In the four years I've been at ABC News, we have never had three stories on one "World News Tonight" about the savings and loan scandal. Two nights ago there were three stories about 20 poor people smeared over the sidewalk in front of a bakery in Sarajevo. That's a cheap story for television -- easy to do, easy to produce -- and everybody says, "Oh Millie, look at the blood."
Coverage of business stories, even those involving vast amounts of money, creates distinct problems for television because such stories do not lend themselves to visual imagery. Furthermore, just as complex financial crimes develop slowly, over time, the media must devote extensive amounts of valuable air time or column-inches to present the full story of such crimes.
Readers who followed the unfolding BCCI scandal in The Wall Street Journal, a mainstream paper with a business focus, had the opportunity to understand the intricacies of the story. The Journal published numerous editorials on the subject, and in 1991 Truell's editors provided him with space for five front-page feature stories. However, The Wall Street Journal was the exception; most of the other media outlets were not nearly so aggressive in their coverage.
Some conference participants believed that the absence of imagery made the presentation of the BCCI and savings and loan scandals more difficult. In Muolo's apt words, "some of the press were concerned, and they really wanted a gun to be looting these S&Ls, not a fountain pen. Again, it makes for better pictures on television."
Of course, footage of bank buildings doesn't make for riveting television, but Muolo may have overstated the point. Brooks Jackson, who produced several extensive segments on the savings and loan crisis for CNN -- some as long as 16 minutes -- asserted that, by using animated graphics, "you can get more information...and a better understanding of some of these complicated financial interactions." Moreover, there are people behind every financial transaction: both the savings and loan crisis and the BCCI scandal involved dozens of colorful, notorious, even outrageous individuals through whom the story could have been told. Nevertheless, the mainstream press continues to avoid extensive coverage of financial stories.
Another reason for the prevailing media aversion to financial stories is that such stories are relatively open-ended, without swift resolutions and tidy conclusions. In the summer of 1991, NBC News President Michael Gartner wrote in USA Today that "the BCCI scandal, perhaps the greatest business scandal in history, will go on and on, and few people will really care." * Waldman echoed this point: "I sometimes say that the S&Ls passed from a non-story to yesterday's news without ever really staying in the news for very long." Thus, though the savings and loan crisis has continued for at least a decade, it was afforded intensive coverage only during the summer of 1990. The open time frame, as opposed to a single event, weakens the attention spans of both the journalists who report the stories and the public who are their viewers and readers. According to Douglas Frantz of the Los Angeles Times, reporters must now "sell [their] editors on the story and then [they] have to go out and report the story." But reporters must also sell an ongoing story to the public, a daunting task when the subject matter is as complex as the BCCI affair.
In spite of the problems of visual imagery and extended time frames, television can be extremely effective in explaining complicated financial stories, as indeed it was for both the BCCI scandal and the savings and loan crisis. In March 1992, for instance, Eric Nadler, a producer for Globalvision, produced a 90-minute documentary for the PBS "Frontline" program on the BCCI scandal. Since Nadler had the luxury of being under no particular time constraint, he took the following approach: "[W]e decided that nothing would hurt us that any competitor did, or that any investigator came out with -- that it all became part of this gorgeous BCCI mosaic." By ignoring the time-worn premium placing exclusivity over quality, Nadler produced a successful show, enabling many viewers to understand the BCCI saga for the first time.
However, documentaries are not the only effective means that television has for covering complex stories like BCCI and the savings and loan crisis. Waldman reminded conference participants that Phil Donahue's "much-maligned" talk show has done several shows on the savings and loan crisis. According to Waldman, the Donahue shows indicated that there was "a real thirst" for information and that the issue "could be presented in a way that was understandable on television." Muolo agreed with Waldman and noted that after his coauthor appeared on the show, their book hit the best-seller list.
And I think until the networks really feel the fear they once had [to demonstrate compliance with public interest standards to the federal government], the law of least effort and the least expense can prevail on network television.
Ira Silverman
Producer
NBC News
*"BCCI: No Sex, No Star," by Michael Gartner, USA Today, August 15, 1991, p.
A1.
