End of Inside Story
I traveled to Central America fort Inside Story again in the 1984 to cover elections in El Salvador, a country in the midst of a rebellion against the seven families that had ruled the country for decades. The military junta’s response had been ruthless. During the last year of Carter’s presidency, 1980, Salvadoran soldiers, police, and death squads, killed 11,895 people, mostly peasants, trade unionists, teachers, students, journalists, human rights advocates, and priests. By 1992, when the civil war was finally over, at least 75,000 had been killed, although nobody knows for sure because so many poor people simply disappeared.
Despite this record, in his last week in office Carter suspended aid to Nicaragua and provided $10 million in aid for El Salvador’s military.
I had five reservations at the Sheraton Hotel in San Salvador, but on arrival all of them were gone. It took the famous Hodding Carter to get us one room for the seven of us. The elections were held under military rule amidst high levels of repression and violence, and candidates to the left of Duarte's Christian Democrats were excluded from participating.
My lasting memories of that election have to do with fear. The morning after we checked into the Sheraton, we drove to a military base to get our press credentials. We waited on benches in a bare room with chipped pale-yellow walls for nearly an hour as the death squads returned from their night’s work. I’m sure the timing was intentional. Groups of four to six large men, dirty work clothes, eyes dead, faces devoid of compassion.
Christian Democrat José Napoleón Duarte was running against Army Major Roberto d’Aubuisson. Duarte was a typical politician, but d’Aubuisson was a thug, a leader of the death squads, probably the man who ordered the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero.
When we interviewed d’Aubuisson, he swaggered into the meeting room where we waited at a small table. Before either Hodding or I could get up, d’Aubuison pulled a nickel plated 45m pistol from his back pocket, slammed it down on the table between us, and sat down. He seemed confident of winning the election, but Duarte was finally victorious after a second vote.
Every day, just before dawn local El Salvadoran camera crews would go out on “vulture runs,” looking for the remains of the death squads’ night work, bodies left to rot on the outskirts of the city attracting vultures. The cameramen would sell the footage to international news teams for broadcast around the world.
A meeting with a catholic priest one night required the seven of us to walk several blocks from the hotel to a nearby restaurant. On the way there a van with tinted windows pulled up next to us and slowed to match our pace. The windows rolled down and automatic weapons came out pointing directly at us. Someone in the car shouted, “Bang, bang, bang” and in a peal of laughter the SUV sped off.
The night of the election we drove to Apopa, a working-class suburb of the capital, to try to document voter intimidation. In the middle of a plaza, we ran into automatic rifle fire coming from both sides. We fell to ground. My cameraman kept videotaping, but the audio cable had become detached from his camera. Face pressed again the cobblestones, I tried unsuccessfully to reattach it. Fortunately, an NPR reporter was in the square that evening, and we were able to match his audio to our video later in the edit room.
The election was a joke. An American public relations firm ran D’Aubuisson’s campaign with generous contributions from American conservatives. Duarte’s campaign was financed in part with a $2 million grant from the CIA. Nicaragua had elections the same year. According to the Reagan administration, the Nicaraguan elections were dishonest and meaningless, while the El Salvador elections were free and fair. The mainstream United States media reported those conclusions as facts.
International observers disagreed. In Nicaragua, voting was not mandatory and independent European observers said the election was largely free and fair. In El Salvador, voting was mandatory, and signs of military intimidation were everywhere, if you bothered to look for them and talked to the poor. We told the real story most of the mainstream press ignored.
Inside Story gave me the opportunity to do the most solid journalism I had done since my five years at Pacifica. We did two shows on Rupert Murdock, The Press Baron Who Would Be King. We looked at how a largely white press covered Black mayors in Black Pols: White Press. We went to the Super Bowl for Super Bowl Super Stakes. We followed Jessie Jackson’s 1984 campaign for president and won another national Emmy, Outstanding Coverage of a Continuing News Story.
We were in Grenada before most of the American troops got there. Hodding and his producer walked through an empty prison on the morning before brave marines were supposed to have stormed the heavily defended prison and liberated the captives. Like many military press handouts, this was written before the events it pretended to describe had even taken place.
We all thought that Inside Story would go on forever. I sat in a meeting at General Electric’s headquarters in Connecticut where executives promised that they were committed for the long hall. The show was popular with conservatives because it criticized American press performance.
Ned wanted to do a program on press coverage of the nuclear energy industry. He knew that reactors were much more dangerous than the mainstream press admitted. If you’ve read my blog, you know that I have a long history of biting the hand that feeds me, but in this case I was cautious. Maybe I was growing up. GE was heavily invested in nuclear energy. I didn’t think the issue was worth jeopardizing our funding and I simply failed to appoint a producer to do the show. Hodding backed me up.
Ned hired an old friend, recently divorced, just coming off a two-week retreat with Werner Erhard, founder of EST. Ned was the boss, and I did my best to work with his producer. As his research focused on a nuclear facility in Arizona, I asked him if any GE products were involved. He promised they were not.
It was about a week before the program was due to be broadcast when I screened his rough cut. It was a powerful story about a nuclear facility in Arizona that had illegally buried radioactive equipment in the desert to avoid the huge costs of proper disposal. While a local reporter had picked this up, no one outside of Albuquerque would run his story. I asked Ned’s producer again if GE were in any way involved. He said he had just discovered that GE made the reactors for the nuclear facility we were attacking. The show was trashing a major GE client.
I was angry. Ned’s producer started massaging my shoulders in some kind of EST practice as he told me to calm down. I didn’t want to calm down. I wanted to can the show, but Ned persisted in broadcasting it.
We sent a copy of the fine cut to GE as we did with all our productions. They never said a word, but they pulled their national advertising campaign for the show. They had scheduled full-page ads in a large variety of publications from the New Yorker to TV Guide. When the season was over, they declined to fund another. Ned tried to raise funding elsewhere, but Inside Story was dead in 1986.
This is how corporate control works. GE never said a word, but everyone knew why they pulled their funding, and the industry took note. Nobody had to say a word, but producers, writers and editors made sure that their stories did not offend their corporate sponsors.
When Cable Wasn’t Cool
Hodding Carter and I formed a company with a lawyer friend of Hodding, Ron Goldfarb. It seemed like a good combination for a television production company, but it was hard sledding. We did a series for PBS that Hodding hosted called Capitol Journal. The idea was much like F.Y.I. Report on stories around the country and then sees how Washington was dealing with them. It was a good idea but woefully underfunded, which made us rely heavily on interviews with Washington politicians, lobbyists and staff members, none likely to speak frankly on camera.
We produced other PBS specials, but PBS was underfunded during the Reagan years, and we resorted to industrials to keep going. By early 1987 it seemed like hard work with little payoff, and we dissolved the company. I formed a company with my wife, Susan, and we began producing for a whole new market, cable television companies. Cable began in the Sixties to relay broadcast television signals to customers who couldn’t pick them up with an antenna. In the Seventies, satellite distribution of television signals gave cable companies access to programming from all over the country, and it began to offer more programming choices than over the air broadcasting. Cable subscriptions surged and the revenue gave cable companies the money they needed to develope and produce their own shows.
HBO was the first cable program company, launched to a few hundred viewers in 1972. Most of its programming for its first five years consisted of re-runs of movies and sports. When HBO began distributing its programs on satellites in 1975, Ted Turned convinced HBO to let him piggyback off their signal. He sent programming from his local station, WTBS, nation wide.
In 1980 Turner founded CNN, the Cable News Network. Showtime, The Movie Channel, Bravo, The Entertainment Channel, The Disney Channel, Playboy Channel, ESPN, Black Entertainment Television, Christian Broadcasting Network, Nickelodeon all launched their cable channels in the early Eighties.
The 1984 Cable Act ended most cable regulations, stimulating an unprecedented investment in cable plant and programming. From 1984 through 1992, the industry spent more than $15 billion on wiring the United States, the largest private construction project since World War II. Billions more were spent on program development.
In January of 1987, the recently launched Discovery Channel called and asked us to produce a program about Soviet News coverage. Discovery, then located in Landover, Maryland, had 36 employees. They had obtained rights to rebroadcast live Soviet television. We arranged to have the news shows translated and brought in a group of experts to talk with Hodding Carter about their content. Live from the Inside the Soviet Union premiered on Sunday, February 15, 1987. For the first time in history, Americans could watch almost live Soviet television.
By mid-1988 Discovery was profitable, and they hired Tim Cowling, an award-winning executive producer at National Geographic Television, to head up their production effort. Friends and colleagues were struggling to get funded by PBS or some foundation, a tedious and usually disappointing process, but they still were universally shocked that we would produce for cable! No one took it seriously. As a famous song about Ted Turner put it, “We were cable, when cable wasn’t cool!”
David Macaulay had come out with a popular book in 1988 called The Way Things Work.” Tim said Discovery wanted a series based on the same idea, but when we thought about it, we concluded that viewers would quickly get bored watching the way mechanical objects worked. People were interested in other people. We suggested a program based on the inventors, with the objects of their creation only a part of the package. Invention was a co-production with the Smithsonian Institution.
Invention, hosted by NBC correspondent Lucky Severson, premiered on Discovery on October 2nd, 1990, at 9:30 p.m. The first show featured a flying car invented by Paul Moller. For that story, in addition to Moller, we interviewed Gore Vidal. As a boy, Vidal had helped his inventive father test an earlier attempt at a flying car, the Pitcairn Autogiro.
Invention was a ratings dynamo. The ad sales staff in New York told us that they could run Invention segments multiple times and charge the same ad rate because audience numbers stood up so well. Inventors were fascinating, always intelligent, frequently colorful, and sometimes brilliant. We aimed to produce shows that a reasonably intelligent fourteen-year-old could understand and experts would say got it right.
Invention seemed to us to prove that intelligent programming, aimed at viewers’ curiosity and desire to understand the world, could be commercially successful. Like Inside Story, we thought it would go on forever, and we hired a staff of twenty-five, gave them medical benefits, a retirement plan and generous time off. We bought a rammed earth house just out of Washington DC on an acre and third of land with a swimming pool. We had gained a solid footing in the upper middle class during the Reagan years. Avoiding politics in those years seemed only sensible.
Citizen Carter
Discovery asked us to a special on Jimmy Carter. I wasn’t a fan of Carter when he was in office, but it was a pleasure to spend time with him as an ex-president: thanksgiving dinner with the family in Plains, where Carter showed me around the woods and fields where he’d grown up; Nicaragua, where he helped monitor the election of 1990. It was Carter’s lengthy conversations with Daniel Ortega that convinced Ortega to accept the results of the election, in which Violetta Chamoro defeated him for the presidency.
We built homes with Carter and Rosalynn in Tijuana, Mexico. We went fishing on the Rogue River in Oregon, where Rosalynn caught a few trout but Jimmy, to his consternation, none. We traveled to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which Carter had created in one of his last acts as president but had never visited. I wanted to ask Carter to reflect on his presidency in a high mountain setting, a wise man seeking truth in the wilderness. (A visual cliché I hoped would work).
It was extremely difficult to find a spot high in the Brooks Range with a snow-capped summit behind him, sufficiently protected from the wind to make audio recording possible. We found a site that would work, with frequent interruptions when the wind shifted. About halfway through our conversation, I asked Carter how he answered people who said his had been a failed presidency. Before Carter could answer, I heard the hum of the 16mm camera stop and my director of photograph said. “I have to stop this interview. Like many other Americans, I respected your administration, and I don’t know why Chris is asking you all these typically negative Washington questions.”
He was superb cameraman, with decades of experience, but he had a Swedish arrogance about the United States and its citizens. I was on the north side of the Brooks Ranges, at least two days from the nearest camera operator, and no replacement was possible. I looked at the Swede for a moment and turned back to Carter. Jimmy looked at the cameraman and said, “Bob, would you roll the camera?” There is rarely a question that you can throw at an intelligent, thoughtful person that they have not already considered.
Discovery had given the Carters the right to review the final script. I was in the edit room adding the last titles to the show when the phone rang. It was Rosalynn. She was furious. “We took you into our lives, we trusted you and you’ve completely trashed Jimmy,” she began. I listened through a tirade of specifics (you can see the show on my website if you’re interested). I was completely shocked. “Rosalynn, if this had been any more pro-Jimmy people would have laughed at it.”
Citizen Carter aired a week later, February 20th, 1991. I was at home when the phone rang shortly after the show was over. A voice with a southern accent said, “I liked the show.” I thought it was my friend and former business partner Hodding Carter, but the accent wasn’t quite right. The voice went on, “and my wife liked it too.” And he chuckled. Jimmy Carter is a class act.
The LA Times called Citizen Carter an “unabashedly adoring film portrait.” The Baltimore Sun said it was “an impressive piece of television biography. … evocative, balanced and places him in a historical and symbolic context.” Citizen Carter won a 1991 Gold Cine Award.
The Eighties
President Ronald Reagan’s attack on the New Deal and the overwhelming victory of his vice president, George H. W. Bush, over Michael Dukakis in 1988 kept us staggering down the same road the media called “the Reagan Revolution.” The Neoconservative agenda was in full swing with massive tax cuts for the rich, deregulation for corporations, an aggressive foreign policy, and a neglect of poverty, gun violence, health care, and the growing climate crisis.
Bush appointed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in September and invaded Panama in December of 1989 to overthrow his former CIA operative, Manuel Noriega. According to surveys, 80% of the American people cheered the invasion and Bush’s approval ratings soared. We are a warlike people.
Destruction of the Soviet Union had been a long-term goal of American foreign policy, and in 1989 we had an opportunity to contribute to its demise and help shape its future. Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev had taken control of the Soviet Union in 1985 and soon established a policy called glasnost (openness). He criticized the authoritarian excesses of Joseph Stalin and promised reform. Communist satellite states picked up on the reform movement and asked for more independence.
In the middle of juggling these demands the Chernobyl nuclear reactor failed in April of 1986. Handling the crisis cost the Soviet government the equivalent of $18 billion dollars. Added to the cost of their war in Afghanistan , the Soviet Union was virtually bankrupt, Gorbachev later said.
In February of 1989, Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan. Jimmy Carter had begun supporting the mujahedeen in 1979, aiming to destabilize Soviet troops sent to support a pro-Russian Afghan government. Reagan continued the policy, and tit finally paid off.
Soviet weakness encouraged civil resistance in the already restless client states of Eastern Europe. Poland and Czechoslovakia allowed increasing numbers of East Germans to flee to the West, and East Germans began to demand freedom of travel. East German officials made some concessions. That led to thousands of East Germans trying to get through checkpoints in the wall. Guards were overwhelmed. No East German official would authorize the use of force. Guards disappeared and the wall began to come down.
A few weeks later, on December 2nd and 3rd in Malta, President Bush and Gorbachev met to declare the end of the Cold War. No formal agreements were signed, but when Gorbachev was asked about nuclear war, he answered, "I assured the President of the United States that the Soviet Union would never start a hot war against the United States of America. And we would like our relations to develop in such a way that they would open greater possibilities for cooperation.... This is just the beginning. We are just at the very beginning of our road, long road to a long-lasting, peaceful period."
It seemed to many that the end of the Cold War, a primary cause of conflict, could usher in a time of reconciliation when the world could start cooperating to solve problems. German reunification in October of 1990 seemed like a propitious start.
Hard core communists launched a coup against Gorbachev in 1990. Suppressing the coup would have required a level of violence that Gorbachev was unwilling to launch. Hundreds of CIA agents flooded Moscow, lending full support to Boris Yeltsin, an official who had left the Communist Party and spoke in favor of capitalism.
The Soviet Union dissolved in December of 1991. With the open help of American neoconservatives, most notably Larry Summers and the IMF, Boris Yeltsin was elected president and Russia and its satellite countries adopted an extreme version of the neoconservatism. Corrupt, haphazard privatization turned state enterprises over to politically connected people who quickly emerged as oligarchs with immense fortunes and the power that goes with money. Many of the oligarchs invested their money abroad, leading to huge flight of capital from Russia. The result was disastrous, with real GDP falling by more than 40% by 1999. Hyperinflation wiped out personal savings. Crime soared. With no safety net, poverty grew at an alarming rate.
Bush invaded Iraq in a dispute over an oil field earlier that year. On the morning of January 17, 1991, allied forces launched more than 4,000 bombing runs by coalition aircraft. This pace would continue for the next four weeks, until a ground invasion was launched in February. On television it looked like a video game, and once again Americans ate it up. We admire presidents who start wars and Bush’s approval rating soared.
His Iraq victory didn’t help him a year later in his struggle with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot for the presidency. Unable to shrink the huge deficit he inherited, Bush reneged on his 1988 "no new taxes" campaign promise. The economy was in trouble. Unemployment was at its highest since 1984. According to the 1992 Census Report 14.2% of all Americans lived in poverty.
The phrase that Clinton campaign strategist James Carville coined said it all: “The economy stupid.”
Clinton
Politicians of both parties like to talk about “The Reagan Revolution.” Conservatives want to take credit for this dramatic change in the culture of the United States, and Democrats want to avoid responsibility for those changes that have devasted the lives of millions of working Americans. It’s not that simple.
After twelve years of Republican control of the White House, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton defeated President Bush in 1992. Clinton’s victory was credited to a new Democratic Party strategy, developed by the Democratic Leadership Council after Walter Mondale’s loss to Ronald Reagan in 1984. lt called for balanced budgets, free trade, tough-on-crime laws, and welfare reform.
I spent two days with Clinton in 1986, producing a piece on Arkansas education for Roger Mudd who had a show on NBC called 1986. I traveled with Clinton by plane around the state and he was clearly very smart and knowledgeable about issues, respectful of the views of others, interested in everything. I watched him connect with back woods Delta farmers, black and white, in the southeast and high-powered businessmen in Little Rock. Everybody loved him. I called my wife and told her this man could be president.
Sitting in the bar of the Capitol Hotel, its dark wood and leather looking unchanged since 1870 when the hotel was built, local reporters chuckled at my speculation. They didn’t disagree, but they said there were a couple of things about Clinton that everyone eventually found out. He doesn’t always tell the truth and he doesn’t leave the party with the same girl he came with. They called him “Slick Willie.” Both those statem,ents turned out to be true.
Clinton was so comfortable with African Americans, and maybe because he played the saxophone, some people called him “the first Black president.” But Civil Rights advocates were not so sure. He sabotaged Jessie Jackson at a Rainbow Coalition meeting by attacking a controversial rap singer without warning Jackson in advance. ‘You had a rap singer here last night named Sister Souljah,’ Clinton said. ‘Her comments before and after [the] Los Angeles [uprising following the not guilty Rodney King verdicts] were filled with a kind of hatred that you do not honor today and tonight’. . . That quote is from an important book, The Great Wells of Democracy, by Manning Marable. Marable goes on to point out that Clinton called attention to the speech with national interviews, explaining that ‘if you want to be president, you’ve got to stand up for what you think is right.’
Another book on racial politics, Nixon’s Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to Clinton, by Kenneth O’Reilly, reminds us that Clinton left New Hampshire just before the primary vote to return to Arkansas and preside over the execution of African American Rickey Ray Rector. O’Reilly continues, “In March he posed for pictures in front of forty mostly black prisoners in their prison uniforms. “Jesse Jackson called it a moderately more civilized ‘version of the Willie Horton situation.’ Two weeks later, on the day after the Illinois and Michigan primaries, Clinton again showed he was a different type of Democrat by golfing nine holes, accompanied by a television camera crew, at a segregated Little Rock country club.”
“Only days before the 1996 Democratic National Convention, Clinton signed the ‘Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act,’ with the stated goal of ‘ending welfare as we know it.’ . . . Clinton repeatedly criticized the lack of ‘personal responsibility’ of those on public assistance.”
In the end, the Clinton administration led the Democratic Party away from its working-class base to a new base of high tech engineers and technocrats. Both parties had us locked into an agenda that may have been best described by economist Larry Summers who served in the administrations of both Clinton and Obama. In an interview with journalist Ron Susskind during the early days of the Obama administration, Summers said: “One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way that they’re supposed to be treated.”
Those of us striving to do better should give up and accept our lot in life. We should not expect to be treated well. We don’t deserve it. This was the attitude of both parties. They had repudiated the New Deal society that I had grown up in. Both parties had been captured by wealthy elites, the leaders of our mega-corporations whose goal is maximizing profit. The greedy had taken over.