Dateline Under Fire

By David E. Thigpen

There is no scientific evidence that an ancient curse has settled over the hallways of NBC News, but staff members at the network's newsmagazine show Dateline could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. After last February's embarrassment of having to apologize -- on air -- for faking a fire in a segment on General Motors truck safety, they endured a public pillorying that led to the resignation of NBC News president Michael Gartner and three Dateline producers. Hope was widespread at the network that the arrival of new president Andrew Lack and a complete review of the show's reportorial methods would put all that behind them.

No such luck. Last week Southeastern Eye Center, a Greensboro, North Carolina, clinic specializing in cataract surgery, announced that it intends to file a defamation suit against Dateline for a May 4 feature titled "Cataract Cowboys." The segment focused its harsh lights on scalpel-happy surgeons who earn millions by allegedly operating on patients who don't need surgery.

Using concealed video cameras, the show's producers sent to the clinic three healthy volunteers posing as patients. As Dateline's correspondent Brian Ross admitted in the broadcast, all three were correctly diagnosed and turned away. "You don't need surgery now," a clinic doctor told Beatrice Caine twice. Undaunted, however, Dateline sent Caine (who has a small but medically insignificant cataract) back to the clinic, where she asked to be scheduled for surgery. Then, as the camera rolled, correspondent Ross suddenly interrupted Caine's presurgery meeting, badgering the stunned doctor that he was about to subject a healthy patient to "unnecessary surgery." Caine was "only a few tests and a half-hour away from the operating table," said Ross in a voice-over. For Dateline producers, this was just the sort of hard- hitting video journalism that would put them in the same league as CBS's reigning 60 Minutes. For officials at Southeastern Eye Center, it was grounds for legal action.

Demanding a retraction and an apology, Southeastern's attorneys complain that not only was undercover patient Caine's aggressive pursuit of surgery unusual, it bordered on entrapment. The clinic's routine procedure of screening patients at least one more time before surgery was mentioned only at the end of the report, after the damning footage.

Southeastern Eye Center, which earns $12 million annually, mostly from the 5,000 Medicare-paid cataract operations performed there each year, claims its business is down 30% since the NBC report. Executive director Mark McDaniel says the Caine case got as far as it did only because of a bureaucratic mistake by a nonmedical assistant, and the error would have been caught at the next screening. "We want our reputation restored," McDaniel says.

NBC News president Lack defends "Cataract Cowboys," calling Southeastern Eye Center's concerns "misplaced." Dateline executive producer Neal Shapiro contends the clinic's attacks come only because Dateline is still "vulnerable" as a result of the GM fiasco. Even the threat of litigation was bad news for image-battered Dateline. Earlier this month, Utah's Orrin Hatch took to the floor of the U.S. Senate to denounce the show for its "false and reckless" claim, aired Aug. 3, that he had introduced legislation that would have benefited a firm in which he holds a financial interest. Dateline's producers say no retraction is forthcoming. But with the show's reputation still shaky at best, they have nonetheless assembled a 60- page defense of their charges against Hatch.