'60 Minutes' learns from Clarke flap
By David Bauder
Associated Press
Blindsided by a controversy over its corporate ties to the publisher of Richard Clarke's book, "60 Minutes" has promised that it will not happen again.
CBS via Associated Press
So, when it reports Sunday on Bob Woodward's book, "Plan of Attack," "60 Minutes" will say that publisher Simon & Schuster and CBS are both owned by Viacom.
A media official said Lesley Stahl's interview with Richard Clarke on "60 Minutes" didn't match the show's standard of toughness.
When that wasn't said during the March 21 report on Clarke's book, which is by Simon & Schuster subsidiary Free Press — a week later, correspondent Lesley Stahl called it an oversight — it provided fuel for Clarke's critics.
"If you're looking to deflect attention from the content of what was in the Clarke piece, this was a good way to do it," said Josh Howard, executive editor of "60 Minutes," "and we walked right into the trap."
Consider it a foreshadowing, however, of questions that TV news organizations are likely to face more often in this world of media consolidation.
Plenty of news divisions and publishers are corporate cousins: Hyperion Books and ABC News; Time Warner Trade Publishing and CNN; HarperCollins and Fox News Channel.
And those are just individual strings in a larger web that ties news organizations with entertainment companies. For example, Viacom also owns Paramount Pictures and cable channels MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central.
Internet columnist Matt Drudge first raised the Viacom issue in connection with Clarke, and some conservative critics questioned whether "60 Minutes" was helping to drive profits to another Viacom division.
"We thought the news was in what Clarke was saying, rather than in who published his book," Howard said. "We planned to interview him even before he had a publisher."
There's no special relationship between Simon & Schuster and CBS, the network said. Of 29 books featured on the show since 1998, seven were S&S books. "60 Minutes" would have loved the first interview with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton about her Simon & Schuster book, but that went to ABC's Barbara Walters, Howard said.
Subsequent events made clear that what Clarke had to say was newsworthy, he said.
Many conservatives are suspicious because within four months, "60 Minutes" will feature three books that are either critical of Bush or are expected to raise tough questions about his leadership, said Rich Noyes, research director of the Media Research Center.
Besides the Clarke book and upcoming feature on Woodward's account of the administration's planning for the Iraq war, the newsmagazine in January interviewed former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill about his criticisms of Bush in the book "The Price of Loyalty."
Noyes also said Stahl's interview with Clarke didn't match the "60 Minutes" standard of toughness.
" '60 Minutes' had made it a practice its whole life of telling corporate America to come clean and tell America what is going on," Noyes said. "They should be held to the same standards themselves."
Howard noted that "60 Minutes" interviewed National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice the week after Clarke, and Mike Wallace reported critically on Democratic efforts to hold up Bush's appointment of Mississippi Judge Charles Pickering to an appeals court.
