Word: nbc
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Television news is often accused of turning a bland eye on controversy, and activist critics yearn for the days when the late Edward R. Murrow savaged Joseph McCarthy and crusaded for migrant farm workers. No such criticism could be lodged against the NBC documentary What Price Health. Broadcast last December, the program attacked the high cost of medical care in the U.S., portrayed individual victims of the system in dramatic terms, and lobbied for adoption of a broad national health-insurance scheme...
...NBC's show was so tough that it gave the American Medical Association a severe case of outrage. Persuaded that NBC was guilty of numerous specific errors and general distortion, the A.M.A. battled for eight months to gain satisfaction. But only after the A.M.A. took its case to the Federal Communications Commission did NBC yield some ground. Now the A.M.A. and NBC have reached a fuzzy compromise that leaves unsettled the issue of redress in such controversies...
...fight began on Jan. 10, when A.M.A. Executive Vice President Ernest B. Howard sent a protest letter to NBC President Julian Goodman. Howard attacked what he called the program's "frequent inaccuracy and overall bias," pointing out 29 instances in which NBC had, by the A.M.A.'s standards, distorted the truth. Howard demanded equal air time for an A.M.A. rebuttal...
Instead, Howard received from NBC on Feb. 27 a 39-page rebuttal of the A.M.A. allegations. Two months later, the A.M.A. countered the counterattack and formally asked the FCC to investigate what it termed the "distortion and slanting of news" in the NBC documentary. For its counsel, the A.M.A. hired former FCC Chairman Newton Minow, who once condemned commercial network programming as a "vast wasteland." The A.M.A. also discussed the case with the new National News Council, an independent body established to adjudicate complaints against news organizations...
...number of the A.M.A.'s specific charges about the show were petty, but others were significant. One of the show's human-interest vignettes, for instance, concerned Kristen Knapp, 5, whose congenital heart condition received prominent treatment in the documentary. NBC showed the girl being denied necessary corrective surgery be cause her father-laid off his job two years earlier-could not afford...