Sometimes Truth Comes Out
But in broadcast journalism, not too often lately.
It’s been a peculiar career. Daily news reporter. Business reporter. Investigative reporter. Film critic. Columnist on advertising and marketing. Advertising critic. Roving features correspondent in newspaper syndication and on NPR. Freelance magazine writer. Network TV talking head. Book author. Speaker. Podcaster about language. Creator of podcast about MacArthur Geniuses. Co-host for 20 years of a public-radio show about media and society.
Kellogg’s would call that a “variety pack.” Thing is, sometimes it’s hard to remember if you’re the Rice Crispies or the Frosted Flakes. In fact, in my dotage, I sometimes find myself saying, “Oh, yeah, the jailhouse murder confession from the armed robber!” “Oh, yeah, the Panama-Mexico scam on desperate cancer patients!” “Oh, yeah, the time Coca-Cola halted its multi-hundred-million-dollar global ad campaign the day after my column judged it to be stupid.” “Oh, yeah, the intrepid investigation that proved Rice-a-Roni, no matter what they told us for decades, is not and has never been the San Francisco treat.” How that story didn’t win me the Presidential Medal of Freedom is an absolute mystery.
Why do I bring this up now? I mean, if you’re patient, you can eventually get it all in my obit. Well, here’s why. Over the weekend, I was updating my website and realized it was missing a whole category from my journalistic oeuvre. Oh, my aching oeuvre. To fill the gap, I had to listen to a mess of On the Media interviews that, in most cases, I hadn’t heard for many years. And in the process, I noticed something odd.
They constitute something of a relic: prominent people and institutions whose conduct demanded accountability being confronted for answers and actually, albeit grudgingly, furnishing them. I’m trying to think of recent examples of that outcome, but coming up blank.
The current model is broadcasters confronting interviewees with challenging questions, only to get evasion, changed subjects, lies and insults in response. So in case you want to hear what accountability actually sounds like, I invite you to stroll with me down memory lane.
Philip Morris. A top Big Tobacco executive articulates the most cynical justification imaginable for the cigarette holocaust that continues to claim more than 6 million lives per year.
Judith Miller. The ex-New York Times reporter defends, and rationalizes, her conduct in her credulous WMD stories that incorrectly validated the Bush Administration’s casus belli for the invasion of Iraq. You may find her answers a little thin on introspection, never mind contrition.
The Pentagon. In rewriting the “Law of War” manual for American troops, the Department of Defense equated journalists with “belligerents.” This and a subsequent interview caused the Pentagon to backtrack and re-rewrite the manual.
Glenn Beck. In 2017, the rightwing provocateur made a big show of recanting his former views and apologizing for his excesses. His media apology tour was a bonanza, as one mainstream outlet after another lapped up his supposed confession. Beck had a different experience on On the Media.
ExxonMobil. Another corporate confession, this one after a top Big Oil executive was forced to acknowledge decades of climate-change disinformation.
Revenge Porn. The online entrepreneur Hunter Moore reluctantly closed-up shop and relocated to federal prison shortly after his pitiful attempt, in our interview, to rationalize posting nude pictures of women — pictures provided by vengeful ex-partners.
Project Veritas. Media dirty trickster James O’Keefe became a darling of the right by going undercover with cameras and microphones to catch supposedly “woke” institutions in hypocrisy and bias. And it was easy for him, because he invented scenes that didn’t exist and — in violation of all journalistic standards — moved excerpts around out of context to make the benign seem indicting. Here we hear him denying unscrupulousness and using many big words.
Al Haig Advertorials. Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig retired to private life and fronted for World Business Review, a fake business show with fake academic credentials, on public TV, no less. This piece, which won an Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative journalism, ended the scam.
$70,000-a-Year Lab Rats? Questioning the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism about the ethics of recruiting prospective students in a downward-spiraling media industry. This conversation, unfortunately, has aged quite nicely.
Watchdogs in Tuxedos. This piece documented the 2014 White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington, DC, an annual exhibit of the unsavory chumminess between the press and officialdom. This one earned the Mirror Award for radio journalism, plus a nice banquet dinner.
Et Tu, Brooke? One of the most tense confrontations in my radio career came in a conversation with my own co-host, Brooke Gladstone, on the day following Donald Trump’s 2016 election to the presidency. This one — not just unfortunately but catastrophically — holds up, too.
I must say, some of these pieces are altogether jawdropping, my jaw included. Pity that they’re now artifacts of a lost civilization.