WELCOME to the debut of “The Truth Is!”, a blog of reporting and commentary that aims to be informative, thoughtful and provocative. At least initially, the blog will have a strong heartland flavor by virtue of the connection of a number of us to Cowles family journalism. I am former editor of the Des Moines Register’s opinion pages. Another contributor, Michael Gartner, is former editor of the paper; he later served as president of NBC News. Another former Register editor who has agreed to contribute, Geneva Overholser, is director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg school of journalism. Followers of the blog will have access also to the work of Herbert Strentz of Des Moines, a close Register and other newspaper watcher who once headed Drake University’s journalism school. Bill Leonard, a longtime Register editorial writer, will add insights.

“The Truth Is!” will be supervised by my daughter, Marcia Wolff, a communications lawyer for 20 years with Arnold and Porter (Washington, D.C.). Invaluable technical assistance in assembling and maintaining the blog is provided by my grandsons Julian Cranberg, a college first-year, and Daniel Wolff, a high school senior.

If you detect a whiff of nepotism in this operation, so be it. All of it is strictly a labor of love. —Gil Cranberg

Monday, December 10, 2012

Gilbert Cranberg: HOW NBC FOULED UP


Winning a libel suit against the press is very difficult, so difficult that it seldom happens. But George Zimmerman, the Florida security guard charged in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year old he encountered on his rounds, is chancing it. Or rather, his lawyers are. Zimmerman basically is suing NBC for injecting a racial angle into the killing.

The crux of the libel complaint is that NBC’s “Today” show broadcast last March a portion of what purported to be an exchange between Zimmerman and a police dispatcher about the Martin-Zimmerman encounter. According to the broadcast, Zimmerman had volunteered to the dispatcher, “This guy looks like he’s up to no good…he looks black.” The New York Times reported that Zimmerman actually had said, “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around looking about.” The police dispatcher then asks, “OK and this guy – is he white, black or Hispanic? Mr. Zimmerman pauses and replies, “He looks black.

So it was the police dispatcher, not Zimmerman, who brought up Martin’s race. NBC apologized for taking Zimmerman’s words completely out of context, and it took disciplinary action against six staffers for the editing blunder.  But NBC’s initial reaction to complaints about its Zimmerman story was uninformative and totally inadequate. In its statement, it said “there was an error made in the production process we deeply regret….We will be taking steps to prevent this from happening in the future and apologize to viewers.” Nowhere in its statement did the network suggest it had been unfair to Zimmerman by misattributing words to him that made it appear there was a racial motive for the shooting. And no one with responsibility for the Today show went on-air to apologize to him.

Would that have prevented Zimmerman’s libel action? Plenty of people who receive an apology or retraction go ahead and sue anyway, in part apparently to punish the media. Regardless of whether NBC could have forestalled Zimmerman’s libel action, it would have been prudent for the network to broadcast widely that it had been unfair to Zimmerman.

After all, the shooting of Trayvon Martin was widely reported and it was widely believed, or at least suspected, that it was racially motivated. NBC contributed mightily to that misperception. Somebody from the Today show should have stared into a camera and set the record unmistakably straight.
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