Smoke in the Eye

Dear FRONTLINE,
I viewed with interest your recent report regarding CBS's 60 Minutes' intimidation by the tobacco industry. Your story concentrated on whether CBS should have stood their ground against threats to be sued.
I am sorry, but I think you missed the core problem.

The basis for the intimidation was the existence of a dysfunctional legal system. If a plaintiff can bring a suit under a regime whereby its outcome is not subject to the rigorous application of justice, but rather dependent upon "a sympathetic jury selected from a tobacco growing region", then the news business, and in fact any business, is not safe.

I will remind you of a recent case. A large Canadian funeral corporation recently got into a fight with a small Mississippi funeral operation. The details of this case are not important, and indeed who was right or wrong is unimportant. The bottom line was that the trial was set in the hometown of the funeral operation, with a jury selected from the region. A flamboyant case was made and a jury award of $500 million. To appeal the case the corporation was required to post a bond of $500 million which they could not raise.

To protect the genuine rights of individuals and companies (including the right to protect trade secrets) you suggested that an article "must be in the public interest", This is a good argument, but means nothing if the legal system ultimately used to enforce it cannot be counted upon. Since the determination of what is "in the public interest" is subjective, then a jury subject essentially to plaintiff selection can always be used to circumvent it.

T.C.
Ottawa, Canada

Dear FRONTLINE,
It was with great fascination that I watched your program last night. A mixture of compelling drama and frightening realism, your story has done more to help me screw up my reslove and quit smoking than any message I have encountered in the last several months. I was also fascinated by the details behind the networks' relative decisions in handling the threatened lawsuits from the tobacco lords. I can't help but wonder if the lawsuits weren't just an excuse, a smokescreen if you will, to give the public a simple, easily-swallowed, reason to back down.

As someone who grew up with Walter Cronkite's reports on the War in Vietnam and on the Apollo Missions, as someone who was inspired as a boy by the incredible tale of Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate, it is with great sadness that I watch the integrity of the newsman on the beat whittled away by corporate greed. Your story, however, is the most hopeful sign I've seen in a long time that perhaps the future is not so bleak. Thank you.
Sincerely yours,
R. Bruce McCurdy

Dear FRONTLINE,
What new information did you hope to expound in this one? It all sounded like old news...
Randy Eversole

Dear FRONTLINE,
I enjoyed your program "Smoke in the Eye". I often complain about the liberal media stepping out of bounds, however, I have never questioned their first amendment rights. I find it frightening, that the news backed away from these stories. The media serves as the final watchdog for the people. If they back away from legitimate stories because of the threat of being sued, who will get the information to the people? Thank you for doing this story.
Michaela E. Noble

Dear FRONTLINE,
Your investigation into the ABC/CBS reporting fiasco was brilliant. As an investigative reporter, I empathize with the respected Mike Wallace and Daniel Schorr.
But more importantly, I admire these journalists and PBS for their courage in reporting the real story behind a growing epidemic in the news industry: corporate executives -- including editors, lawyers, and news directors -- who let their personal interest(s) infect the public's right to know.
Skip Lackey

Dear FRONTLINE,
Thank you so much for your excellent programming. As a child I watched my grandmother suffer from chronic bronchitis and undergo surgery to remove a portion of her lung. She smoked all the while. I saw my grandfathers progressively crippled by heart disease and accept this as a malady of middle age as they puffed away. I visited my father in the intensive care unit where he landed after suffering a heart attack at age forty. As my stepmother took him to the hospital with his chest pain, he stopped on the lawn of St. Mary's, sat down and enjoyed a cigarette because he knew they wouldn't let him smoke in the hospital. He was a four pack a day man at the time. Two months after our marriage I watched my wife's fifty nine year old mother die from cigarette induced vascular disease in the hospital where I practice emergency medicine.

And every day when I go to work I see the effects: senior citizens laboring to breathe with emphysematous lungs as they struggle through their "golden years", business executives with heart attacks at age forty, college freshmen with asthma attacks. They all have a right to smoke, and they exercise that right, many of them until the day they die.

Tobacco maims and tobacco kills, and for a tobacco company executive to maintain that he does not believe there is a link between cigarettes and disease is ludicrous. It also seems ludicrous to me to hear a media executive say that if there were situations where news media corporate decisions were influenced by the prospects of significant financial gain for a few top executives we would hear about it in the news from the journalistic arms of those same organizations.

Thank you Frontline for producing this program which graphically demonstrated the strangle hold that the corporate offices of ABC and CBS had on the journalistic throats of some of the most respected members of the news media.

Sincerely yours,
C.C.H., M.D.

Dear FRONTLINE,
The Frontline story "Smoke in Your Eyes" was the most biased, single-sided story I have ever watched on Frontline. It iterated the anti-tobacco stories of the major networks, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The Frontline story provided no new information the public did not already know, and did not provide any perspective on both sides of the issue.

I do not smoke, have never smoked, hate second-hand smoke, and believe that smoking damages your health. Irrespective of what the scientific evidence may or may not say, everyone knows that cigarettes contain nicotine, and that smoking is addictive. Why else is it so hard to give up smoking? Call it folklore if you will, but the addiction of tobacco, or tobacco products, is public knowledge.

Now to the fairness issue: Coca-Cola, Kellogg, General Mills and other companies manufacturing products that are ingested by the consumer maintain high quality control standards for the consistency of their products. The Coca-Cola you drink today tastes the same as the Coca-Cola you will drink next year. Wine is a natural product that varies from year to year, so Gallo and other large, commercial wineries blend their wines to maintain year-to-year consistency (hence no specific year on the label). Does that mean that vintners "manipulate the alcohol" in their wines?

Cigarette manufacturers face the same issue. In order to maintain a consistent product, they must blend various tobaccos and tobacco products. What they are doing is quality control, not "manipulation." If they wanted to manipulate, they would produce a brand of cigarettes made from a strain of high nicotine tobacco and call the brand "Macho" or use some other marketing ploy. Bear in mind that manipulation of nicotine - if indeed the tobacco companies choose to do that - is not illegal. The Frontline story presented the picture as if "manipulation" were a crime. It is not. FAIRNESS, FAIRNESS! PLEASE!

Note that in the Senate hearings, the tobacco executives were stating their belief. It is not a crime to state your beliefs, even though they may be false. Suppose the tobacco executives were tried and convicted of false testimony. Most of them are ready for retirement anyway, and there is a large cadre of executives poised to take their place. Targeting the top executive does not harm the tobacco companies.

I regret that Frontline allowed itself to be prostituted by the anti-tobacco forces.
Sincerely,
D. F. S. III

Dear FRONTLINE,
Thank you for your piece on the grip the tobacco industry seems to hold on some of the commercial news media. Most telling was the revelation of the Tisch family's holdings in the Lorillard Tobacco Company while controlling CBS, and their interest in Brown & Williamson.

As long as the "death merchants" can control the content of the news media through their investment portfolio, commercial newscasts should always be suspect. With the Tisches of the world, a free and independent press is bound to lose in a choice between truth and profits.

This report should underscore the need to support Public Broadcasting. Is there room for Mike Wallace in your organization?
Sincerely,
W.R.M.
Millbrook, NY

Dear FRONTLINE,
Although the broadcast did a good job of exploring the conflict between broadcast journalistic responsibility and the chilling effect of Big Business on the peoplesí right to information in the public interest, Smoke in the Eye was generally kind to both. Perhaps a more fitting title might have been, Black Rock, Black Eye.

As far as tobacco companies are concerned, letís not forget that these companies produce an addictive product which, when used as intended, kill its consumer.

With respect to CBS, what could have provided more perspective on the themes of TV ethics and tobaccoís effect on health than a retrospective on CBSís own Edward R. Murrow? With his courageous reporting (Sen. Joseph McCarthy, etc.) and his on-air chain smoking, he was an exemplar of the risks on each side of the issue. Could his name, and the irony of his tobacco-related death in 1965, have escaped his colleagues - Schorr, Cronkite and Wallace? Perhaps his story would have just embarrassed everyone concerned with TV journalism that much more.
Mike Spataro
Brooklyn, NY

Dear FRONTLINE,
I've just finished watching it and I'm speechless. I was even more impressed by your web page on the Internet which provided the materials and sources within the broadcast. Keep up the good work, and thank you for your story. p.s. This episode is only second to the one about the Gulf War in terms of content and editing.
George Magdeleno

Dear FRONTLINE,
I just finished watching "Smoke in the Eye" and I had to tell you what a great job you did with this program. I had closely followed the incidents at ABC and CBS at the time, but your report tonight brought out a lot of information that I had not known or considered before. Most notable of this was the Tisch ownership of a tabacco company actively doing business with the very company who might sue them over the report. During the initial controversy over the cancelled report, there was a lot of discussion in the media about the impending merger but little or nothing about the Tisch relationship to the tabacco industry.

At a time when we require our politicians to "come clean" about who gives them financing, which lobbyists they meet for dinner and who pays them speaking fees, it is tragic that the fourth estate can be run by big corporations that are not required to be above board about their own conflicts of interest. Historically the press has had an important role in keeping government, business and private citizens honest. At this, it has done a good job. Unfortunately, as news has become entertainment and big business, managed by multinational conglomerates, this role has been subsumed by the almightly bottom line. And judging from the comments made by the apologists who appeared on Frontline as the official spokesmen for ABC and CBS News, this is not going to change any time soon.

From the journalists who reported on these tabaccco stories, we also did not see the same convictions we would have a few years ago; the willingness to fight to have their story published or aired. Think about it: the only journalist upset enough about the unwillingness of his station to report a well-researched story to quit was on a sitcom. At least we still have a program like Frontline that is willing to take on the tough issues.

Frontline represents the best of what public broadcasting should be. Keep up the good work.
K.S.
New York City

Dear FRONTLINE,
Great job on your program and the "webumentary" on the tobacco papers.
Thank you for your good work. Please contintue this excellent format which allows for the immediacy and impact of telivision and the depth and reference of the internet.
Great Job.
Pat MacManus

Dear FRONTLINE,
Thank you for the in depth story regarding the 60 Minutes piece about Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company which was initially quashed by the CBS corporate C E O's and attorneys. You presented it with a clarity which makes plain the power some companies have to disregard the general publics right to know information which seriously impacts our daily lives.

My only question is: Why didn't a seasoned and respected staff the likes of 60 Minutes not take a walk enmasse after finding out the truth behind this important story being stopped by their upper management? Their journalistic integrity will never be the same in my eyes.
Sincerely,
N.M.
Dallas, Texas
Dear FRONTLINE,
As a print journalist with seven years in the field, it made me proud to see that in this era of instantaneous communication, our country must still rely on the courage and dedication of newspaper reporters, like those at the Wall Street Journal, to expose the truth. Who says we're dinosaurs? I also have to ask what else can you expect of corporate journalism, especially that of commercial television, in a revisited age of robber barons? Your report also begs the question why is Congress seeking to treat the Internet as a form of broadcasting rather than granting it the same freedom of speech newspapers enjoy? In the eyes of Brown & Williamson, its political action committees and assorted lobbyists, the closed deposition of Dr. Jeffrey Wigand must assuredly be viewed as pornography. It only proves that the leaders of this great Republic are as frightened as cigarette manufacturers about the dissemination of information. Democracy in action? More likely a new axiom to the old addage ≥power corrupts.≤ It should now read power corrupts and is addicting.
Sincerely,
David J. Ralis

Dear FRONTLINE,
I saw your story and a lot of sensations appear. First of all we all saw the tobacco exects. lie in front of Congress, them we see how the tobacco industry wants to keep its own scientific research a secret. Secondly, I read a commentary by Frank Rich, informing the public, that Big Tobacco is attempting to neturalize the FDA`s efforts to regulate the product, he says that the Republican Convention is being underwritten by Philip Morris, refere to Dole as" Mr. Fixit. Haley Barbouur, a native of primitive Mississippi, is interveining in several states, to thwart the anti-tobacco effort, and Gov. Fordice has made an attempt tp prevent his own attorney general, from pursuing a leadership role in anto-tobacco regulation Tobacco is a legal killer drug, we all know that:I do not see any rationalation in its regulation, but if a pack of cigarettes cost $5.00, due to taxation why not tax it. Your show was informative as was the info on the NET. Please keep up the good work.
James M. Freeman

Dear FRONTLINE,
Thank you for a very informative, hard-hitting report. It was the type of report I would have expected to see ABC or CBS before they became corporate lackeys. I hate to see the heroes of my youth grow old and die, but thank you for the obituary.
I thought I could no longer be suprised by the lack of ethics in corporate America. I was wrong.
Fred Pearson

Dear FRONTLINE,
I was stunned by the behind the scenes extortion that even newsmedia War Horses like Mike Wallace and his other fine collegues have to endure. It is sad that the lack of "journalistic ethics" in corporate thinking that Walter Cronkite commented on, is NOT LIMITED to newsmedia. Through my own day to day business experience there is a true vacumn of ethics in most business activities. Thank you for yet agian another eye opener you ar famous for.
Yours,
Mark Bender
Los Angeles, CA

Dear FRONTLINE,
Your program "Smoke In Your Eyes" illustrates the imact of Corporate blindness and lack of concern or interest with any sense of responsability for anything or anyone but profit and greed. By exposing the corporations which act in this way you illustrate the reality of US media, media consolidation, and generate much needed awareness and pressure on corporations around the country and world. Keep up the fantastic work.
Stefan Hodes

Dear FRONTLINE,
Thanks for a very informative program. In a country that believes so strongly in First Ammendment rights, I am so thankful that print news media like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal still understand what the First Ammendment represents. ABC and CBS news are spineless and have become the worst of big business, just like the tobacco companies.
Rusty Martin

Dear FRONTLINE,
Congratulations FRONTLINE! Your piece on the tobacco industry persecution of the former scientist, and the weakness of ABC and CBS was top line reporting and COURAGE! Walter Cronkite warned us that the change of News Divisions into businesses would mean the death of unbiased reporting in the public trust. He was right. You could see the saddness in Cronkite's eyes. You could feel Mike Wallace's pain as he basically admitted his lack of will and courage in the face of manaagement capitulation to Brown & Williamson. It was like an excrutiating toothache! And to have to admit that he was unaware of the Chairman's overwhelming tobacco interests at the least smacks of poor investigative reporting.

Apparently, the newspapers have more commitment to journalism than commercial television. We had better watch over the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. They may be the next targets for takeover by Brown & Williamson and the peers of power.

Frontline, you have served the United States of America as a wartime hero, and you deserve our highest praise, admiration, and everlasting support. Only you have demonstrated the willingness to deliver on the promise provessed in the public trust.
Thank you.
B.D.C.

Dear FRONTLINE,
Once again I feel compelled to complement Frontline on an excellent production: Smoke in the Eye. I am amazed each week at the consistent high quality of reporting and presentation which Frontline maintains. The report on the tobacco industry and its effect on investigative news reporting by network television was (again) infuriating and revealing. Keep up the good work! And thanks!
Sincerely,
Bob Monaco

Dear FRONTLINE,
As I watched your program about the news industry's encounter with the cigarette industry, trying to grasp the structure of the problem of what went wrong with the system we have in place, I first thought, here we are again, the legal system, i.e., lawyers, being corrupted again by powerful industry. But this isn't just any industry; it is the "news" industry, the public's relegated and accepted conscience of society that was being pushed around by industrial dollars, the voice the law has consciously chosen to protect in the Constitution as a safeguard not only for herself but for the fabric of our society.

This issue is a microcosmic reflection of the general pervasive state of personal irresponsibility that our society has fostered in the past several years. The news industry, in this case, had relinquished its responsibility to the public in order to allow its leaders to build gold lined safety boxes for their bouillon, commanding its players, including both the news and legal soldiers to build the case for it, in effect an attempted annihilation of our public conscience, and ironically, itself, for if it destroys its own conscience, it destroys its raison d'être, as well.

The news soldiers, not the industry, should be thanked and congratulated for holding to its sacred [an old fashioned but practicable word] responsibility and duty in our society. Not so the news industry. Not so the legal soldiers. Thank you very much for putting this program together.
Sincerely,
Lillian Greeley, Ed.D.
Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Boston University