The Inquisitors

"If you're a taxpayer seeking assistance from IRS, a word of caution: IRS won't back up its own advice. Why?"

"If you think your income tax return is a confidential matter between you and IRS, you 're mistaken. It isn 't. Why?"

Those questions, which may be of more than passing interest to taxpayers now hastening to complete their returns, will be answered Friday (10 p.m. E.D.T.) on IRS: A Question of Power, this month's edition of ABC News Closeup. In the 18 months since Closeup presented its first hour-long program, the network's new documentary unit has specialized in asking--and finding answers for--some nasty questions. Closeup has asked why the Federal Aviation Administration has been lax in pursuing passenger safety, whether Teamster President Frank Fitzsimmons arranged with the White House to have his predecessor James Hoffa barred from further union activity, why fire-safety standards in the U.S. are not higher, why major coal companies in West Virginia have not paid millions of dollars in government fines for safety violations.

Seldom Profitable. That inquisitiveness has earned ABC News Closeup, which does not yet have a regular time slot, 14 journalism awards as well as considerable praise. According to Marvin Barrett, director of the Alfred I. duPont--Columbia University Survey of Broadcast Journalism, Closeup "has been consistently courageous and the most outspoken series of TV reports since See It Now," Edward R. Murrow's pioneering 1950s series.

ABC's swift rise in the documentary derby is part of a network strategy to fill a partial vacuum in network programming. CBS and NBC mount full-length documentaries from time to time, but not regularly. CBS' excellent 60 Minutes generally tackles a number of subjects each week in what TV journalists call a magazine format, as does its monthly NBC counterpart Weekend.

Documentary programs are seldom profitable for the networks. ABC News Closeup, for instance, often appears without a sponsor, despite its respectable monthly audience of from 7 million to 20 million viewers. Yet ABC will pour $2.4 million into Closeup this year, largely for its prestige value. "Every time Closeup wins an award or gets a good review, our lobbyists in Washington run to every Congressman they can find with the clips," says a pragmatic ABC executive. "That's so the next time a Congressman starts screaming about sex and violence on TV, we can point out that they provide the money to do all those wonderful documentaries."

Whatever the reason, ABC News Closeup has developed an effective style of its own. In addition to the characteristic, pithy questions that open each segment, Closeup generally states its objective at the beginning ("In this report we will find out why ...") and restates that aim several times throughout the show. Few opportunities are missed to keep viewers from losing the thread of the narrative. Reporters typically show their hand boldly ("Next, we are going to see how ..."), and Closeup generally uses more than one narrator to prevent the audience from being lulled by a familiar voice. Affidavits and other printed records are put directly before the camera, and viewers are encouraged to read from them along with the narrator. Says Producer Stephen Fleischman: "We're putting the documents back into documentaries."

Nor does Closeup avoid featuring "talking heads," those eye-glazing shots of the faces of reporters and interviewees. But these talking heads are different: jowls quiver, lips tremble, and eyebrows arch as startled bureaucrats and corporate chieftains suddenly suspect that they are being set up for the kill. Unlike other documentary units, which sometimes bring in a big-name network correspondent only at the last minute to do narration, Closeup has its reporters see a project through from beginning to end--a period of from three to nine months--and immerse themselves thoroughly in the subject.

The man most responsible for Close-up's power and tenacity is ABC Vice President Avram Robert Westin, 45, who has been making documentaries since he joined CBS fresh out of New York University in 1949. Av (pronounced Ahv) Westin was hired by ABC in 1969 to help revamp the network's Evening News (he spirited away Anchor Man Harry Reasoner from CBS) and got the commission to revive ABC's moribund documentary unit in 1973. Westin acknowledges that the network's commitment may be transitory. "The business has a cyclical nature," he says. "It takes a conscious decision by management to support an aggressive news organization. For the moment, this corporation has put its money where its mouth is."

Occasionally, the corporation's commitment wavers. A segment showing a baby's crib burning lustily in a laboratory test to demonstrate unsafe materials was deleted from the Closeup program Fire! after the crib's manufacturer went to court. Some Closeup staffers would have preferred to defy the injunction. (The segment later appeared on ABC's Evening News). Westin spends much of his time with network lawyers, who are bothered by what he calls "letterhead mail"--complaints from companies and Government agencies gored by Closeup.

Personality Cult. Lately, ABC executives have begun developing a kind of personality cult around Westin in an effort to make him their own Fred Friendly, the former CBS News president who became a symbol of network dedication to quality journalism. Last week, for example, ABC broadcast a number of spots in which Westin, seated at a film-editing machine, asked viewers to watch the forthcoming IRS show. Yet Friendly's fame did not prevent him from resigning from CBS in 1966 because he thought the network's dedication to first-rate journalism was waning. (CBS had aired / Love Lucy reruns instead of Senate committee hearings on Viet Nam.) If ABC executives want to avoid a similar embarrassment, they will have to continue, as Westin says, to put their money where their mouth is, asking those nasty questions on Closeup.

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