UNC-TV's Alcoa saga continues

If you pay the piper, will he play your favorite tunes?

Former House Speaker Richard Morgan, who works for the N.C. Water Rights Committee, gave $3,000 to Martin Sansone, a long-time friend of Eszter Vajda, the UNC-TV correspondent who reported stories about Alcoa that aired last month.

Morgan said Vajda and Sansone, a citizen of Great Britain, solicited the money during a meeting with him and several others connected to the water rights committee. "They both met with me and others and essentially pitched us for subsistence so he could stay here," Morgan said. "He couldn't afford to stay otherwise."

This raises several questions, not the least of which is: How often does this "private subsidization" of in-depth media reports happen?

Another question is: Did Vajda attempt to secure (additional?) funding for her researcher from WUNC-TV itself, only to be turned down, or did she just assume the money would not be forthcoming and took other steps instead? This seems to answer that question:

Shannon Vickery, director of production at UNC-TV, said UNC-TV was not aware before it aired portions of Vajda's report that her researcher had taken money from an Alcoa opponent.

Actually, I may be assuming too much there. If Vajda had requested and been rejected, and then Sansone appeared on the scene anyway, you would think someone would say, "Hey, I thought he couldn't afford to come." Whatever. We'll leave that for now.

It appears Sansone took umbrage at the article's implications. Unless it's an imposter (quite possible), the Brit (Englishman, sorry) decided to pop into the comment section and defend himself:

Well Lynn Bonner !
Even your title to this 'news' piece is incorrect. You know I am not a UNC-TV Researcher, and yet your sensationalist headline implies I am. I spoke to you for some time and answered many questions - including the fact that I have given lots of research data on Alcoa to many parties including various reporters! In the UK we have a cheap daily paper called "The Sun", I now see where you are on the scale of journalism.

Martin Sansone.

Yes, well. Be that as it may, attacking a reporter in the comment section of an online story might not be the wisest approach to securing future research funding from media entities. Just sayin'.

By the way, for someone who doesn't work for WUNC-TV, he sure seems to know a lot about its inner workings:

Martin Sansone, the researcher/producer of the “NC Now” pieces and The Alcoa Story documentary, said by and large, he agreed with the panel’s assessment, but there is more to the story.

“Eszter said from the beginning of March to management that the story needed to be in a longer format than what is possible on ‘NC Now,’” Sansone said. “UNC-TV correspondence between management and Eszter will confirm that this was an ongoing dialogue concerning the story length and content for some time.”

Sansone explained that UNC-TV management pulled Vajda off producing UNC-TV’s “Legislative Week in Review” one week before the “NC Now” segments aired and told her to cull footage from the more than 200 hours of videotape she had shot and quickly edit together three segments on the Alcoa controversy. The three segments had a cumulative length of just over 35 minutes.

“[Vajda] said to the management again that she wasn’t ready with the story to ensure the ‘NC Now’ pieces would work and telling the story in three short pieces would be extremely difficult,” Sansone said.

I have a feeling we've only scratched the surface on this story. In the normal cookie-cutter scenario, the huge, multi-national Alcoa would be the only entity spending the big bucks to shape public opinion. And I'm sure they're doing so. But there are some monied interests on the other side as well, and the payoff for them, if they succeed, simply has to be more than just the preservation of water rights and/or environmental stewardship.

So what is the payoff? Increased value of lakefront property for developers? Getting their hands on targeted economic incentives funded from (state-owned) energy sales? If the only people asking such questions are Alcoa PR people and (maybe) me, those questions are not going to get answered, and we will move forward based on false assumptions.