How "60 Minutes" Spiked Breakthrough Story On TWA 800

Only If The Left Likes a Story Does Spiking It Become News

When CBS pulled a heavily promoted 60 Minutes report by Sharyn Alfonsi on Venezuelan deportees howls of outrage filled the airwaves of Blue Sky America.

Never mind that it was the same Ms. Alfonsi whose false accusation of a pay-to-play relationship between Publix and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blew up in the network’s face. Never mind that President Trump successfully sued CBS for its politically skewed editing of Kamala Harris’s comments on Gaza. The understanding among the networks for the past 30 years was that if a story fit the prevailing narrative, it was fit to air.

Needing to protect President Bill Clinton from an ambitious Congress, CBS and 60 Minutes shifted into full agenda protection mode after 1994. James Sanders, my late partner on my 2003 TWA 800 book, First Strike, learned this the hard way.

As the husband of TWA 800 trainer Elizabeth Sanders, James attended countless memorials for the 53 TWA employees killed in the July 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800. At one memorial, Elizabeth introduced James, an investigative reporter, to friend Terry Stacey. Stacey, the head 747 manager at the investigation site on Long Island, had a story to tell. When the two men met privately, Stacey told Sanders, “I know there’s a cover-up in progress.”

Stacey revealed among other anomalies the existence of a reddish-orange trail across the cabin interior of the plane, rows 17 through 19. In January 1997, Stacey attempted to scrape a portion of the reddish residue from the relevant seat backs. When that proved unsuccessful, Stacey extracted a few pinches of foam rubber, and Sanders had the residue tested in an independent lab. The residue, Sanders learned, was consistent with solid rocket fuel, further proof that a missile had destroyed the aircraft.

As the cover-up started to unravel from within, Clinton operatives started gradually and anonymously leaking word that the residue was nothing more than glue. They offered no backup, but the major media had long since ceased to ask for any.

One network, however, held promise for Sanders. It was CBS. Sanders had granted an exclusive interview to Emmy Award-winning producer Kristina Borjesson. After the interview had been videotaped, however, Borjesson grew alarmed when she realized no one on the Evening News was editing the piece. Frustrated, she walked into a morning meeting of news executives and asked why the network wasn’t doing the story on Sanders and his documents.

“You think it’s a missile, don’t you?” queried an executive.

“I don’t know what the hell it is,” Borjesson shot back, “but don’t you think we should be doing a story that asks a few questions about this guy and his documents?” The silence that followed was, as Borjesson admitted, “deafening.” When she had walked in to the room, she honestly believed she was about to correct an oversight at a level where it could be corrected quickly. “I walked out of there,” said Borjesson, “feeling like I’d cooked my own goose.” She had.

When CBS finally aired the story, it used what Borjesson called “a classic avoidance tactic.” CBS kept Sanders off the air while Dan Rather introduced the story. Rather then had FBI honcho James Kallstrom come on to claim the red residue was glue. Rather thanked Kallstrom and moved on to the next story. End of discussion.

Confident in his conclusions, Sanders sent one of the residue samples to Borjesson so CBS could do its own independent testing. Although CBS News had no interest in the sample, 60 Minutes did. Borjesson warned Senior Producer Josh Howard that a federal grand jury had been convened to deal with legal issues around the TWA 800 investigation, but Howard wasn’t put off.

“We’ve dealt with grand juries before,” Howard told her. Borjesson was elated. In the world of news, she told him, 60 Minutes was the “last broadcast with balls.” Borjesson put the sample in Howard’s desk for safekeeping until she could locate a lab. A few days later Borjesson got a call from her executive producer. The FBI wanted to talk to her “about some stolen evidence.” As she learned, management had meekly handed over the untested sample to the FBI, “where it disappeared forever.”

The FBI meanwhile pursued the Sanderses and Stacey more vigorously than it had Osama bin Laden, eventually arresting all three. The jurors at the Sanders’s federal trial on Long Island were not allowed to know that James Sanders was an investigate reporter. The prosecutors turned what should have been a First Amendment case into a routine case involving stolen airplane parts.

When Elizabeth and James were convicted, the “last broadcast with balls” tucked them between they/their legs and shuffled off the scene in silence. This is the culture Bari Weiss has inherited. Smart money says the culture wins.

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