A few words about the trustworthiness of Andy Rooney...and CBS News

“60 Minutes” curmudgeon Andy Rooney makes his cranky farewell this week, and the CBS newsmagazine can be expected to make a big deal over his retirement; after all, Rooney is the network’s last remaining link to the halcyon days of Edward R. Murrow. In his blog, journalist Paul McNamara recalls an encounter with Rooney 20 years ago that provides some insight into the regard a broadcast icon has for the truth, and perhaps the culture of news reporting at CBS.

McNamara, you see, was working at a newspaper that ran a syndicated Rooney column, and one day he discovered that one of the columns Rooney filed included his eye-witness report of something that occurred after he wrote the piece… Rooney had intentionally fabricated a scene he never saw. It was a minor misrepresentation in the context of the column, but a misrepresentation nonetheless.

When, at his editor’s suggestion,  McNamara brought it to Rooney’s attention, he was stunned to find Rooney defiant. There was nothing wrong with a little license in making a point, the legend told him. Everybody does it. Rooney assured him that even Fred Friendly, the CBS alumnus who was then the ethics guru at the Columbia School of Journalism, would have no problem with what Rooney had done.

So McNamara asked Friendly, who did have a problem with it, as did every other journalistic ethics authority McNamara consulted . McNamara then wrote his own opinion piece about the incident, and sent the column to Rooney. Rooney responded with an angry letter to the newspaper, again denying that he had done anything unethical by writing he had witnessed something he had not, and accusing McNamara of some personal vendetta that caused him to write an essay critical of Rooney.

That, I believe, is the smoking gun sign of an ethics miscreant caught red-handed. I experience the same unethical argument regularly by commenters who don’t agree with a post but who can’t really mount a persuasive argument against it.  It is a classic accountability dodge as well: attack the critic by assuming that the criticism is motivated by bias rather than objective analysis, thus robbing both critic and criticism of credibility and legitimacy. I believe, as does McNamara, that this is a contemptible tactic: it is, in fact, what President Obama’s defenders are employing when they accuse the President’s opposition of racism.

In Rooney’s case, the episode has far more significance than his actual fabrication, which was indeed minor. It shows that this revered veteran journalist is capable of making things up and representing them as truth. As McNamara concludes:

It’s not a minor matter, it’s really not. And the reason is simple: I have no idea how often Andy Rooney has done this kind of thing; in other words, I have no idea how many of his little observations he actually observed … and how many he made up.

Nor do we know how deeply imbedded this unethical tendency is in the CBS News culture that Andy Rooney helped build. I have my suspicions, though, and will file this tale away with all the other good reasons I have not to trust the honesty and objectivity of TV news reports…with or without Andy Rooney.