KCRA & the Safeway Meat Scandal (17)
Our Washington correspondent's film still hadn't arrived. There was nothing for me to do but wait for the network "feed."
In the 1970s, NBC provided a daily News Programming Service to its local affiliate stations around the country. Stories that might be of general interest, but weren't going make the NBC Nightly News, were fed around the country via telephone cable, so that they could be videotaped and used as needed in local broadcasts.
NBC's Russ ward was scheduled to have a story on Waldie and the meat charges that afternoon.
I expected Waldie to be pretty strong. The later wire service accounts had included a lot of forceful direct quotes. UPI had him calling Safeway's practices an outrageous and deliberate attempt to defraud consumers. Waldie had reportedly said:
The nationwide pattern is so consistent that the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn at this time is that such misrepresentation is company policy.
But there were also unknown factors about the story. It turned out that another Congressman was involved--Benjamin Rosenthal of New York. I hadn't seen any direct quotes from Rosenthal, and I didn't know how good he would be.
Network reporters' stories also had to be a good deal shorter than our local ones. I wasn't sure how much could be included within these time restrictions. The network's early deadline was another complicating factor: I didn't know how much background research Russ Ward might have had time to do.
