Today Gartner is in danger of being fired as president of NBC News, in essence for living down to his low expectations for the medium in which he works. It’s not that Gartner is directly responsible for “Dateline NBC’s” now famous rigged GM crash video; no one alleges that either he or the anchors who apologized for the error, Jane Pauley and Stone Phillips, knew anything about it before the video was broadcast. The problem is that Gartner often neglected to set a tone that would have made such conduct unthinkable in the first place. Ultimately, he looked down his nose a bit at what he did for a living-and it showed. That both loosened his own standards and left him without allies below him.
The NBC inquiry into what happened isn’t finished. But it’s already clear that several people at “Dateline” approved the use of “incendiary devices,” in part because they were told that it was a “standard” part of crash testing. Gartner the Newspaperman might have made that a story to go along with GM’s dangerous truck design: the idea that crash testers were cooking their results. Gartner the TV Executive, expecting less from his showbizzy line of work, didn’t recognize at first how plainly wrong this was.
The buzzards are circling NBC News now. Tom Brokaw had to apologize last week for another mistake-a piece of video in a story on the timber industry that purported to show dead fish. Unfortunately for NBC, the fish weren’t dead at the hands of the industry, only stunned for testing purposes. Except in the minds of trend-hungry reporters, there was no connection between this and the GM story. To drive home the point, Gartner ran a NEXIS computer search showing that while NBC News made five corrections last year, The New York Times ran more than 1,300.
But it was fitting-and ultimately revealing-that Gartner took solace in the print comparison. He’s a thirdgeneration newspaperman, former editor of The Des Moines Register and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. After nearly five years as president of a news division, Gartner may, as he now argues, respect high-quality TV journalism as much as he respects print. But his tenure belies that. On paper-the sort of paper his bosses at General Electric read carefully-Gartner has been successful: he points out that the news division was losing more than $100 million when he took over and this year it stands to make $15 million; he has created an overnight news show, improved “Meet the Press,” expanded and stabilized “Today.” Just before the bad news, NBC was even getting more serious, with “Dateline” improving and a series of “Brokaw Reports” featuring issues like health care. But while credibility polls show NBC and CBS roughly even, N-BC, with its weaker bench of reporters and producers, is still regarded within the industry as last overall in news quality-last and now falling further.
Gartner is angry and feeling aggrieved. He received a letter from Richard Salant, the legendary former president of CBS News, praising his “candor and grace” in fessing up to the GM fiasco. It arrived the day after Salant’s fatal heart attack. “The only guy on your side is dead,” a friend told him. “They’re all hollering for my head,” Gartner said last week. “I’m astounded, because I think I’ve done the right thing at each step of the way based on the facts I knew at the time.”
Yet one of the facts he knew “at the time”–the crucial fact -was that igniters were used in the test. He learned this after the broadcast itself but several days before the GM press conference. During that period, he sent GM a letter saying that “NBC does not believe that any statements made … were either false or misleading. The ‘Dateline’ report was and remains completely factual and accurate.” If GM hadn’t held its boffo press conference, Gartner may well have kept stonewalling.
In recent years there have really been two public Michael Gartners. One returns each weekend to his home in Iowa and writes quirky, principled newspaper columns; the other lives in New York during the week and runs NBC News, where he has developed a reputation as prickly and distant. The first Gartner crusaded against the use of anonymous sources; the second did little to stop their use at NBC News. The first Gartner might have written a column about the GM story, pointing out how the pressure to produce good pictures, particularly during prime time, could slowly infect–even corrupt-a news organization. The second Gartner is all for serious television news-as long as General Electric’s money goals are met first. His eventual replacement will have to reverse that order and treat the “shallow comic book” as a deep, even revered, text.
