Word: wigand
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...former chief of research at Brown & Williamson, the nation's third largest cigarette manufacturer, accused his company's former chairman of perjury. In a pretrial deposition obtained by the Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey Wigand charged that in 1994 chairman Thomas Sandefur told Congress he did not believe nicotine was addictive when in fact he was saying privately that his company was "in the nicotine-delivery business." Wigand also accused B&W lawyers of concealing potentially damaging research. The disclosure prompted cbs News to air on Friday part of a 60 Minutes interview with Wigand that it had declined to broadcast...
...happy week for the heads of the nation's tobacco companies. Former Brown & Williamson research chief Jeffrey Wigand, the industry's highest-level whistle-blower to date, began giving depositions to lawyers for the state of Mississippi, which is suing the industry to recoup the public-health costs it attributes to smoking. Though Brown & Williamson obtained a gag order on Wigand from the courts in Kentucky, where the firm is based, a Mississippi judge refused to honor the ruling...
Justice Department lawyers today deposed Jeffrey Wigand, the former tobacco company executive who told CBS' "60 Minutes" that his former employer, Brown & Williamson Tobacco, lied about the dangers of smoking. Fearing a lawsuit, CBS didn't air the interview. But Wigand, who has himself been sued by Brown and Williamson, is speaking with state and federal attorneys general about the company's decision to market products that it allegedly knew were carcinogenic. Neither Justice nor Wigand would comment about the talks today, but his testimony could devastate Brown and Williamson, which faces two Justice criminal investigations into whether its executives...
Legal issues aside, the revelations of behind-the-scenes dealmaking at 60 Minutes disturbed many journalists at CBS. Paying consulting fees to outside "experts" who help on stories is not uncommon in TV news; but some questioned whether, in this case, the payment compromised both Wigand and CBS. What most appalled some at CBS News was the notion that 60 Minutes would give a source veto power over whether to run his interview. One senior CBS producer expressed outrage that the 60 Minutes journalists would go on talk shows and cloak themselves in the First Amendment when they...
...scrapping of the Wigand interview prompted instant speculation that news decisions had fallen victim to the corporate bottom line, it was force of habit. Since taking control of CBS in 1986, Tisch has been a bottom-line boss. He sold off key pieces of the company (notably CBS's publishing and music divisions), instituted drastic cost-cutting measures and shied away from paying big bucks at key junctures. Two years ago, CBS lost its perennial Sunday-afternoon N.F.L. football franchise when it was outbid for the games by Rupert Murdoch's Fox network. A few months later the network lost...