Star Witness

CBS's Rather takes the stand

The witness started out jaunty and self-confident but eventually appeared grim and embattled. Struggling to defend his competence and ethics, he looked as though he were facing a master interrogator -- say, Dan Rather when he was on CBS's 60 Minutes. Instead, Rather, now anchor of the CBS Evening News, was the co-defendant being grilled last week in a Los Angeles Superior Court chamber, in a $30 million suit for alleged defamation of a doctor at a clinic accused of insurance fraud.

The case stems from a Dec. 9, 1979, segment on 60 Minutes titled "It's No Accident" about faked injuries from automobile mishaps. Rather's narrative charged wide collusion among doctors and lawyers, but cited only one physician by name. A 60 Minutes investigator obtained a phony medical report at a clinic; Rather held up the report and said, on air, "It was signed by Carl A. Galloway, M.D." Among the estimated 40 million people watching was Galloway, a Los Angeles internist and a distant relative of the clinic's owner. Galloway informed CBS that he had left the clinic a month before the report was issued, and that his signature was forged -- points that CBS does not contest -- but he could not get a retraction. The network insists that Galloway knew of fraudulent activity.

Under sharp questioning from Gallo way's attorney, Bruce Friedman, Rather was confronted with some factual errors and acknowledged a minimal effort to reach the doctor for comment. But much of the drama, and the potential consequence for TV journalism, resulted from an unprecedented judicial order compelling CBS to hand over all of its outtakes (sound and picture footage that has been edited out). As the outtakes were shown to the jury and to TV audiences watching the trial live on Cable News Network, viewers got a unique chance to see how a story is put together and to second-guess CBS's editorial judgment. They watched the Rather team coax witnesses, stage a confrontation and repeat questions until it got the best camera angles or the most vividly phrased answers; they heard Rather testify that people who do not return phone calls are probably guilty.

Before the trial, Rather complained that the case, coming in tandem with a $120 million libel suit filed against CBS by General William Westmoreland, could have a chilling effect on investigative reporting. Said he: "In five years, maybe nobody will do this kind of story." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.