Staggers' investigators have closely questioned some CBS employees about past transgressions on the news. Among the sequences that have drawn the investigators' attention are shots of an Idaho forest blaze that reports say were enhanced by setting afire trees in the foreground. Another: an allegedly staged closeup in Viet Nam where a Marine touched a lighter to a thatched roof for added drama in an already dramatic story on the burning of a village.