CBS producers must have a line for when they meet someone like Richard Clarke: “We’ll make ya famous.”
CBS, child of Viacom–and sister of publishing giant Simon & Schuster, cable network MTV, and Hollywood studio Paramount–holds a handful of aces when pursuing the big media “get” of the moment. The corporate family can dangle the world in front of anyone it wants to land badly enough, using its publishing, movie, music, and even news empire to land its quarry and generate a financial bonanza.
In June 2003, CBS and its corporate family went after rescued soldier Jessica Lynch as soon as she could sit up and sign a contract. The conglomerate competed against the usual media heavyweights, but it offered something the others couldn’t–the ability to create a multimedia perfect storm. While Katie Couric offered the photogenic Pfc. a spot on Today and an armful of patriotic books, and while all Diane could manage was to send Lynch a picture of her own West Virginia home, the Viacom octopus rolled out a battery of offers: Lynch got offered a book deal through Simon & Schuster, she got an offer to sell the rights to her story to CBS for a made-for-TV movie or to Paramount for a feature film, and MTV offered Lynch and her friends a spot on Total Request Live. And to top it all off, she was offered a guest spot on CBS’s flagship “news” program, 60 Minutes. After she defected to Knopf for the book and NBC for the movie, 60 Minutes ran a story opposite her NBC movie that effectively debunked the Lynch-as-Annie Oakley meme that had turned her into a war hero. Private Lynch, it seems, didn’t play by the Viacom rules.
If you do play by the rules, Viacom will be your best friend. In fall 2003, as charges of child molestation began to swirl anew around Michael Jackson, CBS put an offer on the table. The network wanted to get Jackson on 60 Minutes, but rather than go the usual route CBS went straight to the former pop star’s ego and wallet. CBS had shelved a prime-time Jackson special when news of his legal troubles hit. The network offered to boost Jackson’s pay for the special by $1 million once it aired, in exchange for a sit-down with the venerable news magazine, making Jacko’s take home pay a reported $3 million. The special aired in December, Jackson got his cash, and 60 Minutes got its “get.” Jacko played by the rules, you see.
Yet after all this, CBS laughably insists that it doesn’t pay for interviews. It must depend on the meaning of the word “pay,” and who’s actually doing the paying.
All of which leads us to the current media megastar enjoying the proverbial 15 minutes of fame. Former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke quit the Bush White House before the Iraq war and set to work on an anti-Bush tell-all book. He finished it in October 2003, submitted it to the White House for security review, and set out to find a publisher. He told Tim Russert on Meet the Press that he originally hoped for a Christmas 2003 release, a completely unrealistic timeline given the number of Beltway eyes that had to review the book and the length of time it generally takes to get a book from consideration to publication. Enter the Viacom conglomerate. 60 Minutes apparently started chatting with Clarke in or before February 2004, wooing him to sit down for an interview. At that point, Clarke says he had no publisher. It just so happened that CBS had a rich sister and an interested parent, both of whom had involved themselves in earlier newsmaker deals.
So 60 Minutes got its interview, which aired March 21, 2004, under Leslie Stahl’s byline. Clarke got his book deal with CBS sister Simon & Schuster. But at no point in the edited puff piece did Stahl ever disclose the corporate relationship or the fact that, via parent Viacom, CBS had a financial stake in the success of Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies.
A week went by before CBS’s conflicted interest landed in the press. On the March 28 program, Stahl tried to wave away the omission as an “oversight.” She explained that when she and her producers approached Clarke “months ago” he did not yet have a book deal, so the CBS crew had no way of knowing that the conflict of interest would arise. That answer is constructed to deceive: Stahl never mentioned when the interview itself was conducted or the fact that it’s possible to edit video packages right up until airtime. The “months ago” formulation is meant to fool viewers into believing that, once initiated, the process of interview-to-air precludes any opportunity to change, add, or delete relevant material–which is bogus. Put another way, is 60 Minutes, long known for having some of the best television editorial talent in the business, really not nimble enough to add new material to news packages after the initial point of contact?
Stahl’s not-quite apology didn’t quite say that the vaguely timed courtship included both the interview and a book-deal offer, but she didn’t quite deny it either. And why be so vague? Just tell us when CBS first approached Clarke, and what sort of deal was offered. We need dates and figures, please. The date of the actual interview would be nice, too. Given the Viacom syndicate’s recent tactics, it is reasonable to conclude that Clarke is just the latest newsmaker to get a fistful from the 60 Minutes cash register via CBS’s corporate sibling, Simon & Schuster.
It must also be just a coincidence that the book’s original April 27 publication date got fast forwarded to coincide with Clarke’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission, testimony that contradicts many of Clarke’s statements over the past two years but seems tailor made to do maximum political damage to the president in an election year–thereby creating a deafening buzz about the book. (That buzz has so far helped 130,000 copies of Clarke’s book fly off the shelves, incidentally.) None of this could have been timed and engineered to create yet another perfect multimedia storm, could it?
Clarke stands to become a very rich man from his bestseller, and his publisher has a mega hit on its hands. 60 Minutes got the big “get” again, and the ratings and buzz that go along with it. If Clarke were younger he would have found himself slinging videos on MTV too. Will there be a movie? On MSNBC’s Hardball on March 31, Clarke dodged questions about possible movie deals. Such a deal can be easily arranged, through Viacom-owned Paramount. Clarke evidently played by Viacom’s rules, and will reap the benefits for months to come, probably through November.
And no big book-deal story is complete without Washington’s ultimate “get” reporter, Bob Woodward of Watergate fame. It just so happens that Woodward also has a new book set for an April 18 release, about the Bush administration and internal disagreements over the war. It’s a Simon & Schuster property, and Woodward is scheduled to be on 60 Minutes the day his book hits stores. Woodward–the ultimate Beltway insider journalist–evidently played by the rules, too.
This whole thing must be what the corporate types call “synergy.” Whatever you call it, 60 Minutes is no longer practicing news the way it once did. CBS and its sisters have taken checkbook journalism, the unseemly tabloid practice of paying newsmakers for their thoughts, to a whole new level. And this sort of aggressive “feature bundling” behavior is what once got Microsoft in so much anti-trust trouble.
But there is good news to find amid the rubble of America’s (formerly) most-respected TV news program. If you happen to become the next “get” the networks must have, the Viacom behemoth has a line for you: “We’ll make ya famous, and we’ll make you very rich–if you play by our rules.”
–Bryan Preston and Chris Regan write on political, military and public affairs, and are the authors of JunkYardBlog.