But once in a while, the dog barks. The suppressors are caught red-handed. Then we learn that what we feared with GE-NBC (where I do some work for NBC News), Disney-ABC, Westinghouse-CBS and smaller media mergers was worth worrying about after all. This time the story involves Time Warner. We know about it only because of the integrity of Steven Brill, the founder of Court TV, The American Lawyer and several smaller legal and business publications then and now mostly owned by Time Warner. A profile of Brill by Jennet Conant in this month’s Vanity Fair turned up some 1996 memos from Brill that were subpoenaed in a lawsuit brought by another party in a separate matter. They tell a tale that is damaging to the credibility of Time Warner and a warning to any journalist who works for a large company.
In one internal memo written for his files, Brill described a call from Richard Bressler, Time Warner’s chief financial officer. Brill says Bressler asked him to kill a profile of William Baer, a Federal Trade Commission official, that was scheduled to appear in a Brill newsletter. The profile was sensitive because Time Warner’s merger with Ted Turner’s media empire was then pending before the FTC. Brill quoted Bressler’s phone call: ““We are working hard on Baer and anything that gets him nervous or makes him think we don’t appreciate him could hurt us.''
Brill not only refused to kill the story; he wrote an impassioned letter to Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin complaining about that and two other corporate attempts to compromise editorial independence. ““Once, Peter Haje [Time Warner’s general counsel] asked me to kill a story in The American Lawyer about the Scientology litigation because he feared it would criticize Time’s reporting. More recently, someone else in the law department asked Court TV not to cover a case involving the [Warner] music company,’’ the letter read. ““I just cannot express adequately how disappointed and upset I am.''
Last week Brill, famous for his bravado, was unusually quiet; his friends say he doesn’t want to pick a fight now with Time Warner, though he signed a no-gag order when the company paid him $30 million to buy out his remaining interests in his properties earlier this year. Brill is planning to start his own crusading media magazine this fall - nearly three years in the making - and he’s anxious that it not be seen as growing out of a grudge with his old employer. Neither Levin nor Bressler would comment, but a Time Warner spokesman issued a statement saying, ““Mr. Brill’s recollections of events are self-serving and inaccurate.''
I’ve known Brill for years (my sister used to work at Court TV), and I have long admired both his formidable reporting skills and his policy on errors in his publications: the corrections appear in the exact same place, with the same prominence, as the mistakes. His account is believable. The call from Bressler came at Brill’s maximum moment of vulnerability; he was engaged in desperate but ultimately fruitless talks with Time Warner, trying to buy back the enterprises he spent his career building. Why would he make up a complaint to Levin that would jeopardize the deal?
In today’s media hothouse, everything ““appears’’ to conflict with everything else, which can make it hard to get any real work done. But in this case, the problem is not apparent; it’s all too real. ““Synergy’’ became a synonym for selling out editorial independence. The board of Time Warner, which claims to have a structure in place to prevent just such abuses, needs to find out if Bressler and Haje made the calls, on whose orders, and take appropriate action. Time Warner publications should get on the story. Otherwise all the elaborate corporate promises over the years about editorial integrity are meaningless.
Many nonjournalists don’t understand all the fuss. What’s a little newsletter or magazine story next to a multibillion-dollar merger or lawsuit? Get real, they say. But as truly principled people know, the test of a principle is when you give up something big for something that seems small. We can’t expect everyone in journalism to be a martyr. Even so, it’s important to complain loudly when editorial freedom is trampled on by corporations, just as we would if the government told us what to print. The executives who wield the pressure should stand warned: you will be publicly identified and stigmatized. The FTC and antitrust division of the Justice Department should know: what apparently happened to Brill was ground enough by itself to void the merger with Turner. And to the reader and viewer: look hard for the silent dogs. Sometimes that’s where the real news is.
