Marooned in a Blizzard of Lies

This is the week that NBC News comes clean about deceit.

The project is “Lying, Cheating and Stealing: Dishonesty in America,” and boldly diving right in all week with water wings are “NBC Nightly News” and “Dateline NBC.”

The timing couldn’t be more propitious, given the inevitable posturing of presidential campaigners and corner-cutting of the May ratings sweeps, one of those audience-measuring periods in which the shiniest suits of TV news lower ethics to raise Nielsens.

Yet don’t expect more than a cursory wink at the subject.

In blowing the lid flat off of fibbing, for example, NBC News will not be revisiting its own sins, the largest being the notorious “Dateline NBC” expose of General Motors pickup trucks 3 1/2 years ago, in which igniters were secretly placed beneath one such vehicle later seen to explode and burst into flames in a televised crash test arranged by some of the program’s staff.

“We’re not looking at the ethics of the press this week, so we felt [the crash fiasco] would be out of place,” an NBC News spokesman said from New York. “We’re taking a smaller, lighter look.”

Yes, check with us later about the hoodwinking of America. As for now, lying, cheating and stealing--the smaller, lighter side.

And so it goes, as former NBC News hand Linda Ellerbee is fond of saying, in most of the “Dateline NBC” segments on “Dishonesty in America” provided in advance by the network, the first of which--a breezy piece on the body language of lying--aired Sunday.

Also fun but thin are portions of Tuesday’s “Dateline NBC” that deploy the hidden-lens tactics of “Candid Camera” to test the veracity of some adorable little kids and monitor the right-wrong dilemmas facing adults who find wallets on streets or get drastically under-billed at restaurants. Smile, you’re on NBC.

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Tucked into the same hour, though, is Dennis Murphy’s profoundly disturbing glimpse of a Chicago honors student who says she was widely condemned and called names by her peers and others for blowing the whistle on a respected teacher-coach whose secret cheating ways had brought their high school a couple of heady championships on the Academic Decathlon circuit.

“I just don’t understand why these kids don’t see this as wrong . . . to this day,” she says about the academic coach’s cribbing.

Who would understand? Yet welcome to the real world, for similar questions were asked about the slew of ordinary, law-abiding Americans who participated in mass riggings of TV quiz shows in the 1950s, contestants who willingly nourished and financially benefited from this hoax on viewers that turned out to be the fattest zit ever on the complexion of TV.

Much like the young whistle-blower in Murphy’s story, one of these quiz show collaborators, a colorful Tennessean named Stoney Jackson, recalled years after how many of the same people who earlier had toasted him for being a winning contestant later denounced him for publicly disclosing that he had received help with questions in advance. They weren’t angry at him for the cheating, understand, only for blabbing about it.

Perhaps, as one expert tells “Dateline NBC,” lying is tightly woven into the social fabric of America. It surely threads much of TV news.

Oh, they’re such minuscule white lies, right? The wee liberties with truth that by themselves amount to so little: The ad-libs read from TelePrompTers. The “exclusive” that isn’t. The “this just in” that isn’t. The “coming up next” that doesn’t. The chauvinistic promotions of prime-time programs disguised as news stories. The breathless live shots plugged into yesterday’s stories to make them appear fresh.

Or the recent story that KNBC-TV Channel 4 ran on pyramid schemes. It may have seemed a tad familiar to viewers of KCBS-TV Channel 2 and cable’s CNBC, where a strikingly similar story had run months earlier with David Horowitz as the reporter.

Horowitz has since departed KCBS, where his contract allowed him to adapt his pieces for his other employer, CNBC, and vice versa. Thus did footage and the guts of Horowitz’s old pyramid story resurface May 10 on CNBC’s corporate sister, KNBC, minus Horowitz, of course, and with a new voice-over from reporter Doug Kriegel and new intro read by anchor Paul Moyer: “Investigators tell us tonight. . . .”

Tonight? Or was it two months ago, or three or four? What the heck, as long as it’s the same decade, it works.

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There are different levels of fakery, none of the above even approaching the deception of Janet Cooke, the former Washington Post reporter whose phony story about a nonexistent 8-year-old heroin addict won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 that she was forced to return.

The devastating odyssey of Cooke--for whom, since childhood, lying came as naturally as breathing--is a fascinating read in the June issue of GQ magazine.

Cooke also was recently interviewed by Ted Koppel on ABC’s “Nightline” as part of a campaign to come out of the shadows and reinvent herself, one that evidently has paid off. Just last week, she and the writer of the GQ article reportedly signed a movie deal for her story worth a potential $1.5 million.

This focusing anew on her scandal is a wake-up call about the danger of small lies someday growing into the big one. Perhaps that, and the games its Los Angeles station sometimes plays, may catch NBC’s eye the next time it examines dishonesty in America.