CBS Producer Says My Article About Evening News Had Errors

By MERVIN BLOCK
October 2007

A senior producer in CBS’s investigative unit, Keith Summa, has written to me and pointed out what he called “errors” in my article “Katie Couric: When ‘Exclusive’ News is Not Exclusive–And Not Even News.” Below are his letter and my point-by-point reply.

Dear Mr. Block:

As a former journalist, we know you are as concerned about accuracy in reporting as we are at CBS News. So, we would like to address some errors in your blog posting of August 2, 2007 concerning our series of reports on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric about the formaldehyde problem with FEMA trailers.

You wrote that our stories were neither exclusives, nor news. However, as the following list of details about our reportage makes clear, they were exactly that:

  • The CBS Evening News reported, for the first-time, on never-before-seen documents that revealed FEMA itself had testing data showing that formaldehyde fumes in trailers were at dangerous levels.
  • The CBS Evening News reported, for the first time, that FEMA was warning its own employees that merely inspecting the trailers exposed one to the risk of “cancer” from the formaldehyde.
  • The CBS Evening News reported, for the first time, information from a supervisor at a factory that manufactured the trailers that they were made with shoddy materials and often manufactured too quickly.
  • The CBS Evening News interviewed, for the first time on this topic, FEMA administrator Paulison during which he said he didn’t know why the children are getting sick.

Most news organizations qualify new or never seen or reported before information relating to any news event as exclusive. And in this case, we weren’t the only ones with this understanding. After our first broadcast, others in the press, as well as elected officials, pointed to our reporting as new information that required action from FEMA. Senator Landrieu, after viewing us, called for an investigation into the formaldehyde problem.

The day after our first story aired, Congressman Jindal, quoting data from it, called for a Congressional hearing. When Congress held hearings on this issue on July 19, Congressman Waxman’s staff called CBS News to obtain a copy of the report to play at the hearing—the only news report shown at that Congressional event or referenced by any member of Congress.

We stand by our reporting on the FEMA trailers. And we firmly believe that they were characterized appropriately as both new and exclusive.

In the future, please feel free to contact us when you are writing about our work. We are more than happy to discuss our reporting with you.

Sincerely,
Keith Summa
Sr. Producer, CBS News, Investigative Unit
Aug. 10, 2007

– – – –

My Point-by-Point Reply:

His Letter Is in Boldface;
My Reply Is In Brackets

Dear Mr. Block:

As a former journalist, we know you are as concerned about accuracy in reporting as we are at CBS News.

[Dear Mr. Summa: I’m reluctant to pounce on any letter-writer, but I can’t ignore that dangling modifier: “as a former journalist” refers to me, but it modifies “we,” you and other folks at CBS News.]

So, we would like to address some errors in your blog posting of August 2, 2007 concerning our series of reports on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric about the formaldehyde problem with FEMA trailers.

You wrote that our stories were neither exclusives, nor news. However, as the following list of details about our reportage makes clear, they were exactly that:

[Let’s look at who reported what when. Couric introduced the story on May 16 by saying, “We’re beginning tonight with a CBS News exclusive, another scandal in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Many survivors of the killer storm are now getting sick, and their government-provided trailers may be to blame. Nearly two years after Katrina, 86,000 families are still living in FEMA trailers, and every day more and more of them are developing health problems. We have two reports tonight, beginning with our chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian.”

[Alas, poor Couric! Her first sentence presented the exclusive as “another scandal”: many survivors “are now getting sick.”

[Now? In fact, since mid-2006, as we’ll see, newspapers, broadcasters and websites had reported on the sicknesses.

[Couric’s saying on May 16, 2007, that many survivors of Katrina are “now getting sick” brings to mind Marie Antoinette’s remark that “There is nothing new except what’s been forgotten.”

[Also on May 16, CBS News posted at its website three articles related to the story on the Evening News. None of the articles used exclusive. Two articles bore the bylines of Keteyian and Michael Rey, who’s also a member of the CBS investigative unit. The other CBS article, which quoted Keteyian, was headed with a question: “Are FEMA Trailers Making Residents Sick?”

[One Keteyian-Rey article—”FEMA’s Own Documents Tell the Formaldehyde Story”—said, “When the Investigative Unit heard that some of the more than 144,000 trailers used by FEMA for temporary housing across the Gulf could be making people sick, the first thing we did was file a Freedom of Information Act Request with FEMA.”

[The CBS article went on to say the two CBS investigators filed the FOIA request on March 30—the day they said they heard about the sicknesses. Yes, they said when they heard of people getting sick, it was March 30, 2007.

[In his report for the Evening News of May 16, Keteyian did not refer to anything as exclusive. If the items were exclusive and significant, why didn’t Couric present them at or near the top?

[The first person Keteyian interviewed in his package was Angela Orcutt, then her son, Nicholas. She said her boy’s symptom of sickness was coughing. The next person Keteyian interviewed was Dr. Scott Needle.

[But two weeks before the CBS newscast, Dan Rather, in an episode on HDTV titled “Toxic Trailers,” broadcast an interview with Dr. Needle. He said many of his young patients in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, had ear infections, sinus infections, pneumonia and other ailments. He said they apparently arose from living in FEMA trailers.

[And three months before the CBS newscast, the Nation of Feb. 26 carried a long article—”Dying For a Home: Toxic Trailers Are Making Katrina Refugees Sick”—that included Dr. Needle and the Orcutts; Angela Orcutt spoke of her son’s “choking and coughing.” On May 16, 2007, the Orcutts and Dr. Needle re-told their story, capsulized, to Keteyian on the CBS Evening News.

[Going back even further, to July 25, 2006, MSNBC.com carried an article quoting Dr. Needle, a pediatrician, and Paul and Melody Stewart. The head on the article read, in part, “Private testing finds high levels of formaldehyde; residents report illnesses.” The residents were living in trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

[The Stewarts first appeared on WLOX-TV in Biloxi, Mississippi, on March 17, 2006. They told of living in a trailer and getting headaches, burning eyes and scratchy throats. They said they obtained a testing kit and found the level of formaldehyde in the trailer was twice what the Environmental Protection Agency considered acceptable.

[After that, the media carried many stories about Katrina survivors living in FEMA trailers who reported getting sick.]

The CBS Evening News reported, for the first-time, on never-before-seen documents that revealed FEMA itself had testing data showing that formaldehyde fumes in trailers were at dangerous levels.

[Even though those documents–about the testing of 28 trailers—might have never been seen before by an outsider, FEMA had a much larger study, of 96 trailers, a study FEMA had requested. The trailers were tested in the last quarter of 2006. FEMA made this study public 10 days before Keteyian went on Couric’s broadcast of May 18. This study also found that many trailers had formaldehyde levels that were unsafe. [Another federal agency, ATSDR, had conducted the study of the 96 trailers: “Health Consultation: Formaldehyde Sampling at FEMA Temporary Housing Units, February 1, 2007.”

[ATSDR’s preface to its study said: “During the summer of 2006, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) asked the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) to analyze formaldehyde sampling data collected in 96 unoccupied trailers by the Environmental Protection Agency. These unoccupied trailers were similar to those distributed by FEMA to house persons displaced by Hurricane Katrina.”

[The preface went on to say: “ATSDR’s consultation was intended to answer the question ‘Do empty trailers have formaldehyde levels that can adversely effect (sic) human health?’ The short answer is yes.”

[FEMA posted the 10-page study at its website on May 8, ten days before Couric’s broadcast of May 18. That’s when Keteyian first spoke of the 28 trailers.

[On May 4, four days before FEMA’s posting of the ATSDR analysis—and two weeks before Keteyian’s presentation about the 28 trailers–FEMA made the ATSDR report the subject of a news release. In a 425-word summary and elsewhere in the release, the focus was on preventive and remedial action. The title: “FEMA Study: Ventilating Travel Trailers Can Significantly Reduce Formaldehyde Emission Levels.”

[Similar findings of formaldehyde’s dangers were reported by the media since at least mid-2006. MSNBC.com reported on July 25, 2006: “Air quality tests of 44 FEMA trailers conducted by the Sierra Club since April have found formaldehyde concentrations as high as 0.34 parts per million….And all but four of the trailers have tested higher than the 0.1 parts per million that the EPA considers to be an ‘elevated level’ capable of causing watery eyes, burning in the eyes and throat, nausea and respiratory distress in some people.”

[The MSNBC.com article quoted Dr.Needle as saying he noticed some unusual and persistent health problems among patients living in the trailers. The article also reported that Paul and Melody Stewart said that formaldehyde had forced them out of their trailer into their truck.

[Two nights after the CBS Evening News broadcast of May 16, 2007, Couric said: “We’re beginning tonight with a CBS News exclusive, a follow-up on our report exposing an emerging health crisis for thousands of survivors of Hurricane Katrina. As we reported earlier this week, many people living in trailers provided by FEMA are getting sick. Tonight we can tell you FEMA has known for a long time that the trailers are toxic but did little about it. CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian, who first broke this story, has the follow-up tonight.”

[That “we can tell you” sounds as if Couric is about to make a big disclosure. But one year earlier, on May 16, 2006, the Sierra Club, an environmental organization, issued a widely reported news release that began: “A new study conducted by the Sierra Club shows that the indoor air quality of FEMA trailers contains excessive levels of formaldehyde, a carcinogen that can cause various forms of cancer with repeated exposure.”

[The release said the Sierra Club had tested the air in 31 FEMA trailers in Mississippi and Louisiana to determine formaldehyde levels. The release said only two tests were at or below the maximum safety limit recommended by the EPA and that several trailers were more than three times over the limit.

[Also on May 16, 2006, the same day the Sierra Club issued that release, CNN said it had tested two trailers. One tested “80 percent higher than federal recommendations,” according to CNN, and the other “tested 50 percent higher.” A CNN anchor said, “We tagged along with the Stewarts and some local environmentalists as they tested 31 FEMA trailers (for formaldehyde fumes). Twenty-nine tested above the federal standard.”

[And on Aug. 4, 2006, MSNBC.com reported that a FEMA official said the agency had already determined “there is a problem with elevated formaldehyde levels in ‘two or three brands’ of the at least 10 brands of travel trailers provided to the government under emergency contracts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.”

[Newspapers, broadcasters and websites told of FEMA’s playing down or pooh-poohing the complaints.

[As for Couric’s saying CBS first broke the story, that’s redundant. The person who’s the first to report a story is the one who broke it.]

[Again, on July 23, Couric told of CBS’s breaking the story, “And now an update on a story Armen (in the previous story, she had used his full name) broke back in May about the health problems of Katrina refugees living in FEMA trailers….”]

The CBS Evening News reported, for the first time, that FEMA was warning its own employees that merely inspecting the trailers exposed one to the risk of “cancer” from the formaldehyde.

[How can anyone be sure no newspaper or broadcaster or website reported the item previously? Besides, many news organizations had long been reporting the possible cancer risk for trailer residents.]

The CBS Evening News reported, for the first time, information from a supervisor at a factory that manufactured the trailers that they were made with shoddy materials and often manufactured too quickly.

[None of the Evening News scripts that figured in this examination– those of May 16, May 18, July 19 and July 23–used the word shoddy or a synonym. CBS quoted a factory supervisor as saying his crew worked at a “breakneck pace,” which, he says, “forced the company to use cheaper wood products.” But cheaper isn’t necessarily shoddy. And what the supervisor said was not new. Nor was the word “breakneck,” not an everyday word, which had previously been used in the Nation article of Feb. 26, 2007.

[The Nation said: “Trailer manufacturers set up ad hoc assembly lines, advertised in local newspapers and hired temporary workers to fill FEMA orders at breakneck speed. On some assembly lines, workers say, they were expected to produce a trailer in eight to ten minutes. Twelve-hour shifts and six-day workweeks were common. ‘Under the best of conditions, some trailer manufacturers do not really have good quality control,’ says Connie Gallant, president of the RV Consumer Group, a nonprofit that rates the quality of mobile housing and trailers. ‘In a mass production frenzy, that quality control pretty much goes out the window.'”

[The author of the Nation article, Amanda Spake, also quoted an attorney who had sued FEMA. He said that after he filed the suit, several Indiana workers hired by trailer makers told him they had come down with headaches, nosebleeds and flu-like symptoms.]

The CBS Evening News interviewed, for the first time on this topic, FEMA administrator Paulison during which he said he didn’t know why the children are getting sick.

[During which what?

[Whether Paulison’s answer was correct, his remark could be construed as self-serving: if he didn’t know why the children were getting sick—and perhaps didn’t want to know–he might have figured that he couldn’t be blamed for not taking corrective action in regard to formaldehyde. (Some critics of his call it FEMAldehyde.)]

Most news organizations qualify new or never seen or reported before information relating to any news event as exclusive. And in this case, we weren’t the only ones with this understanding. After our first broadcast, others in the press, as well as elected officials, pointed to our reporting as new information that required action from FEMA.

[Many, if not most, exclusives aren’t exclusive at all. And those that are, are often not worth crowing about.

[The meaning of exclusive is elusive. Does it mean a reporter has scooped the competition with a blockbuster? Or does it mean that the reporter was the only media rep present? Or the only reporter at an interview an hour before the next interviewer showed up? Or an hour after the previous interviewer left? Or is a story exclusive because no one else wanted it? Or had already carried it? Or is an exclusive a fact or a story that a reporter dug up and has alone and is worth using but hardly anything to get excited about.

[And what are listeners to think when they hear that a story is exclusive—that all the other stories on the newscast come from a pool or from the newswires?

[The news outlets that break the most exclusives that might be considered truly worth calling exclusive are the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal. But they don’t brag and call their stories exclusive. That word, after all, has less to do with journalism than with hucksterism.]

Senator Landrieu, after viewing us, called for an investigation into the formaldehyde problem. The day after our first story aired, Congressman Jindal, quoting data from it, called for a Congressional hearing. When Congress held hearings on this issue on July 19, Congressman Waxman’s staff called CBS News to obtain a copy of the report to play at the hearing—the only news report shown at that Congressional event or referenced by any member of Congress.

We stand by our reporting on the FEMA trailers. And we firmly believe that they were characterized appropriately as both new and exclusive. In the future, please feel free to contact us when you are writing about our work. We are more than happy to discuss our reporting with you.

Sincerely,
Keith Summa
Sr. Producer, CBS News, Investigative Unit
August 10, 2007

[Thank you for writing to me.]


By MERVIN BLOCK
October 2007

A senior producer in CBS’s investigative unit, Keith Summa, has written to me and pointed out what he called “errors” in my article “Katie Couric: When ‘Exclusive’ News is Not Exclusive–And Not Even News.” Below are his letter and my point-by-point reply.

Dear Mr. Block:

As a former journalist, we know you are as concerned about accuracy in reporting as we are at CBS News. So, we would like to address some errors in your blog posting of August 2, 2007 concerning our series of reports on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric about the formaldehyde problem with FEMA trailers.

You wrote that our stories were neither exclusives, nor news. However, as the following list of details about our reportage makes clear, they were exactly that:

  • The CBS Evening News reported, for the first-time, on never-before-seen documents that revealed FEMA itself had testing data showing that formaldehyde fumes in trailers were at dangerous levels.
  • The CBS Evening News reported, for the first time, that FEMA was warning its own employees that merely inspecting the trailers exposed one to the risk of “cancer” from the formaldehyde.
  • The CBS Evening News reported, for the first time, information from a supervisor at a factory that manufactured the trailers that they were made with shoddy materials and often manufactured too quickly.
  • The CBS Evening News interviewed, for the first time on this topic, FEMA administrator Paulison during which he said he didn’t know why the children are getting sick.

Most news organizations qualify new or never seen or reported before information relating to any news event as exclusive. And in this case, we weren’t the only ones with this understanding. After our first broadcast, others in the press, as well as elected officials, pointed to our reporting as new information that required action from FEMA. Senator Landrieu, after viewing us, called for an investigation into the formaldehyde problem.

The day after our first story aired, Congressman Jindal, quoting data from it, called for a Congressional hearing. When Congress held hearings on this issue on July 19, Congressman Waxman’s staff called CBS News to obtain a copy of the report to play at the hearing—the only news report shown at that Congressional event or referenced by any member of Congress.

We stand by our reporting on the FEMA trailers. And we firmly believe that they were characterized appropriately as both new and exclusive.

In the future, please feel free to contact us when you are writing about our work. We are more than happy to discuss our reporting with you.

Sincerely,
Keith Summa
Sr. Producer, CBS News, Investigative Unit
Aug. 10, 2007

– – – –

My Point-by-Point Reply:

His Letter Is in Boldface;
My Reply Is In Brackets

Dear Mr. Block:

As a former journalist, we know you are as concerned about accuracy in reporting as we are at CBS News.

[Dear Mr. Summa: I’m reluctant to pounce on any letter-writer, but I can’t ignore that dangling modifier: “as a former journalist” refers to me, but it modifies “we,” you and other folks at CBS News.]

So, we would like to address some errors in your blog posting of August 2, 2007 concerning our series of reports on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric about the formaldehyde problem with FEMA trailers.

You wrote that our stories were neither exclusives, nor news. However, as the following list of details about our reportage makes clear, they were exactly that:

[Let’s look at who reported what when. Couric introduced the story on May 16 by saying, “We’re beginning tonight with a CBS News exclusive, another scandal in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Many survivors of the killer storm are now getting sick, and their government-provided trailers may be to blame. Nearly two years after Katrina, 86,000 families are still living in FEMA trailers, and every day more and more of them are developing health problems. We have two reports tonight, beginning with our chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian.”

[Alas, poor Couric! Her first sentence presented the exclusive as “another scandal”: many survivors “are now getting sick.”

[Now? In fact, since mid-2006, as we’ll see, newspapers, broadcasters and websites had reported on the sicknesses.

[Couric’s saying on May 16, 2007, that many survivors of Katrina are “now getting sick” brings to mind Marie Antoinette’s remark that “There is nothing new except what’s been forgotten.”

[Also on May 16, CBS News posted at its website three articles related to the story on the Evening News. None of the articles used exclusive. Two articles bore the bylines of Keteyian and Michael Rey, who’s also a member of the CBS investigative unit. The other CBS article, which quoted Keteyian, was headed with a question: “Are FEMA Trailers Making Residents Sick?”

[One Keteyian-Rey article—”FEMA’s Own Documents Tell the Formaldehyde Story”—said, “When the Investigative Unit heard that some of the more than 144,000 trailers used by FEMA for temporary housing across the Gulf could be making people sick, the first thing we did was file a Freedom of Information Act Request with FEMA.”

[The CBS article went on to say the two CBS investigators filed the FOIA request on March 30—the day they said they heard about the sicknesses. Yes, they said when they heard of people getting sick, it was March 30, 2007.

[In his report for the Evening News of May 16, Keteyian did not refer to anything as exclusive. If the items were exclusive and significant, why didn’t Couric present them at or near the top?

[The first person Keteyian interviewed in his package was Angela Orcutt, then her son, Nicholas. She said her boy’s symptom of sickness was coughing. The next person Keteyian interviewed was Dr. Scott Needle.

[But two weeks before the CBS newscast, Dan Rather, in an episode on HDTV titled “Toxic Trailers,” broadcast an interview with Dr. Needle. He said many of his young patients in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, had ear infections, sinus infections, pneumonia and other ailments. He said they apparently arose from living in FEMA trailers.

[And three months before the CBS newscast, the Nation of Feb. 26 carried a long article—”Dying For a Home: Toxic Trailers Are Making Katrina Refugees Sick”—that included Dr. Needle and the Orcutts; Angela Orcutt spoke of her son’s “choking and coughing.” On May 16, 2007, the Orcutts and Dr. Needle re-told their story, capsulized, to Keteyian on the CBS Evening News.

[Going back even further, to July 25, 2006, MSNBC.com carried an article quoting Dr. Needle, a pediatrician, and Paul and Melody Stewart. The head on the article read, in part, “Private testing finds high levels of formaldehyde; residents report illnesses.” The residents were living in trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

[The Stewarts first appeared on WLOX-TV in Biloxi, Mississippi, on March 17, 2006. They told of living in a trailer and getting headaches, burning eyes and scratchy throats. They said they obtained a testing kit and found the level of formaldehyde in the trailer was twice what the Environmental Protection Agency considered acceptable.

[After that, the media carried many stories about Katrina survivors living in FEMA trailers who reported getting sick.]

The CBS Evening News reported, for the first-time, on never-before-seen documents that revealed FEMA itself had testing data showing that formaldehyde fumes in trailers were at dangerous levels.

[Even though those documents–about the testing of 28 trailers—might have never been seen before by an outsider, FEMA had a much larger study, of 96 trailers, a study FEMA had requested. The trailers were tested in the last quarter of 2006. FEMA made this study public 10 days before Keteyian went on Couric’s broadcast of May 18. This study also found that many trailers had formaldehyde levels that were unsafe. [Another federal agency, ATSDR, had conducted the study of the 96 trailers: “Health Consultation: Formaldehyde Sampling at FEMA Temporary Housing Units, February 1, 2007.”

[ATSDR’s preface to its study said: “During the summer of 2006, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) asked the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) to analyze formaldehyde sampling data collected in 96 unoccupied trailers by the Environmental Protection Agency. These unoccupied trailers were similar to those distributed by FEMA to house persons displaced by Hurricane Katrina.”

[The preface went on to say: “ATSDR’s consultation was intended to answer the question ‘Do empty trailers have formaldehyde levels that can adversely effect (sic) human health?’ The short answer is yes.”

[FEMA posted the 10-page study at its website on May 8, ten days before Couric’s broadcast of May 18. That’s when Keteyian first spoke of the 28 trailers.

[On May 4, four days before FEMA’s posting of the ATSDR analysis—and two weeks before Keteyian’s presentation about the 28 trailers–FEMA made the ATSDR report the subject of a news release. In a 425-word summary and elsewhere in the release, the focus was on preventive and remedial action. The title: “FEMA Study: Ventilating Travel Trailers Can Significantly Reduce Formaldehyde Emission Levels.”

[Similar findings of formaldehyde’s dangers were reported by the media since at least mid-2006. MSNBC.com reported on July 25, 2006: “Air quality tests of 44 FEMA trailers conducted by the Sierra Club since April have found formaldehyde concentrations as high as 0.34 parts per million….And all but four of the trailers have tested higher than the 0.1 parts per million that the EPA considers to be an ‘elevated level’ capable of causing watery eyes, burning in the eyes and throat, nausea and respiratory distress in some people.”

[The MSNBC.com article quoted Dr.Needle as saying he noticed some unusual and persistent health problems among patients living in the trailers. The article also reported that Paul and Melody Stewart said that formaldehyde had forced them out of their trailer into their truck.

[Two nights after the CBS Evening News broadcast of May 16, 2007, Couric said: “We’re beginning tonight with a CBS News exclusive, a follow-up on our report exposing an emerging health crisis for thousands of survivors of Hurricane Katrina. As we reported earlier this week, many people living in trailers provided by FEMA are getting sick. Tonight we can tell you FEMA has known for a long time that the trailers are toxic but did little about it. CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian, who first broke this story, has the follow-up tonight.”

[That “we can tell you” sounds as if Couric is about to make a big disclosure. But one year earlier, on May 16, 2006, the Sierra Club, an environmental organization, issued a widely reported news release that began: “A new study conducted by the Sierra Club shows that the indoor air quality of FEMA trailers contains excessive levels of formaldehyde, a carcinogen that can cause various forms of cancer with repeated exposure.”

[The release said the Sierra Club had tested the air in 31 FEMA trailers in Mississippi and Louisiana to determine formaldehyde levels. The release said only two tests were at or below the maximum safety limit recommended by the EPA and that several trailers were more than three times over the limit.

[Also on May 16, 2006, the same day the Sierra Club issued that release, CNN said it had tested two trailers. One tested “80 percent higher than federal recommendations,” according to CNN, and the other “tested 50 percent higher.” A CNN anchor said, “We tagged along with the Stewarts and some local environmentalists as they tested 31 FEMA trailers (for formaldehyde fumes). Twenty-nine tested above the federal standard.”

[And on Aug. 4, 2006, MSNBC.com reported that a FEMA official said the agency had already determined “there is a problem with elevated formaldehyde levels in ‘two or three brands’ of the at least 10 brands of travel trailers provided to the government under emergency contracts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.”

[Newspapers, broadcasters and websites told of FEMA’s playing down or pooh-poohing the complaints.

[As for Couric’s saying CBS first broke the story, that’s redundant. The person who’s the first to report a story is the one who broke it.]

[Again, on July 23, Couric told of CBS’s breaking the story, “And now an update on a story Armen (in the previous story, she had used his full name) broke back in May about the health problems of Katrina refugees living in FEMA trailers….”]

The CBS Evening News reported, for the first time, that FEMA was warning its own employees that merely inspecting the trailers exposed one to the risk of “cancer” from the formaldehyde.

[How can anyone be sure no newspaper or broadcaster or website reported the item previously? Besides, many news organizations had long been reporting the possible cancer risk for trailer residents.]

The CBS Evening News reported, for the first time, information from a supervisor at a factory that manufactured the trailers that they were made with shoddy materials and often manufactured too quickly.

[None of the Evening News scripts that figured in this examination– those of May 16, May 18, July 19 and July 23–used the word shoddy or a synonym. CBS quoted a factory supervisor as saying his crew worked at a “breakneck pace,” which, he says, “forced the company to use cheaper wood products.” But cheaper isn’t necessarily shoddy. And what the supervisor said was not new. Nor was the word “breakneck,” not an everyday word, which had previously been used in the Nation article of Feb. 26, 2007.

[The Nation said: “Trailer manufacturers set up ad hoc assembly lines, advertised in local newspapers and hired temporary workers to fill FEMA orders at breakneck speed. On some assembly lines, workers say, they were expected to produce a trailer in eight to ten minutes. Twelve-hour shifts and six-day workweeks were common. ‘Under the best of conditions, some trailer manufacturers do not really have good quality control,’ says Connie Gallant, president of the RV Consumer Group, a nonprofit that rates the quality of mobile housing and trailers. ‘In a mass production frenzy, that quality control pretty much goes out the window.'”

[The author of the Nation article, Amanda Spake, also quoted an attorney who had sued FEMA. He said that after he filed the suit, several Indiana workers hired by trailer makers told him they had come down with headaches, nosebleeds and flu-like symptoms.]

The CBS Evening News interviewed, for the first time on this topic, FEMA administrator Paulison during which he said he didn’t know why the children are getting sick.

[During which what?

[Whether Paulison’s answer was correct, his remark could be construed as self-serving: if he didn’t know why the children were getting sick—and perhaps didn’t want to know–he might have figured that he couldn’t be blamed for not taking corrective action in regard to formaldehyde. (Some critics of his call it FEMAldehyde.)]

Most news organizations qualify new or never seen or reported before information relating to any news event as exclusive. And in this case, we weren’t the only ones with this understanding. After our first broadcast, others in the press, as well as elected officials, pointed to our reporting as new information that required action from FEMA.

[Many, if not most, exclusives aren’t exclusive at all. And those that are, are often not worth crowing about.

[The meaning of exclusive is elusive. Does it mean a reporter has scooped the competition with a blockbuster? Or does it mean that the reporter was the only media rep present? Or the only reporter at an interview an hour before the next interviewer showed up? Or an hour after the previous interviewer left? Or is a story exclusive because no one else wanted it? Or had already carried it? Or is an exclusive a fact or a story that a reporter dug up and has alone and is worth using but hardly anything to get excited about.

[And what are listeners to think when they hear that a story is exclusive—that all the other stories on the newscast come from a pool or from the newswires?

[The news outlets that break the most exclusives that might be considered truly worth calling exclusive are the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal. But they don’t brag and call their stories exclusive. That word, after all, has less to do with journalism than with hucksterism.]

Senator Landrieu, after viewing us, called for an investigation into the formaldehyde problem. The day after our first story aired, Congressman Jindal, quoting data from it, called for a Congressional hearing. When Congress held hearings on this issue on July 19, Congressman Waxman’s staff called CBS News to obtain a copy of the report to play at the hearing—the only news report shown at that Congressional event or referenced by any member of Congress.

We stand by our reporting on the FEMA trailers. And we firmly believe that they were characterized appropriately as both new and exclusive. In the future, please feel free to contact us when you are writing about our work. We are more than happy to discuss our reporting with you.

Sincerely,
Keith Summa
Sr. Producer, CBS News, Investigative Unit
August 10, 2007

[Thank you for writing to me.]