Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Tenet Responds to CNN Broadcast of March 8
 

CNN aired a story on March 8 during Paula Zahn Now about Tenet’s legacy issues.  We are deeply concerned about their coverage, and sent the letter below to CNN ombudsman Rick Davis.  We believe that critical information was missing, ignored or misconstrued in their coverage, and it left erroneous and damaging impressions with viewers.  Tenet declined to appear on camera, but company officials did provide a letter on March 8 in response to the producer’s questions.  We are making this information available to provide full background on CNN’s report.  Click here to download a copy of this letter.

March 15, 2006

Rick Davis
Executive Vice President
News Standards and Practices
One CNN Center
6th Floor, South Tower
Atlanta, GA  30303
Via Fax and Email

Dear Mr. Davis:

I am writing to express our deep concerns that a recent CNN story – “Tenet Troubles,” which appeared March 8 on Paula Zahn Now, with written versions posted on CNN.com – was reported without even a minimum attempt at balance and fairness.

We believe that, because critical information was missing, ignored or misconstrued, your story left an erroneous and damaging impression: Because of Tenet’s past legal problems, the company must somehow be culpable in the current inquiry regarding alleged euthanasia at Memorial Medical Center after Hurricane Katrina.

In fact, your March 8 story is simply the latest example of what we consider to be CNN’s continuing unbalanced portrayal of Tenet and Memorial in your coverage of post-Katrina deaths at New Orleans hospitals and nursing homes. 

In my 34-year career, first as a journalist at The Los Angeles Times and then as a public relations executive for several large companies, I have worked with investigative reporters at many publications and broadcast outlets.  Almost always, I have managed to develop some level of trust in which we have provided information, often on background and even when the stories being reported were adverse to my company.  I expect investigative reporters to be skeptical of what they are told by me and by all their sources.  I expect them to double-check everything I say.  But I also expect them to be fair, to check out legitimate leads and not to make their stories fit preconceived notions.  Unfortunately, our interactions with your staffers over the past six months have often seemed more prosecutorial than journalistic.

Since Hurricane Katrina, my Tenet colleague Steven Campanini has had a number of conversations with CNN staffers Jonathan Freed, Sean Calleb, Drew Griffin and Kathleen Johnston.  I also spoke with Ms. Johnston, and I sent her a letter before your March 8 broadcast that laid out in considerable detail our basic position.  I am attaching a copy of that letter for your information. 

We have attempted to be helpful to CNN to the extent we can by providing background information, but we have purposely limited what we will say on-the-record.  Because we are assisting the Louisiana Attorney General in his ongoing investigation into post-hurricane deaths at New Orleans hospitals and nursing homes, we have consistently declined to make detailed on-the-record comments or to be interviewed on camera by anyone until the Attorney General announces the results of his investigation.  In our view, to do otherwise might compromise the investigation and be unfair to individuals whose names have surfaced or may surface as part of it.       

What troubles us is that we have made an effort to supply CNN with considerable background information to assist in your coverage, but most of that information seems to have been dismissed out-of-hand or simply ignored.   Facts that might point your viewers to a different conclusion about Tenet or Memorial Medical Center have been all but absent from your stories.  Are we wrong, therefore, to conclude that our refusal to grant CNN on-camera interviews has so colored your perception of us that you will not even weigh the background information we provide you against all the other information you are receiving from other sources?

Let me cite a few specific examples of information and leads we have provided to CNN:

• Forty-five bodies were removed from Memorial in the aftermath of the hurricane.  Of that number, 10 were Memorial patients who had already died of natural causes before the hurricane struck but whose bodies had not yet been picked up by funeral homes or the coroner.  Eleven others were Memorial patients, most of them elderly and very ill, who did not survive the hurricane aftermath and evacuation.  The remaining 24 bodies were patients of a separately licensed, long-term acute care hospital on the seventh floor of the Memorial building that was operated by LifeCare Hospitals Inc., owned by the Carlyle Group of Washington, D.C.  LifeCare had its own nurses, doctors and administrative staff, and it had a legal responsibility to provide for the care and safety of its own patients.  We have been told that, on the Saturday evening before the hurricane struck, LifeCare decided to close its facility in east New Orleans and to bring about two dozen very ill patients from that location, many on ventilators, to its facility at Memorial rather than transport them to a location outside New Orleans.  This decision, we believe, brought the patient census at the LifeCare facility inside Memorial to more than 50 extremely ill, often terminal patients.  To our knowledge, CNN has not reported most of these facts.  
  
  
• Dr. Anna Pou, a physician whose name has been reported by CNN and other news media in connection with the Attorney General’s investigation, is a Louisiana State University employee.  She was not employed by Memorial or Tenet.  Dr. Pou was credentialed to care for patients at both Memorial and the separate LifeCare hospital on the seventh floor.  We understand that she volunteered to be on duty to care for patients throughout the hurricane.  Therefore, it certainly would have been appropriate for her to be on the seventh floor and to care for LifeCare’s patients in the aftermath of the hurricane.  The fact that Dr. Pou was an LSU-employed physician who was credentialed to care for both Memorial and LifeCare patients has never been made clear by CNN.
  
  
• We suggested to your staffers that it was odd that Dr. Bryant King, whom you have used repeatedly as a prime source of information regarding alleged euthanasia at Memorial, abandoned the hospital on Thursday afternoon Sept. 1, not long after he supposedly overheard conversations in which euthanasia was being considered.  We thought it only fair to the physicians who did remain at the hospital that Dr. King be asked why he left when he did, especially if he truly believed patient lives were in danger from euthanasia.  To our knowledge, CNN has never shown Dr. King answering that question. 
  
  
• Your March 8 story suggested that CNN has talked with numerous Memorial employees and patient family members who claimed that the hospital was “ill-prepared” for the hurricane.  None of these people were identified or shown on-camera.  As we told you, although some food rationing was required for hospital employees (but not patients) after several days of flooding, there was still enough food, water and supplies at Memorial to last at least another three days even after all patients and staff had been evacuated by noon on Friday Sept. 2, 2005.  This was not mentioned by CNN.
  
  
• Several months ago, CNN reported that one of its sources had claimed that Curtis Dosch, a Memorial Medical Center administrator, was in a meeting with physicians where he suggested making a prayer for patients.  At that time, Mr. Dosch authorized us to provide the following comment from him:  “There was no such meeting and Dr. Bryant King either misspoke or he is not telling you the truth.”  Your producer Kathleen Johnston indicated that she would only take that comment directly from Mr. Dosch on-camera.  You choose to include off-camera comments and responses from others, but apparently not from us.  Why?
  
  
• Dr. Louis Cataldie, the Louisiana state coroner, indicated in a press conference in late September that as many as 50 bodies had been removed from another New Orleans hospital in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  This would surpass the number at Memorial.  We informed CNN that we had heard from authorities at the state morgue that the number might have been as high as 55, including 11 bodies scattered throughout that hospital.  We asked CNN, in the interests of fairness and out of respect to those who had worked so heroically to rescue more than 2,000 people at Memorial, to put the number of bodies removed from Memorial in context of what was found elsewhere.  To our knowledge, CNN never mentioned this.
  
  
• On October 27, 2005, your correspondent Drew Griffin reported on CNN that, while volunteering to help keep civil order in New Orleans, a group of New Mexico sheriff deputies encountered the body of a murdered woman in the emergency room of Memorial Medical Center after all the patients and staff had been evacuated.  The deputies said they thought they saw a bullet wound in her head and that she appeared to have been sexually assaulted.  We told you that our private security guards were on duty before those New Mexico sheriff deputies arrived, and our guards found no such body and had no information that any such body had existed.  You contacted the New Orleans police department, which told you they had found no such body and had no evidence to confirm the deputies’ report.  You broadcast this sensational allegation without any further confirmation and despite the explicit denials by both the New Orleans police department and our private security people on the scene.  You have never done a follow-up report to put this matter to rest.  Why?   
  
  
• We provided extensive information to your staffers about the Tenet Shareholder Committee, including its founder Dr. M. Lee Pearce of Miami.  We pointed out that Dr. Pearce has been a critic of Tenet and its predecessor companies for at least 20 years.  We also noted that Dr. Pearce had engaged in a media campaign against Tenet since 2000 because of his anger over a failed real estate deal near Ft. Lauderdale.  We showed you an email trail which demonstrated that in 2004 Dr. Pearce threatened to run negative advertising about Tenet in the Wall Street Journal unless the company made a greenmail payment by a certain date.  Tenet refused to make the payment and the advertising ran.  We identified a number of Dr. Pearce’s paid consultants and employees, including Gary Cripe, the general counsel of Dr. Pearce’s committee.  We asked your staffers to consider this track record before accepting on face value the criticisms of Dr. Pearce and his representatives.  We are dismayed that little of this information was used in identifying Gary Cripe in his lengthy on-camera interview with you in the March 8 story.  Your brief identification of him as working with a “doctor” who is a “minority shareholder” was misleading:  To our knowledge, Dr. Pearce owns 15,000 of Tenet’s almost 469 million common shares.  We understand that Dr. Pearce sold the lion’s share of any Tenet stock he once owned well before November 2002, thus reaping a considerable profit by selling at the stock’s historic high.  There are no other identified shareholders in the Tenet Shareholder Committee.  The anti-Tenet book you identified as being co-authored by Mr. Cripe was self-published by Dr. Pearce and mass-mailed to dozens of journalists across the country early last year.  The book is so blatantly one-sided and unbalanced that not a single major media outlet has mentioned it – until CNN chose to do so on March 8.  Did CNN check any of the information in Mr. Cripe’s book for accuracy or fairness before giving it a worldwide platform?

We do not know what the Louisiana Attorney General will conclude in his investigation, or whether any charges will be filed.  We are not privy to his findings.  As I mentioned in my letter to Ms. Johnston last week, it is our clear understanding from the Attorney General’s investigators that neither Tenet nor Memorial Medical Center is a target of the investigation.  Once the Attorney General makes public his findings, you may expect us to make a detailed comment.  However, our position on euthanasia has always been clear:  It is abhorrent to everything we stand for as a provider of health care to our communities, and it is never permissible under any circumstances.

As I mentioned, we have cooperated with many reporters on stories about Tenet, and we have rarely complained about their coverage.  We realize that this company has had many problems in the past and is under a regulatory and journalistic microscope.  That is why Tenet’s new management has, since 2003, followed a strategy of being transparent, forthcoming and honest in all its dealings.  It is the only way we believe we can earn the trust of all our constituencies.  It is unfortunate that we have not been able to achieve a mutual level of trust with CNN.

Tenet has no complaint with good investigative journalism.  But I am bringing this matter to your attention because CNN’s reporting, in our opinion, has been deficient.  We ask that, going forward, you make a much greater effort to achieve balance and perspective in your coverage of such a sensitive and important issue. 

Sincerely,

HARRY ANDERSON
Senior Vice President
Corporate Communications

Attachment:  Letter to Kathleen Johnston dated March 8, 2006

cc: Richard Parsons
 Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
 Time Warner Inc.

 Paul Cappuccio
 Executive Vice President and General Counsel
 Time Warner Inc.