Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.

Crime Scene Investigation: L.A.

On Wednesday night, November 10, 2004, Leslie Moonves and several of his top executives sat in the ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles. They were attending a dinner, a fund-raiser for a Jewish charity.

Moonves and his guests had just settled down at the table after the cocktail hour. It was approaching 8 p.m.; in the eastern and central time zones, prime time was just coming to a close.

Les and his colleagues had reason to be confident. Their Wednesday night was on the rise, mainly because of C.S.I.: NY. The show had started strong, beating Law & Order the first weeks of the season, but NBC’s old warhorse had come back more recently.

Just a couple of minutes until 8, Kelly Kahl felt the vibration from his BlackBerry and pulled it out to check the message. A contact in New York was e-mailing him that the news department had preempted the final five minutes of that night’s episode of C.S.I.: NY during the East Coast feed because of a news flash. Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat had died.

“I can’t believe this,” Kelly said. When he told Moonves that CBS News had taken C.S.I.: NY off the air for a bulletin about Arafat, Les, by his own account, “went crazy.” As the full ramifications of what had occurred sank in, Moonves’s fury rose. Every viewer in the country’s two biggest time zones would have missed the ending to that night’s C.S.I. plot, meaning they would not know who the killer was. And for what? Arafat had been dying for weeks. Moonves and Andrew Heyward, the president of CBS News, had decided weeks earlier that at most, CBS would run a twelve-second crawl at the bottom of the screen informing viewers that the Palestinian leader had died and they could get more information on their next newscast.

In this case, the damn local newscast was only five minutes away. A memo had gone out describing all of this in detail. Who inside CBS News had dared to pull a stunt like this, in direct contradiction of his orders?

Taking out his cell phone, Les pushed his way through the tables to a quiet place outside the ballroom and dialed New York. “How could this happen?” Moonves demanded with vehemence when Heyward got on the line. Heyward explained that the news executive in charge had the authority to take the air; that was the only prudent thing in case of a momentous event.

Still steaming, Moonves said, “How many people have the ability to say take that off the air and put this on the air?” Heyward guessed it might be as many as twenty-five people.

Moonves was stunned. This was simply too much. It was one more example of CBS News people being full of themselves, feeling like they were superior to the people in the entertainment division and everyone else in the company. And this incident was occurring only two months after CBS News had been forced to withdraw its backing of a 60 Minutes II report accusing President Bush of shirking his National Guard duty. After that disgrace, Les decided that the people in CBS News were not only not superior to everyone else at the network, they were responsible for tarnishing the good image of the rest of CBS. Now, CBS News people were senselessly preempting the network’s most important new show.

To Moonves, it only made it worse that he was learning about this outrageous act of stupidity while attending, of all things, a Jewish charity event. When he got back to the table, Moonves told the CBS group: “We were fucked by Arafat again.”

from DESPERATE NETWORKS
by Bill Carter
Doubleday, 416 pp. $26.95

D.C. Spokeswomen Don’t Wear Plaid

Several days later, I headed up to the 0600 operations meeting with Rumsfeld, Myers, and other senior military and civilian staff. As people shuffled for caffeine and seats, the SecDef came in and headed over to the coffee wearing a bright red fleece vest and a rich purple and red tie. It looked pretty sharp.

“Very spiffy attire today, sir,” I said as I moved to let him get at the coffee. Without looking up as he poured, the SecDef said quietly, “I wore it for you.” I had no idea what he meant, so I asked him.

“Well, given the Style section story today, Joyce thought I should wear this in solidarity.” I hadn’t read the Style section since early 2001, so I repeated myself. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Oh,” he said, “Then you’d better take a look at the paper.” I didn’t worry much about his comments. After all, I thought, how bad could something in the Style section be?

I called George Rhynedance, my senior military assistant, on the way back. “What’s up with the Style section?” I asked. “Oh, it’s bad,” he said. “It” was a huge Style section piece that covered — in great detail — my choice of clothing. It included heavy criticism for what some people saw as inappropriate attire, given the seriousness of my surroundings and responsibilities. The piece was too darn long to read — not that I had the stomach or the time for it anyway. But you couldn’t miss the pictures — seemingly dozens of them — filling the inside page. The jacket that drew the most ridicule was a Louis Féraud that can only be described as asymmetrical patchwork. Some called it the “Partridge Family Bus” jacket; others thought it looked like a Mondrian with buttons. What can I say? It was in my closet, so I wore it.

I sure didn’t have the time to worry about the article at the time. And I certainly didn’t expect what happened. All at once, our office got a flood of calls and e-mails from people whose emotions ranged from aggravation to outrage that the Post had focused on something as trivial as my clothes at a time of war. They were young and old, male and female. They were average citizens and senior correspondents from across Washington and the country. One of the best reporters in Washington said she was going to call Donny Graham, the publisher of the Post, and “tell him just how despicable this is.” A Post reporter e-mailed me with “I thought we had covered every aspect of this war. I was SOOOOOO wrong!”

I was stunned by the volume of responses. Lots of people wanted me — or others on my behalf — to respond in some fashion. But Rhynedance and I remained convinced that the best and obvious choice was not to engage. One reporter actually hunted down my mother in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, to get her reaction to the “scandal,” as he called it. It never occurred to me that the story might be a big deal, so I hadn’t given her or my dad a heads-up. Anyhow, the reporter filled in my mother and asked for her reaction.

“Well,” she said, demonstrating that common sense and quick thinking are the best communication skills out there, “if that’s the meanest thing they ever say about Torie, I think she’ll be okay.” I was. The next day I wore purple.

from LIPSTICK ON A PIG
by Torie Clarke
Free Press, 241 pp. $26

Desperate Measures

In Shawn’s latter days, in the early eighties, he began training Charles McGrath as his possible successor to the top — a better candidate, I believed, than the previously tapped Jonathan Schell or Bill McKibben, whom Shawn had been forced to abandon, to his great distress, when faced with strong opposition from much of the staff. Shawn, though well along in his ninth decade by now, did not want to go at all, of course, and the McGrath apprenticeship, like the others, languished on the vine. One afternoon, piqued and frustrated by the whole thing, Chip determined to force the issue after his eye had fallen upon a dilapidated life-size, cotton-stuffed dummy that had lately been kicking around the fiction department in various low poses and positions. Chip called me into his office on our twentieth floor, which by chance lay directly above Shawn’s, on the nineteenth. “Listen,” he said, his eyes wildly alight. “It’s time for action. I’m dressing the dummy up in my shirt and tie and this old Press jacket. Then I get Shawn on the phone and say, ‘Mr. Shawn, this is McGrath and I can’t stand it one more minute! Look out your window’ — and then, ZAM, here I come, straight down past him, with maybe a whole bunch of galleys tied to my hand. That should settle things, wouldn’t you think?”

“Do it,” I said.

Only he didn’t.

from LET ME FINISH
by Roger Angell
Harcourt, Inc., 304 pp. $25

The Dance of the Bold-Faced Names

Before the ball, friends and security experts had told Truman that he had to provide a secret entrance at the hotel so that his celebrity guests could evade the photographers and the reporters who were expected to congregate en masse outside the Plaza. Truman obligingly made the arrangements. At the end of the evening, after the last camera had been packed away and all the guests and the paparazzi had gone home, Truman realized that not a single person, famous or unknown, had made any attempt to use this entrance to avoid the press.

from PARTY OF THE CENTURY: THE FABULOUS STORY OF TRUMAN CAPOTE AND THE BLACK AND WHITE BALL
by Deborah Davis
John Wiley & Sons, 293 pp. $24.95

To read the articles in the May/June 2006 issue, click here.

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.