IN THE immortal words of John Stossel: Give me a break!
Stossel’s fingerprints are all over that woebegone story about organic veggies and yet it’s the producer who’s taking the fall – a month’s suspension without pay. So while this guy, David Fitzpatrick, tries to figure out how he’s going to make ends meet for a month, Stossel gets off with some sort of “reprimand,” according to ABC.
What exactly is the nature of that reprimand anyway? Does he get hauled into some executive’s office for a bawling out? Does he have to go sit in a corner, or go to bed without his supper, or write 100 times on a blackboard, “I will be more careful the next time I condemn an entire industry?”
Whatever it is, it doesn’t sound nearly as drastic as losing a month’s salary, although ABC won’t specify what the producer did to deserve his lumps. Maybe he really screwed up, but is he that much more responsible for the farm story going haywire than Stossel?
Their punishments vary so widely that it can only mean one of two things.
First, that for all his bravado, Stossel isn’t nearly as involved in the creation and reporting of his stories as are his producers.
Second, that a star correspondent always fares better in a crisis than a lowly producer.
The same thing happened at CNN in June 1998, following Peter Arnett’s story alleging the use of nerve gas by American forces against some of our own personnel in Laos during the Vietnam War.
When military sources, insisting they’d been misquoted, called the accuracy of the piece into question, two producers, April Oliver and Jack Smith, were fired. The two denied they’d done anything wrong and seperately sued CNN. Arnett, along with a whole bunch of higher-ups who had reviewed and approved the story, were not.
Still, Arnett didn’t get off scot-free. The story tarnished his reputation and the following spring, he left CNN under a cloud (although the official announcement said he and the network parted company “amicably”).
Arnett, a swashbuckling foreign correspondent famous for his reports from Baghdad during the Gulf War, had once been one of CNN’s biggest stars. Stossel too is a big star at ABC – so much so that he gets a handful of his own prime-time specials every year.
Tonight, though, he faces the embarrassment of apologizing on “20/20” for the flaws in his report on organic food. Time will tell if his reputation will suffer as Arnett’s did at CNN.
Meanwhile, after the apology, he continues to work and get paid, while a producer wonders how he’s going to pay the rent.
