CBS Producer Sues Over Job

NY Times ^ | March 10, 2005 | JACQUES STEINBERG

[Coastal]

A veteran CBS News producer filed a lawsuit against the network in State Supreme Court in Manhattan yesterday, asserting that she should not have been removed from her position on the Wednesday edition of "60 Minutes" over her role in a segment that purported to raise new questions about President Bush's National Guard service in the Vietnam era.

The producer, Esther Kartiganer, who has worked at the network for four decades, was among those responsible for vetting portions of the report, which was broadcast on Sept. 8 and was based on documents that the network has since acknowledged it cannot authenticate.

On Jan. 10, the day that CBS released the findings of an independent panel - including that the report had been rushed onto the air without proper verification - Leslie Moonves, chairman of the network, said that Ms. Kartiganer was among those being removed from the program and would be reassigned.

Ms. Kartiganer's main responsibility on the Wednesday edition of "60 Minutes," as Mr. Moonves described it, was "reading scripts and unedited transcripts to determine whether an interview segment was used in context."

"It is difficult to understand how a person of Kartiganer's toughness and experience abnegated her assigned function," Mr. Moonves said in a statement posted on Jan. 10 on the CBS Web site, "but the fact is that she did, and CBS News is the worse for it."

[harpu]

Mr. Moonves did not specify how Ms. Kartiganer had erred, but the panel suggested that she could have been more skeptical about how the program was using several interviews for the discredited report.

A CBS spokesman, Dana McClintock, said in a statement late yesterday that the network had not yet been served with a copy of Ms. Kartiganer's suit but was "confident that all of the actions we have taken are entirely appropriate and lawful." Ms. Kartiganer is suing the network for defamation because she contends that, contrary to Mr. Moonves's assertion, she fulfilled her responsibilities on the disputed report, including reviewing the unedited transcripts of interviews with several principals.

Ms. Kartiganer, 67, is also suing the network for age discrimination.

[snarks_when_bored]

Moonves heaps criticism and scorn on the minor players while licking the butts of the major players. He's really found a home.

[eclectic]

You go, girl... well, grandma!