Private Jessica: CBS admits TV movie 'mistake'

CBS may have been wrong to raise the possibility of a TV movie while trying to bag an interview with former Iraq prisoner of war Jessica Lynch, the American broadcast giant has said.

“Maybe that went over the line. That was not respecting, possibly, the sanctity of CBS News,” CBS chairman Leslie Moonves told a meeting of the Television Critics Association.

Pfc Lynch, who has yet to publicly tell the story of her capture in southern Iraq and subsequent rescue from an Iraqi hospital by Marines, has been wooed by CBS and other networks. CBS initially defended its approach.

In a letter to Lynch’s family that became public last month, CBS News senior vice president Betsy West proposed a two-hour documentary and noted the opportunities offered by sister units of Viacom-owned CBS, including MTV networks and publisher Simon & Schuster.

CBS Entertainment executives, the proposal said, “tell us this would be the highest priority for the CBS movie division”.

The correspondence became public after it was obtained by The New York Times.

Moonves said that “probably, if we had to do it all over again, a movie of the week never would have been mentioned in Betsy’s letter”.

He said the expansion of media conglomerates created the environment for potential mis-steps.

“As these companies become more and more vertically integrated, you know, sometimes you do go over the line,” Moonves said.

CBS has now abandoned the idea of a TV movie about Lynch, who was due to be released from Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington DC tomorrow, after treatment for broken bones and other injuries.

NBC “is already down the road with a movie without the rights”, Moonves said. An NBC movie on Lynch, unauthorised so far, is due to start filming in August.

“We’re not going to do ‘The Amy Fisher Story’ where there are three (TV movies) on at once,” Moonves said. He was referring to the network feeding frenzy over Fisher, who as a teenager shot her lover’s wife.