Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Who Is The Real Target? Media Response To Controversial Investigative Reporting On Corporations, Chad Raphael, Lori Tokunaga, Christina Wai

Communication

In the past decade, corporate targets of American investigative reporting have deployed new legal and public relations counter‐attacks on journalists. Although corporations have largely directed their efforts at managing subsequent news coverage of these controversies, there has been no systematic study of how the rest of the media cover them. We examine elite print reaction to two investigative reports that were publicly challenged by their targets: ABC's 1992 Primetime Live report on Food Lion supermarkets and NBC's 1992 Dateline NBC story on General Motors' trucks. The case studies and content analyses of print coverage of these controversies suggest that greater …