The Belly of the Beast
How rotting is the culture at a major television "news magazine"? At "Dateline," it is worse than I ever feared.
At the moment [NBC Entertainment president Jeff] Zucker blew in and interrupted, I had been in [Dateline executive producer David] Corvo's office to propose a series of stories about al-Qaeda, which was just emerging as a suspect in the attacks. While well known in security circles and among journalists who tried to cover international Islamist movements, al-Qaeda as a terrorist organization and a story line was still obscure in the early days after September 11. It had occurred to me and a number of other journalists that a core mission of NBC News would now be to explain, even belatedly, the origins and significance of these organizations. But Zucker insisted that Dateline stay focused on the firefighters. The story of firefighters trapped in the crumbling towers, Zucker said, was the emotional center of this whole event. Corvo enthusiastically agreed. "Maybe," said Zucker, "we ought to do a series of specials on firehouses where we just ride along with our cameras. Like the show Cops, only with firefighters." He told Corvo he could make room in the prime-time lineup for firefighters, but then smiled at me and said, in effect, that he had no time for any subtitled interviews with jihadists raging about Palestine....
I did [...]point out to the corporate-integrity people unhelpful details about how NBC News was covering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that our GE parent company stood to benefit from as a major defense contractor. I wondered aloud, in the presence of an integrity "team leader," how we were to reconcile this larger-scale conflict with the admonitions about free dinners. "You make an interesting point I had not thought of before," he told me. "But I don't know how GE being a defense contractor is really relevant to the way we do our jobs here at NBC news." Integrity, I guess, doesn't scale.
Where does this useful, albeit depressing, article by Jeff Hockenberry appear? In a major newspaper? In a weekly newsmagazine? In a popular monthly magazine whose editors ought to be eager to show how today's networks seem to be copying dark movie satires for ideas?
No. It appeared in the MIT alumni magazine. Sic transit gloria hominis.
Labels: John Hockenberry, NBC News, stupid corporate tricks
