Journalistic Downer

LAST OCT. 31, KIRO-TV took to the air in the five o'clock hour with journalistic cannons blazing. The station had a big story, a "dirty secret, one the beef industry doesn't want you to knowsick, injured, or dying cows turned into hamburger," as the station's promotional voiceover put it. It was the first night of fall "sweeps," the most-important ratings month of the year, and KIRO investigative reporter Chris Halsne was going after the beef industry for its use of so-called "downer" cows. Downers are cattle usually too broken down to walk into a slaughterhouse on their own. "Are federal inspectors just standing by?" the voiceover asked, before telling viewers that the station was about to reveal "undercover video raising questions about your family's safety."

Moments later, veteran anchor Steve Raible was telling viewers that the video Halsne was about to show was disturbing, but "we want you to see it for the health and safety of your family." Co-anchor Kristy Lee warned the audience that the images were too unsettling for children and pointed out that Halsne had been working undercover for six months. Then they turned to Halsne, who was live in front of an apparently healthy cow on a Monroe farm. But what, Halsne asked, "about a sick or ill one ending up on your plate?" Over two days, in a four-segment series, Halsne connected downers with e. coli bacteria, reported that downers were handled inhumanely, and said the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) was asleep.

Halsne's assertions, however, don't prove out, despite the fact Halsne is an experienced, award-winning "investigative" reporter. What viewers got instead of evidence was journalistic sleight-of-hand, with half-truths over-sold as full-truths and chains of causation unproven. Simply put, Halsne didn't have the evidence to support his broad claims. He either hadn't done the reporting necessary, or he chose to ignore facts he did uncover. As a result, the series was unvarnished advocacy, a couple of steps removed from Jayson Blair-style fabrication.

Predictably enough, the state's beef and dairy industries had a cow. They aren't suing KIRO, but along with the Chehalis slaughterhouse shown on the series, they have brought a complaint before the Washington News Council, the state's unofficial journalism police. The industry accuses KIRO of factual inaccuracies and flawed journalism. They are rightand it won't be the first time Halsne's lack of attention to proof and detail has gotten him in trouble. But it's even worse than that: It's an indictment of KIRO's news management, who should have been bird-dogging Halsne's work and clearly were not.

THERE'S A SIMPLE STANDARD that underlies investigative reporting. "You've got to prove it," says Jim Upshaw, a professor of journalism at the University of Oregon, who viewed a tape of the KIRO series. He says that KIRO didn't. Proof in journalism usually involves documents or videotaped evidence. Yet, as indicting as documents and video can seem at first blush, careful practitioners of the craft run their evidence by real experts, especially on stories like Halsne's, which involved matters of science and animal physiology.

Within moments of introducing viewers to the idea that downers are unsafe, Halsne implicitly introduced them to the idea that they are also sources of e. coli O175:H7, the sometimes-lethal strain of the bacteria that can enter the human food chain. His on-camera expert on this point was Gaylis Linville, "a consumer expert of sorts" whose son almost died of e. coli poisoning from tainted meat in the early 1990s. She gave a fine emotional response to seeing a downer cow on-screen. Halsne doesn't say whether her son's illness was as a result of exposure to downer meat. Linville was unavailable to explain what training she has to evaluate e. coli, but it strikes one television expert as odd that Halsne would turn to her instead of a scientist, which one can easily find at the University of Washington's medical or public-health schools.

"There's no connection between the woman and the problem," says Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute, a media think tank, who reviewed the KIRO story. "The main question is health and safety. Are downer cattle unhealthy and unsafe for me and my family? The questions raised in the promo and the implications are not answered in the story. 'Dirty secret'? There's no proof of that."

Halsne and KIRO's news director, Helen Swenson, did not return repeated requests for comment to clarify this and other points raised by the series.

Thomas Besser, an associate professor of veterinary microbiology and pathology at Washington State University, has studied e. coli in livestock since 1990. He's just the kind of source a careful investigative reporter would want to talk to. Besser says there are no scientific studies indicating a higher incidence of e. coli in downer cattle than in regular cattle.