[First published in AM New York]
Celebrity crime-writer Dominick Dunne is about to get more exposure, of the kind he doesn’t like.
His battle with ex Congressman Gary Condit is generating even more spill-over than the stories on “Today” this week. The NBC TV show focused on Condit’s denials (more emphatic than before, but still disputed) of having a romantic relationship with the murdered intern Chandra Levy.
But there is more to come – about Dunne himself, whom Condit is suing for $11million-worth of defamation.
At issue are Dunne’s claims on radio and TV talk shows that, variously, Ms. Levy had “gone off on the motorcycle of one of Condit’s motorcycle friends,” or was killed and dumped in the Atlantic Ocean as part of a conspiracy involving a Middle Eastern embassy sex-ring.
(Ms Levy’s body was found, a year after her disappearance, in a Washington DC park. Police say Mr Condit is not a suspect.)
Since early 2004, Dunne has been fighting to shield his own existing testimony from public view, but over the holidays a federal judge ordered the video of his deposition be unsealed.
At one point during his recorded questioning Dunne makes a remarkable admission: “I heard all these details, okay’? I mean I can’t vouch for any of this.” Nonetheless Dunne went live on air to voice “these details.”
It’s safe to say Dunne would never have ventured into print, say in his steady venue Vanity Fair, with material he couldn’t “vouch for.” He surely knows the difference between verbally repeating a rumor, and checking it out before consigning it to a carefully-crafted account.
A former BBC defense correspondent, Andrew Gilligan had to learn that difference. He triggered a scandal that ended last year in resignations by the BBC’s two topmost executives – and by Gilligan himself.
(Not only that, but the whole sorry story also involved the suicide of Gilligan’s source.)
Gilligan had claimed that Tony Blair’s administration “sexed-up” military intelligence suggesting Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction readily available. But the correspondent’s essential offense was to have loose lips. He spoke in a live Q & A with a radio host and didn’t follow a written script. He uttered the sloppy words: “the government probably, erm, knew” that its claim “was wrong.”
That contention proved unproveable.
Such blunders are avoidable, but they’re all-too-easy in today ‘s media climate. As the veteran editor and publisher Harold Evans said: “In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant lo pontificate than it is to sweat:”
THE PROBLEM IS OF COURSE that finding out takes time. Mary Mapes now smarts after heing fired for producing the disastrous ”60 Minutes” piece with its infamously unauthenticated memos about President George W Bush.
She has now suggested that with more time she could have fully checked out the documents. She blames her superiors – among whom CBS News president Andy Heyward remains teflon-coated – for rushing up the broadcast date by three weeks.
These journalist-bosses wanted, it seems, to “sound off ‘ more than they wanted to “find out“.
