'Sunday Morning' Apologizes Over David Pogue Segment

In January, CBS "Sunday Morning" aired a report by contributor David Pogue that discussed a data-recovery service called DriveSavers as part of a report on what to do when you lose information stored on your computer. Pogue also did the story for National Public Radio and the New York Times. What Pogue failed to mention in his "Sunday Morning" segment, as San Francisco Weekly's Matt Smith pointed out last week, was that Drivesavers repaired Pogue's personal computer for free. (The company normally charges $2,000 or more.)

A DriveSavers rep said Pogue's fee had been waived as a "professional courtesy," not as a de facto payment for good publicity. "In my view, that's a pretty significant violation of journalism's ethical conventions, ones I would have expected to have been in force at the gold standards of American print, television, and radio journalism," wrote Smith. "How is a reader, or viewer, or listener, to know a journalist's analysis is on the up and up if a writer receives expensive goodies from a story subject?"

On Sunday, seemingly in response to Smith's inquiry, Charles Osgood apologized on "Sunday Morning." Here's his statement in full:

In January, we aired a report by contributor David Pogue about your computer hard drive and what to do when all is lost – when you fear that novel you've been working on for years is lost forever. David did the same story for the New York Times back in September and in it he wrote that one of the companies reviewed in his on-line column had performed hard drive repairs on his computer on a complimentary basis, which is to say he got the repairs for free. In our "Sunday Morning" version of the story, however, he failed to mention that as he should have, and furthermore, CBS News standards bar any of us from accepting free goods or services. To make a long story short, David apologizes, and so do we.