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On Saturday, "48 Hours" ran a story about the 2003 murder of Elli Perkins, a murder that her 28-year-old son Jeremy confessed to committing. Jeremy had been hallucinating and behaving erratically before his mother's death, but his parents, devout Scientologists, resisted giving him psychiatric treatment. As "48 Hours" notes, "[s]ome pro-Scientology materials declare that psychiatrists are not only useless, but evil – their medications nothing but poisons." The Perkins' opted to medicate their son primarily with vitamins.

The Scientology community was not happy with the story, which raised the possibility that Elli Perkins might not have been murdered had her son been given psychiatric treatment. The group refused to provide "48 Hours" with an official spokesman and began taking action to influence the broadcast. "They hit us with numerous e-mails and there were some people at CBS or at '48 Hours' who they knew personally, and so there were some personal requests made as well," says CBS News Senior Vice President, Standards and Special Projects Linda Mason.

One of the primary complaints from Scientologists was that CBS News has a conflict of interest in covering the story, since the network counts pharmaceutical companies among its advertisers. The argument was that since these companies make anti-depressant and anti-psychotic drugs, CBS News wanted to promote them – and that this story was one way to do that. Mason disputes this argument. "Nothing could be further from the truth," she says. "At CBS the sales department and the news department – there is a Chinese wall between them. And we just don't cross. And we've done numerous stories on the ill effects of drugs of various sponsors that are on CBS." After the broadcast aired, Mason estimates that CBS News received "more than 500 letters from scientologists saying that we had been unfair."

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When a broadcast network magazine program devotes time to a murder story in your hometown, you’re probably going to watch it. When that network displays a front-page of the local newspaper and that page has been altered, it’s a safe bet someone is going to notice it. That’s what happened in the wake of last week's “48 Hours” in an incident which raises some hefty ethical questions for the news division.

Last Saturday’s “48 Hours” broadcast focused on the 2001 murder of Kent Heitholt of Columbia, Missouri. Without going into the complicated details of the case, a young man named Ryan Ferguson was convicted of the murder of Heitholt, who had been the sports editor of the Columbia Daily Tribune. The crime went unsolved for over several years until Chuck Erikson, a friend of Ferguson who later pleaded guilty to second degree murder, told police the two were responsible for the killing.

Because of many questions and doubts surrounding this case, it made for a compelling “48 Hours” story but it’s about four seconds in the one-hour story that we’re interested in trying to clear up today. Throughout the program, the front-page of the Tribune was displayed on screen to mark important moments in the case. Near the end of the show, when “48 Hours” correspondent Erin Moriarty told of the 40-year sentence recommended by the jury, the picture on-screen showed Ferguson standing in a suit and tie. Another front-page then came up, with the same picture under the headline, “Ferguson gets 40 years.”

The problem is, everything was accurate except the picture. That headline actually ran after another sentencing hearing and the picture that accompanied it showed Ferguson in an orange prison jumpsuit with (presumably) his attorney next to him. And altering that image is not in line with the standards of CBS News. According to the Tribune, Managing Editor Jim Robertson “complained” to CBS in an e-mail about the alteration.

“48 Hours” Executive Producer Susan Zirinsky apologized to the Tribune, and I spoke with her about how this happened.


She told me that the alteration of the front-page was done by a freelance editor who had only worked with CBS one previous time and was unaware of the “intricacies” of CBS News standards. “We find it an egregious oversight” Zirinsky said, adding, “if it had been brought to anyone’s attention, it never would have made the light of day.”

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Last night, there were two religion-themed specials on television: “The Mystery of Christmas,” an hour-long CBS special from the “48 Hours” team, and “Heaven -- Where Is It? How Do We Get There?,” a two-hour Barbara Walters-hosted special on ABC.



It’s hard not to be skeptical of national reporting on religion. The target audience of religion-themed specials is, in large part, people of faith, and ratings-conscious network executives aren’t looking to alienate that audience by doing anything too controversial. But when trying to deal in a serious way with a topic like religion, which is so sensitive to so many people, controversy isn’t easy to avoid. The result, too often, is that media outlets settle for unserious reporting, the kind that relies on inspirational music and stock montages of streaming clouds but never really poses serious or important questions.



To some extent, the problems of reporting on religion are unavoidable. Serious journalism requires a certain adherence to provable fact, after all, while religious belief is grounded in faith. The two often seem incompatible. “It's practically impossible to cover religion,” says Columbia Journalism Review’s Gal Beckerman, who recently wrote a piece asking why journalists don’t “get” religion. “You're using a form [in reporting] that demands a certain level of basis in fact. And faith is almost the polar opposite – the idea that the test of your belief is how much you're willing to give up the notion that it needs to be based in reality.”

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