Message Points
My first meeting with Ted Turner was in his suite at Time Warner in New York shortly after I had been promoted from Senior to Executive Producer of the by now six million dollar project. The key people were there with me. Robert Wussler seemed uncharacteristically nervous. He is usually so self-possessed that he’s a parody of inscrutable, but waiting for Ted Turner, Wussler was restless and jittery.
Marty Schram, who had been hired to write a companion book to the series, paced around the table brimming with self-importance. Suzanne Arden was dressed to the nines and sat with a frustrated, pinched expression that I would later learn was a combination of ambition and envy. And finally, there was Tim Rockwood, the 17 year Wussler veteran who exuded the enthusiasm of Peter Pan.
Ted arrived characteristically on time and quickly circled the room introducing himself to each of us. He was impressive in person. A tall man, with an inner energy that seems barely contained in his lanky frame. He has that essential element of all charismatic people, clear eyes that appear to see the world as it really is, tinged with humor, connecting with your eyes if only for an instant, and seeming to see into the depths of your mind.
Ted offered two pieces of advice for the documentary: “International, international, international” and “don’t dumb it down.” If Ted had been our leader instead of Robert Wussler, it all would have ended very differently.
Wussler and Suzanne love to tell stories about Ted. He had 24 homes he maintained around the world. His private airplane costs a thousand dollars an hour when it was on the ground and $8,000 an hour to fly. Suzanne said he’s a neatness freak. During flights he wandered around his private cabin like a steward, picking up stray napkins and empty plates.
Ted had come to see a rough cut of a ten-minute trailer we had prepared for a July PBS program meeting. When we rolled the tape, the pictures looked great on the large Time Warner screen, but you couldn’t hear the words very well and Ted is half deaf anyway. He seemed engaged, made a few suggestions about the sound mix and then left, taking all the energy with him.
Back to work in Washington and following Suzanne’s lead, Wussler began bugging me about my message points. They really wanted us to decide first what it was we wanted to say, and then go out and videotape it. Like Graham Green’s Quiet American, who in Vietnam “never saw anything he hadn’t heard in a lecture hall,” for the Suzanne ideas came ahead of reality. In the end, that turned out to be true of PBS as well.
Suzanne Arden arranged a series of focus groups to find out what people wanted to hear, and she hired “The Three Blonds” to develop the message points. I took part in one or two of these bizarre sessions, where participants offered ideas that were scrawled on multiple huge pads of paper suspended around the room on easels. I never took them seriously and I tried to focus on the television series.
Arden was never satisfied with the message points that the three blonds came up with. I never could find out how much of the budget went to that nonsense. Arden insisted that I craft the messages for the series. This is what I wrote at the time.
Takeaway Points – Final Koch
• Be aware. Governments act in your name. Find out what they’re doing.
• Be accountable. And hold others accountable for their actions. Things just don’t happen. We all make decisions. Some good. Some bad.
• Support whistle blowers. They have proven their accountability heroically. We must protect, honor, and encourage them.
• Be informed. You need to know about weapons of mass destruction before you can act. Knowledge is power.
• Be skeptical. Pursue multiple sources to find out what’s going on. If you aren’t getting the news you want, write or call your news shows and demand the kind of coverage you need.
• Use common sense. The issues are not as difficult to understand as the experts and the politicians want you to believe.
• Follow the money. Find out how much various programs cost and see who ends up with the money. Weapons of mass destruction have proliferated because people make millions on them. Greed often drives decisions that permitted or fueled proliferation.
• Remember the past – as a way of securing the future. We did not use chemical weapons in World War II because we remembered WW I.
• Light up the dark places. Bad things are done when good people aren’t looking. The moral prohibitions against chemical weapons didn’t work in the Iraq/Iran war, because the rest of the world looked the other way.
• Think like a citizen of the world – because today that’s what we all are. Learn how the rest of the world sees us. There can be no national security now without international security.
• Avoid demagoguery cast in the form of religious rhetoric. Talk of good and evil does not help resolve problems, but only leads to more violence. Terrorists are demagogues with weapons.
• Be active. Governments only act under pressure. Get involved. You better believe the well-heeled lobbyists of the big money interests are involved.
• Global Village. Cliché, but still true. Imagine if you lived in a village with a ghetto so desperate that people were blowing themselves up to get attention. You’d know you had to do something about it beyond policing.
• Avoid expediency. Act from good principles. We supported Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran and we helped fund the mujahidin in their fight against the Soviet Union. Big mistakes. How often do we have to learn this lesson?
• Advocate National Service. American youth need a year of community service. It could be military, civilian, domestic or international. We can afford it. Young people would learn what the world is really all about. We need their understanding, and they need our help.
• Be hopeful. Solutions exist. We can implement them. It is not too late. We cannot afford a failure to seek and implement those that work.
• Be empowered. Armed with information, work for change and feel as if you are taking your own destiny in your hands.
Suzanne hated these message points, but she never came told me which specific messages irritated her. It was their whole tone. I asked, but Suzanne never came up with her own list.
The Think Tank
The dispute over journalism versus message points became a struggle over writing an “acceptable” proposal for the series. By the time I took over, there were already several proposals around; some slickly bound with pictures and others simply long essays. The need for a new proposal came out of a request from the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a think tank that Ted Turner was also funding.
NTI was a vehicle to implement policies to reduce the dangers of weapons of mass destruction. It was a typical Washington think tank with deep ties to the rest of official Washington, but little understanding of how to reach a broader public. NTI had a love/hate relationship with Avoiding Armageddon, because our funding came out of their budget.
In early July, NTI President Charlie Curtis asked Robert Wussler to give him an updated description of the series. Wussler told Curtis we would have a detailed series summary ready by the end of the month.
Marty, Tim and I went to work with the producers and over the next three weeks came up with a detailed description … about 12 pages for each of four two-hour shows. It was a solid, well-researched proposal that would have given Curtis what he wanted. Unfortunately, by the end of the July when the proposal was slated to go to NTI, Suzanne Arden decided she wanted the proposal to fulfill a very different purpose … to sell the series to PBS ... even though PBS had already agreed to air it.
Arden didn’t like what we had written. She didn’t think it made the issues “vivid” enough. It was “too academic.” It wasn’t exciting and it didn’t contain message points. Of course, it didn’t. We knew these were the things that would infuriate the serious academics at NTI and most of the people we intended to interview. I never heard from Robert Wussler what he thought of it, but Tim Rockwood told me that Wussler had called him and said he threw the proposals in the trash.
Arden brought in Paula Hunker, a publicity writer, as a freelance assistant. More unnecessary money out of pocket. Paula and I took at crack at writing a new proposal, but Arden remained unhappy with all our versions. By this time the television segments were in full production and I had teams videotaping all over the world, but Arden’s priority remained the proposal. At her request, I started interviewing new proposal writers. Three weeks later, we’d settled on Michael Olmert a first rate professional writer recommended by WETA. Olmert started writing drafts. And more drafts. Olmert, Hunker and I wrote drafts together. Finally, in early October, I told Arden and Wussler that I had to stop working on proposals. The television documentaries required my full attention.
Arden, Hunker and Olmert continued on their own. My producer’s were appalled by the direction the writing was taking. “If the people I’m interviewing read that, they’d refuse to be on the series,” one producer told me.
On October 7th, WETA executive Jeff Bieber wrote me regarding Arden’s version: “The exec. Summary is bookended with hype and exaggeration. … Suzanne and Paula have been trying to frame the series as one that could "change the world,”.... Of course this is bunk and should be changed but again, Tim is right in that it plays into Suzanne's and Paula's PR for the series. … Explain to Suzanne, Paula and Robert why the documents need to be tweaked so that the team is not setting itself up for parody.”
Wussler gave a copy of that draft to NTI’s Charlie Curtis. Of course, NTI was appalled. We were called before a special meeting with the NTI team and read the riot act by one of the chairman, Senator Sam Nunn. I had interviewed Nunn in the past, and although his criticism was expected it was a humiliation. With huge embarrassment and the evil eye of Robert Wussler, we repudiated the entire document. I don’t believe any proposal was ever finished. Dewey Blanton was still working on a version on January 16th of 2003 when I was fired.
My second meeting with Ted Turner took place at a PBS conference in San Francisco. I arrived on the afternoon before our presentation with the finished PBS trailer in hand. As I was checking into the San Francisco Hilton, Wussler called me on my cell phone. “Turner hates the promo. We’re not running it,” Wussler announced. I was stunned. We had completely reworked and solved the audio problems.
I checked into my room, had a quick martini and then called Wussler back.“You’ve got to look at it before you decide,” I argued. I had the hotel set up a VCR machine in Arden’s hotel room, and Wussler watched the promo carefully. He asked us to play it again. And then a third time without making a comment, inscrutable as always. “It’s very good. You’ve made a lot of changes. I think Ted will like it and we’re going to run it.”
Actually, I’d simply finished the piece with a solid sound mix and trimmed a couple of shots. Otherwise, it was identical to the trailer that Turner had seen earlier at Time Warner. PBS loved the trailer and Turner congratulated me.
It was a victory for all of us, but it was short lived.
The Inquisition
To get a show on PBS, you need a public television station to “present” it to the network. Wussler chose WETA, and as soon as they got involved, the pervasive atmosphere of dysfunctional infighting became one of venomous intrigue. We didn’t have to become involved with WETA. Any number of public television stations would have been delighted to represent what everyone expected to be Ted Turner’s first of many television series. But Wussler wanted the Washington station as a partner.
While negotiations with WETA were going on, several colleagues warned me to avoid WETA like the plague. They said WETA would try to take over the project for their own ends. But the WETA team put on a good show and many of them were top professionals.
We began to screen segments in October, and soon these lengthy sessions became one of the most bizarre aspects of the entire project. The review team consisted of Robert Wussler, Suzanne Arden, Jeff Bieber, Paula Hunker, Michael Olmert, Marty Schram, Tim Rockwood and the production team whose program was up for review.
The setting was a small, dark room with low ceilings, no windows and an air conditioning problem in downtown Washington. It was the modern equivalent of a dungeon in the Vatican during the inquisition. In fact, the editorial sessions resembled the inquisition in their pedantry, conformity to authority and air of threatening malice. I was Galileo before the Grand Inquisitor and his eager sycophants.
A huge, blond wood conference table dominated the room, leaving scant space for wooden chairs and walls lined with storage cabinets and shelving. At one end of the table, a giant television screen and sound system.
We gathered at 8:15 or so in the morning around the table, drinking coffee and munching on bagels, cream cheese and Danish pastries. Wussler would arrive after we had assembled and take his place at the head of the table, impeccably dressed as always. In a soft, measured voice that gave a judicial atmosphere to the proceedings, he would pull the wings off one of his senior lieutenants and warn us in dire tones that we had an enormous amount to do and little time to do it in. These pep talks put everyone on edge and meetings usually began on a tense or smug downer, depending on which side the person trashed was on, me and production teams or the suits.
It was not a room full of people sharing a common production goal. The production team and I all sat on one side of the table, at Robert’s right. Suzanne took the seat across from me, at Robert’s left. Everyone else not part of the production team, sat next to Suzanne in a strict order of importance. Jeff Bieber sat next to her, generally a cautious voice and for the first few months rarely unreasonable, steady like a good poker player.
Marty Schram usually sat next to Jeff, largely in support of the producers, but frequently critical enough to be unreliable. Tim jockeyed with Marty for third place and worked hard to cover his ass when criticized. Paula Hunker was fourth, but she had little to say unless asked and then tread a careful line that was loyal to Suzanne. Michael Olmert sat next to her through most of October and well into November, until his general support for the efforts of my production teams got him into trouble and he was fired for liking the shows too much.
Evaluating works in progress is of the essence of our craft. All good producers want input from people outside of the project they’re working on. Are you confused? Can you follow the story line? Have we provided convincing evidence for our assertions? Are the pictures telling a story? Is the narration clear? It’s not criticism that made these sessions so discouraging.
It was the deadening tone of constant, corrosive carping over the editorial points that drained energy out of the room like some science fiction neurological magnet. Comments were not made to improve the shows, but to weaken the power of the production team, edging toward what would eventually become a WETA takeover. By early December, it was clear that Arden and Bieber had an agenda. As for Wussler, he enjoyed the constant play of power in the room and supported whichever side seemed weaker at the time.
At the mid day break, we rushed from each other’s presence to make urgent telephone calls, then reassembled for a catered lunch of sandwiches, sliced vegetables, and uncomfortable small talk. Fifteen people trapped underground in a small conference room with intermittent air conditioners, Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit, where hell is other people.
Arden led the attack, but she was uninformed about the issues and easy to tie into intellectual knots. She broke down in tears of frustration after a heated discussion about whether or not we needed to explain why one gunman was a “terrorist” while another gunman was a “freedom fighter.” “A terrorist is someone who wants to kill me and my family. That’s all I have to know,” Arden exploded, red in the face, voice choking. “I know you think I’m stupid, but I’m not.” I had made a real enemy and should have seen the handwriting on the wall.
The sessions went on well into the evening. At the end of each one, Wussler would announce his verdict, like a magistrate ruling on competing legal arguments or a judge awarding debating points. In every editorial meeting we had, Wussler endorsed the direction my production teams were taking. His one complaint: trim the pieces more to cut their lengths. We were winning battles but losing the war, it turned out.
Not Bill Moyers
The first two completed shows went to Ted Turner in October. Wussler reported that Ted Turner loved what he saw. PBS however did not. Pat Mitchell also got a set of segments in October. Wussler told me that she didn’t like what she saw. I never got any specific notes from, but Wussler said Pat wanted a much more domestic and less international show. So much for Ted Turner’s request to be “international, international, international.”
I didn’t take Pat’s comments too seriously. She had been our senior executive at Turner Broadcasting when we produced People Count. She didn’t like that show either until it won an Environmental Media Award.
PBS hired Pat in 2000, apparently wanting to get someone outside of the Public Broadcasting tent. A few weeks before she took the job, I bumped into her at a Hilton Head Renaissance Weekend where we both appeared on some of the same panels. I congratulated her on her appointment and urged her to hire assistants who knew the public television system from the inside. It was an arcane, somewhat mysterious organization that could be hostile to outsiders. The traditional skills of the corporate world might not work.
I had been to several PBS conferences in the mid eighties, when I produced Hodding Carter’s series on the press, Inside Story. The atmosphere at those conferences was almost academic, a group of college administrators mixing with their brighter, more creative students. A speech was a talk among colleagues. Pat’s performance in the 2002 PBS annual convention was from a commercial universe of coiffed hair, camera makeup, dramatic lighting and a wireless mike that allowed her prowl the stage like a rock star. All the rehearsed enthusiasms seemed sad to me, as if Public Television were simply another Wal-Mart pitch for a new store.
Pat became PBS’s chief executive when the right-wing attack on Public Broadcasting, which had continued since its inception, reached a new high under the Bush administration. She apparently wanted to mollify their attacks by moving PBS to the right. Her second in command, Coby Atlas, warned me at the convention, “We don’t want another Bill Moyers." Moyers, Lyndon Johnson’s former press secretary and a long-time PBS broadcaster has been called “the conscience of journalism,” but he was a lightning rod for neo-conservative attacks at PBS.
I didn’t take Coby or Pat’s comment that seriously because Ted Turner was paying for the series. He liked what we were saying. I expected his full support.
We had no indication that our editorial positions were in any serious trouble until the very end. As late as December 30th, 2002, Jeff Bieber emailed me as follows: “I screened the 4th show. It was very good. Although the pieces were a bit long (knowing it is a rough cut) they were the best written segments ... perhaps not as gripping vis a vis dramatic storylines, but quite coherent and well thought out.”
Marty Schram emailed me on January 5th, 2003, “Yes! This Homeland Security piece will do exactly what we need it to do for the show. It’s amazing that this so closely parallels what I’d written as a way of opening the Book’s 4th section. Complete with Nunn’s quote and Tenet’s. This makes it clear from the outset that our fourth show is part of the series – and as we build to the more cerebral connections with the rest of the pieces, it will be clear that they flow, one from the other – and that our fourth show is a grand finale that flows from the first three.”
I had my third and final meeting with Ted Turner on January 14th. I was interviewing him for the Avoiding Armageddon Senator Sam Nunn’s website, in his large office in a building he owns in downtown Atlanta. You can see the CNN logo out his window. Turner was in great form. He referred to the nuclear weapons that Russia and the US still have aimed at each other, on thirty second alert, as “rattlesnakes, under your dining room table, coiled up and ready to strike.”
Turner explained why he decided to put his money into the series. He said he wanted to make “an investment in the future of humanity. You know, my race, my family, and my friends. I love this planet and the birds and the animals. I mean, I want to see the environment preserved and I want to see the human race preserved. And I’d like to see everybody living decently in a more - on a more equitable, kind-hearted, thoughtful, generous world. That’s why I did it.”
If I had known I was about to be fired, I would have used my time with Ted Turner to ask him to specifically endorse the editorial direction of the series and to support the production team if we came under attack. I didn’t think it was necessary.
Blindsided
On Sunday afternoon, January 26, less than two weeks after Turner’s enthusiastic endorsement of the series, I received a very different kind of memo from Jeff Bieber. It was six pages of complaints about a show on Chemical and Biological weapons. “This is really a bunch of short segments … tied together by Cronkite. There’s not a over-arching storyline.” “Where are the writers … This is appalling.” “They need to get rid of all the oversimplifications, vague statement and unattributed opinon.” “Silly, meaningless writing about learning lessons from World War I.” “… the absence of appropriate experts/government officials is really alarming.”
On Tuesday, January 28th, a little after 11:00am, Robert Wussler walked into my office and said, “You’re though. You and your wife and Tom DeVries and Rick King. I want you out of here.” I told him he was making a colossal mistake, but Robert’s mind was made up. He never responded to an email I sent the next day urging him to reconsider. I emailed Charlie Curtis, the head of NTI (Nuclear Threat Initiative), but I never heard from anyone at NTI.
If I had seen the end coming, could I have acted more intelligently to ward off the attack? Did I play my cards wrong? The card playing analogy is a good one, because Jeff Bieber, the mid-level WETA manager who engineered the coup against us, once said after a particularly contentious editorial meeting, “I’d love to play poker with you sometime.” Maybe for him it was largely a game and no hard feelings. He seemed genuinely glad to see me when we bumped into each other later at a CPB meeting. Anyway, he certainly bluffed me out. I thought for a long time he was an ally.
On Thursday, January 30th, I called Dewey Blanton, a Public Affairs executive at WETA, and asked Dewey if anyone had worked out a statement to explain my being replaced. He said he had only heard about it the previous afternoon, and everyone was still in shock. Dewey asked if the firing could be explained as “editorial differences.”
A week later, I got back an approved statement from Dewey, which read, “Chris Koch made valuable contributions to this production, and we greatly appreciate his tireless work and the breadth and depth he brought to “Avoiding Armageddon.”As the production progressed, particularly in light of changing world events, we felt we needed to install a new team to bring the project to completion. Frank Sesno and Chris Guarino are respected news producers and journalists and we feel they can build on the strong foundation Chris Koch has provided to complete this major series for PBS.”
Guarano introduced himself to the remaining Avoiding Armageddon staff by announcing that he had brought Monica Lewinsky to CNN. He had never produced a long form documentary. Bieber and Guarano had previously collaborated on a show called Gridlock! – not the kind that ties up Washington politics but the kind that makes you late to Falls Church at rush hour. Guarano’s partner, Frank Cesno, has journalistic credentials, but nothing exceptional and nothing in public television. He went on to become a minor PBS star.
Two hours after I was fired, I was still packing up my desk when Marlene Adler, Walter Cronkite’s personal assistant called me. Mr. Cronkite wanted to speak to me. I explained that I’d been fired. Adler was shocked. “Walter wanted to tell you how much he liked the scripts. He didn’t even feel the need to have his own editorial review.”
Loosing the series six weeks before delivery was like a death, or as one of my women producers said, “a late term miscarriage.” I wrote to Ted, but he never answered me. In fact, in what felt like a free fall from a high cliff, my phone stopped ringing entirely. I went from thirty emails a day to absolutely none. After an immediate flurry of concern from a few close friends, nobody else contacted me. I was “Out-of-Power” … a communicable disease in our nation’s capitol … I had to be avoided like the plague.
I wrote a press release, but unlike my days at Pacifica, I did not have the support and contacts to mount a battle in the press. I had a divisive staff in a power-hungry town of people without many ideals left. I called Current, the public broadcasting magazine. There was no interest. I did one short radio interview criticizing the editorial changes in the scripts and received a “cease and desist” letter from Ted Turner’s lawyer threatening dire consequences if I persisted in what the letter called “product disparagement.” The “product,” which was owned by Turner under the work-for-hire rule, was the series we had given our heart and energy to produce.
The lawyers for “Mouth of the South” were telling me to shut up.
A castrated version of Avoiding Armageddon was finally broadcast. I watched two shows, and it was like seeing an old friend after a frontal lobotomy. The pictures were the same, but the heart and intellect were gone.
PBS rewrote the shows with an agenda. Three fundamental ideas were cut or curtailed: 1) People and nations must be accountable for their actions. 2) America needs an informed and engaged citizenry. 3) Solutions are complex but understandable and they must be international. These are not “liberal” or “conservation” ideas. They are basic values. If anyone tells you differently or fails to support them or consistently violates them, hold onto your wallet.
In the final show, PBS boiled the whole series down to one simplistic, reassuring solution. “If we had to choose one word or phrase that best sums up all of our efforts to stem the threats of nuclear weapons, of chemical and biological agents, of all forms of terrorism, it would probably be: ‘Homeland Security.’”
I’m surprised Walter Cronkite agreed to read that turgid line of government propaganda.