Fueling the Argument

On another front and in far more direct fashion, business was also fighting back at its treatment by the press. The protesters were oil companies, and the focus of their ire was a five-part look at gasoline prices broadcast last month on WNBC-TV, the network-owned station in New York City. The mini-series was aired in daily segments of about five minutes each on the early evening news broadcast. Several oil companies privately expressed displeasure at the coverage, and one, Mobil, went public with its complaints, purchasing nearly $36,000 worth of full-page advertisements in local newspapers to denounce the series as "a parade of warmed-over distortions, half-truths, and downright untruths."

The ads accused WNBC-TV Investigative Reporter Liz Trotta of 18 specific "hatchet jobs." Some of Mobil's contentions were minor. At one point, for instance, Trotta asked: "If there's a surplus of oil, then why hasn't the price of gasoline gone down?" Mobil's complaint was, in part, that the price has gone down in recent months by about 20 a gallon. But other Mobil points about inaccurate or loaded reporting were sharper. Among them:

P: Reporter Trotta cited 1973 and 1974 reports that "tankers loaded with millions of gallons of oil were waiting offshore in New York Harbor" at the height of the oil shortage. But there was no mention, as Mobil felt there should have been, of later investigations that failed to support the parked-tankers stories.

P: At one point, during a discussion of company resistance to proposals to break up big oil firms, Trotta talked about difficulties legislators have in getting information from the oil industry. She then ran a film clip from a Senate hearing showing Senator Henry M. Jackson getting angry at an oil company executive who could not immediately recall his company's recent dividends. Although the Senate had hearings on oil industry competition last fall, WNBC'S film came from a 1974 hearing on oil company profits.

P: During a segment on dealer relations with the oil companies, one station operator was shown complaining that "the only difference between them and the hoodlums in the street is that [the oil companies] don't get caught." Then WNBC cut straight to an oil executive saying, "It is true, we're not willing to subsidize an economic loss at a marginal station." The juxtaposition, as Mobil saw it, was a "cheap distortion."

Last January Mobil executives were invited to be interviewed for the series. They kept putting off an appearance until it was too late, explaining in the ad that they did not want their remarks to be edited. Said Mobil Spokesman Raymond D'Argenio: "We've been screwed too many times by people coming in here, talking to us for a half-hour or an hour and then excerpting two minutes of one of our guys scratching his nose."

Free Time. After the series appeared, Mobil Vice President Herbert Schmertz, the company's public affairs chief, asked to buy 30 minutes of WNBC-TV's air time to reply. The station turned him down, citing an NBC rule against paid statements on "controversial" issues, a policy supported in a 1973 Supreme Court decision. Instead, WNBC-TV News Director Earl Ubell offered Mobil two or three minutes of free time on the evening news program, to be followed by a few more minutes of questioning by Trotta. Company executives declined, arguing that the time would not be enough "to reply to five nights of one-sided editorializing totaling some 36 minutes." WNBC has not answered Mobil's specific complaints about the series, and Ubell says he stands by Trotta's report.

The oil company's protests raise anew a difficult question: How should companies or individuals reply to news and documentary programs when they have a beef? Allowing them to buy rebuttal time does not seem very satisfactory; wealthy interest groups or people could flood the air with self-serving propaganda, to the disadvantage of less affluent opponents.

Newspapers have letters-to-the-editor columns and op-ed pages to accommodate outside voices; broadcast equivalents are harder to find. The FCC encourages local stations to let viewers and listeners answer station editorials, but not news and documentary programs. In a Mobil ad that appeared opposite newspaper editorial pages the same day as the "hatchet job" blast, the company urged consideration of a "voluntary mechanism" for reply that would be "developed by the press [and] which would promote free and robust debate."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.