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159 Chapter Fourteen Firewall As part of their culture, journalists respect what they call “the firewall”—an inviolable separation between the business side and the editorial side of a news organization. Reporters are not supposed to tell the circulation and advertising managers how to do their work, and the people who sell the papers, market the cable distribution, sell the advertising, or handle other business matters are not supposed to tell the journalists how to cover the news.That’s to avoid any conflict of interest—even the appearance of a conflict of interest—by the news organization . The reports that the public reads and sees and hears should not be tainted by any business consideration, by any desire to sell them something. All of this is so that the public will trust the news organization to be as unbiased and independent as is humanly possible. It’s one of the sacred rules of journalism. In my thirty-four years as a journalist, I found that the firewall protecting reporters from commercial taint remained intact most of the time, but on a few occasions it was weakened by cracks in the structure. One day in Washington in early July 1986 there was a story in the news about two U.S. Army boxers who wanted to compete in a new international sports event in Moscow but were forbidden by the Pentagon. They said they were determined to go ahead anyway and risk Pentagon punishment. The sports event was the Goodwill Games, sponsored jointly by the Soviet government and Ted Turner and held in Moscow. Turner conceived the sports event after the United States boycotted the Moscow Olympics in 1980 to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Soviets retaliated by boycotting the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. Based on everything I know about him, I believe that Turner had mixed motives for investing in the Goodwill Games: making money, gaining publicity for himself, and helping world peace. Whatever Turner’s motives, the project was not going well. Public interest was not high (the games would later deliver low television ratings and a $26 million loss for Turner Broadcasting), Turner’s board was not happy, the International 160 What’s Wrong Olympic Committee objected to the Goodwill Games, and the Reagan White House, with its firm stance against Soviet communism, was against the sports event. Two days before the Goodwill Games opened in Moscow, the Pentagon banned all U.S. military personnel from taking part and that included eleven boxers. Turner said he was in contact with U.S. officials in an effort to persuade them to reverse the ban. It was in this context that I received a strange request. Working in the Washington bureau of CNN, I began planning which elements to use for my spot news story that day in early July, checking to see which video clips we had of the two defiant U.S. Army athletes and which sound bites our producers were gathering. In the middle of my preparations, one of the supervising producers in our Washington bureau told me that CNN’s Atlanta headquarters had called to say that the producers there wanted me to include in my story a line noting that President Reagan had once said, months earlier that year, that it was good for the United States and the Soviet Union to compete in sports. “Why should I include that?” I asked. “It has nothing to do with today’s story—two guys fighting the Pentagon.” “Doesn’t matter. You’ve got to include it.” “But it sounds like editorial comment. You know, ‘Look what a hypocrite Reagan is, saying we should compete and then not letting our athletes compete .’” “I know.” “And,” I said, still uncomfortable, “I don’t have room for it. It’s extraneous. I’ve only got room for today’s developments and a brief bit of background.” “Tony,” the producer said,“Atlanta wants it in, and it’s going to be in.” In all my sixteen years as a bureau chief and correspondent of Cable News Network that was the only time that I saw the naked hand of commercialism controlling one element, albeit a minor one, of a CNN news report. It disturbed me. Probably no one in the audience was bothered by it, but I was. Here we were, trying to tell the truth in an honest, detached manner, and we were forced by someone on the business side of Turner Communications to...

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