This is what happens to you when you try to tell the truth about Clinton/Gore, just like New Republic's Kelly:
Zelnick Takes Ultimatum, Quits ABC
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 20, 1998; Page B01
When ABC News correspondent Bob Zelnick asked his bosses for
permission to write a biography of Vice President Gore, he got what
seemed like routine approval.
After nine months of work on his own time, however, he received an
ultimatum from the ABC brass: Abandon the book or give up your job.
Zelnick, 57, resigned yesterday after 21 years at the network, saying he
had been "blind-sided" by ABC. The network's position, he said, "is totally
contrary to First Amendment values."
But Richard Wald, ABC News senior vice president, said the only reason
he initially approved the book after the 1996 election was that the network
had already decided to fire Zelnick, who covers politics and Capitol Hill.
When that decision was reversed last year, he said, the book project could
not continue.
"We were trying to be fair," Wald said yesterday. "We were trying to be
nice to the man."
Earlier, ABC News President David Westin took a hard line in an e-mail
message to Zelnick: "This has precious little to do with the First
Amendment. . . . To paraphrase Holmes, you have a constitutional right to
say whatever you like, but you don't have a constitutional right to be an
ABC News correspondent."
Westin acknowledged that "you are right that we made a mistake" in
approving the book project. But while he was "genuinely sorry," Westin
wrote, "this strikes me as a 'true conflict' in which the needs of ABC News
must take precedence."
"I disagree profoundly with their judgment on this," Zelnick said yesterday.
"I don't think it's an inherent conflict at all."
ABC executives may have been worried that Zelnick's $100,000 contract
is with Regnery Publishing, a staunchly conservative house that has brought
out such anti-Clinton volumes as "Unlimited Access" by former FBI agent
Gary Aldrich. Zelnick wrote his first book, which criticized affirmative
action, for Regnery.
A former deputy Washington bureau chief for ABC, Zelnick reported from
Moscow, Tel Aviv and the Pentagon before moving to his current
assignment. He has accepted a fellowship with the Hoover Institution at
Stanford University to finish writing the Gore book.
It is not unusual for working journalists to write books on their own time.
But Wald said Zelnick told him he would be critiquing Gore and his
policies. "The rule is you can't write a critical book about areas that you
cover or are expected to cover," Wald said yesterday.
Wald says he okayed the book after top ABC executives, feeling Zelnick
was no longer a front-line correspondent, decided against extending his
contract. "I knew it would be unfair to him to have kept him from writing
the book and also not renew his contract," Wald said. Zelnick called this
"an after-the-fact concoction to make me look bad."
In any event, ABC News Chairman Roone Arledge decided last summer
to offer Zelnick the chance to stay on -- at a significant cut in pay. That's
when the network vetoed the book.
"I put in a difficult nine months of work -- evenings, mornings, weekends,
vacations," Zelnick said yesterday. If he dropped the book, he would be
out $82,000 -- the half of his advance already received, his agent's
commission, a researcher's salary and his expenses for a week of research
in Tennessee.
In September, days before his contract was to expire, ABC told him he
had to deep-six the project. In an e-mail message to Westin, Zelnick called
the move "unprecedented in the history of this company" and an "ugly
practice of prior restraint. . . . Correspondents are barred from writing
about people and things they cover? Correspondents at ABC News must
only write about something they know little or nothing about?"
But Westin held firm. "We cannot have a Washington correspondent
writing a book about one of our national leaders whom that correspondent
will undoubtedly have to cover. . . . Whatever positions you take will
subject you -- and us -- to being held up to ridicule that our reporting is
influenced by views you/we have formed about the individual involved,"
Westin wrote in response.
As discussions dragged on, ABC offered to reimburse Zelnick for
$66,000 of his $82,000 in expenses, which he rejected.
Said Wald: "It's unfortunate. He is a very unhappy man. I'm sorry that he is
unhappy."
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