KCRA & the Safeway Meat Scandal (25)
Even with all his sometimes exaggerated fears of offending important people, I cannot imagine Paul Thompson initiating or agreeing to the followup story with Safeway's executives unless some kind of equal-time case could be constructed as justification.
And in a strange way, KCRA's followup really did make equal-time sense:
We'd aired one story that was basically damaging to Safeway. Now we had an obligation to "present the other side." After that, the whole affair could be dropped--unless, of course, some additional hard news developed.
What rendered a strict equal-time approach unworkable was the fact that while Safeway's response could be covered in less than two minutes,the original charges would have taken more like five to present properly. There was no practical way we could have given equal time to both sides and not ended up sitting on information that deserved to be broadcast.
We might as well accept the inevitability of such situations. On any given controversy, one side is likely to marshal more hard supporting facts than the other. Yes, we should make every effort to discover all the facts, sides, and viewpoints. But when it's time to go on the air with something, we can't allow the desire to keep up appearances to force us into a burlesque of objectivity while we sit on important information.
Our primary obligation is to tell our viewers what we know. When we stop performing that function, we stop being news people--and we deserve whatever viewer distrust and resultant lack of sponsor interest we may incur.
This may seem an obvious truism. But it was not to the executives at KCRA. And among local television news organizations at the time, KCRA was widely respected.
