What Was Lost
What PBS edited out of our version of Avoiding Armageddon demonstrates the interplay between events in the real world and what journalists are able to say. We were screening segments of Avoiding Armageddon in the Fall of 2002. Bush was preparing his attack on Iraq. The administration claimed Iraq possessed and was manufacturing weapons of mass destruction and continued to support terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, which coordinated the the 9/11 attacks against the United States.
Media support for the invasion was important to the administration, and they got it. The vast majority of news stories were pro-war. By one count, only 10% of the stories were at all critical. Pat Mitchell visited the White House over Christmas. It would have been strange if Avoiding Armageddon with its direct contradiction of the Bush administration claims did not up. Of course we don’t know, and that’s how censorship works out of the public light.
Keep in mind, social media was not a phenomenon in 2002. We all had dial up modems and connected through AOL. Our only sources of news were the networks, cable news shows, daily newspapers and weekly or monthly magazines. Given the news coverage, it isn’t surprising that 72% of Americans supported the war and 9 out of 10 Americans believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. A sizable majority thought that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attacks on 9/11. Patriotism crackled in the air like the flags everyone put up on their cars. Congress passed a war resolution by a huge majority.
Our Western allies were not so sure. The UN passed Resolution 1441 on November 8th requiring Iraq to readmit inspectors and comply with previous resolutions. Iraq appeared willing to do so and our European allies urged Bush to wait.
We looked closely at the government’s case, and the claims were ridiculous (as they later proved to be). Colin Powel has called his repeating these dubious claims before the UN in February of 2003 the most humiliating experience of his life. It is remarkable example of group think that only a few marginal publications doubted the administration’s case.
It was not only our reluctance to accept the governments case for war. A great deal of what we were saying in Avoiding Armageddon did not fit America’s war mood when people are unlikely to be reflective or compassionate. Americans felt under attack.
PBS dropped the idea that people and nations must be accountable for their actions.
Americans were confused. We still are. “Why do they hate us? Some people believed that it was simply envy of our material prosperity and freedom of behavior. In Avoiding Armageddon, we tried to show that it’s anger with US government policies. Too often, the United States has reacted to international situations with violence followed by neglect while our multinational corporations have been largely indifferent to local concerns.
PBS dropped anything that held the United States responsible. For example, we pointed out that Iranians (and many others!) still remember the 1953 CIA coup that replaced Mohammed Mossadegh, a progressive nationalist who had been elected, with an American picked shah who instigated a brutal regime based on fear and torture. It’s worth noting that a coup against Iran had been debated and rejected by the Truman administration and only reluctantly agreed to by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The CIA station chief in Tehran advised against it, predicting decades of anti-Americanism. Twenty-six years later Iranians threw the Shah out, but they didn’t attack our embassy. It was only after President Carter gave the Shah what amounted to asylum in the United States and refused to send the shah back to Iran to stand trial, that Iranian students seized our embassy staff as hostages.
You wouldn’t know any of that from watching the PBS version of Avoiding Armageddon. They began, out of context, with angry, seemingly irrational Iranian students parading helpless Americans through the streets. It made your blood boil and your mind turn off, just as blatantly as FOX News..
PBS minimized the fact that the United States supported Saddam Hussein and Iraq during its war with Iran. It dropped any mention of US companies providing Iraq with the chemicals and logistic support to manufacture and use them.
PBS cut out any American responsibility for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, ignoring the fact that President Jimmy Carter authorized the CIA to funnel support to the anti-Soviet mujahedeen six months before the Soviet invasion with the specific intention of giving the Soviets their own Vietnam.
PBS ignored the US share of responsibility for India and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, leaving out the atoms for peace program that India exploited along with our willingness to look the other way when Pakistan developed nuclear weapons. They were allies against the Soviets. PBS didn’t mention that we give unconditional support to Israel, ignoring Israel’s "secret" nuclear arsenal.
PBS cut out Jimmy Carter pointing out that the United States is at the bottom of foreign aid giving. “Every time an American through our government gives a dollar, a Norwegian gives $17. All the Europeans on average, give $4.” PBS didn’t want Americans to stop thinking they were the most generous people in the world.
It cut out the Bush’s Administration plans to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons and US withdrawal from a host of international agreements. Most shockingly, from Ted Turner’s perspective I would think, PBS cut out references to former American officials who were once involved with controlling nuclear weapons and who now think we should give them up … Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary under John F. Kennedy, General Lee Butler, the last commander of the Strategic Air Command, and Paul Nitze an architect of the Cold War.
PBS cut or downplayed the idea that America needs an informed and engaged citizenry.PBS cut out many scenes and sound bites that encouraged or demonstrated citizen involvement. There was no mention of any anti-nuclear citizens movement, including SANE. Comments by Bertrand Russell and Joseph Rotblat were cut from the final version.
PBS dropped any mention of the deliberate contamination of civilians and soldiers in USA and Russia during the early phase of nuclear testing and the citizen outrage that stopped the process. They dropped mention of the large number of bombs tested and citizen’s reaction, which lead to one of the largest and most successful citizen protest movements in our history, Women’s Strike for Peace.
PBS ignored citizen concerns about the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to terrorism and leakage or failure. They didn’t mention American problems cleaning up nuclear Waste. They didn’t mention President’s Truman's fear of WWIII in Korea. They dropped comments on the effects of nuclear war on civilians.
They cut out all but one comment by local citizens of Anniston, Alabama who were concerned about the effects of incinerating chemical waste in their hometown. They didn’t like the scene of an Israeli family where gas masks had become part of their everyday life. They dropped the veterans of the first Gulf War who had been exposed to dangerous chemicals.
They dropped the idea that solutions are complex but understandable and they must be international. In our cut of Avoiding Armageddon, we attributed the roots of terrorism to dysfunctional societies, where poverty, lack of opportunity, oppression and misery can lead ordinary people to strike back. One of our examples was a segment that had troubled Suzanne and Bieber during our November screenings, but they couldn’t really tell us why. It was the story of a fifteen-year-old Palestinian who was torn between being an accountant like his father or a suicide bomber that his Imam encouraged. He had seen his brother killed by Israeli soldiers for throwing stones and he was bitter.
In our telling of the piece, viewers were taken inside that young man’s skin, and they saw the world around him through his own eyes. A typical response to our cut was, “oh my god, there but for the grace god go I.” Our story evoked compassion, and I knew that made Suzanne and Jeff nervous, but they couldn’t come right out and say it.
In their recut version, the story was broken up with sound bites and narration. Most of the original fragments were there, but the retelling distanced the viewer and made the kid at best “a case study.” The emotional involvement, the compassion, was gone. The underlying message of the PBS version was simply, “we better get that kid before he gets us.”
PBS attributed terrorism to a “clash of cultures” about which we can do little except fight back. PBS represented Islam by showing crazed fundamentalists in London. We sent a team to Iran where we found a much more complex society than our media portrayed, including underground musicians and dissidents. The Iran section was cut entirely by PBS.
We also did a story on Islamic fundamentalist in Northern Nigeria. They had rescued people from anarchy, even if the price was a harsh civil code called sharia. Islamic fundamentalists were fulfilling real needs to gain people’s support. In grateful thanks, many parents in these remote villages, with access to the Internet and satellite television, named their children Osama after Osama bin Laden. This was also something PBS didn’t want a public television audience to see and they cut the entire segment.
We brought these complex themes together in Kashmir, where unresolved social issues and Islamic fundamentalism have kept two nuclear-armed nations at war for twenty years. All of this complexity was cut from the PBS broadcast.
What else. PBS cut minority leader of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi’s criticism of the Patriot Act. They ignore entirely the under-funding of homeland security and the bungled intelligence that led to 9/11.
PBS cut out all references to the Joint Congressional Intelligence hearings that focused on 9/11 including critical questioning by Republican and Democratic Senators on the failure of US intelligence. It also cut out references to the Hart/Rudman reports – that predicted a major terrorist attack on our soil in January of 2001 but was largely ignored by the Bush Administration until 9/11. It ignored a follow-up report that highlighted our continued vulnerability.
A WETA executive told the staff at one point that all he wanted to know was “how can I keep my family safe?” Perhaps that is the root of the problem – a failure to recognize that we need to be concerned about families all over the world. Until we do so, none of us will be safe.
I was working on our final on-camera narration for Walter Cronkite the morning I was fired.
“In regions where people have enough, the center holds, and misfits and terrorists, psychopaths and murderous idealists, are marginalized. They appear in every society, and they may kill a few or bomb this or that building, bring down an airplane full of innocents, but their friends, colleagues and family soon turn the killers in to the authorities because most of the people around them have a stake in a functioning society. We need to give all the people of the world a stake, not out of altruism but out of national security."
Wow! How radical can you get!
Lessons Learned
Avoiding Armageddon became a crusade for me after 9/11 when our family lost my brother’s stepdaughter, her husband and two children on American flight 77. The crusade ended when I was fired. I’d lost my first job in broadcasting for telling the truth about the war in Vietnam. Those broadcasts hadn’t changed anything. The war dragged on for another ten years. I lost my last job in broadcasting almost thirty years later when I tried to tell the truth about a coming war in Iraq.
It’s little consolation that I was right. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq and that everyone finally had to admit Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. No reporter, editor or publisher lost a job for being wrong. The New York Times did eventually apologize for its mistake. No government official lost a job. It was those of us who broadcast the truth or who blew a whistle who lost our jobs.
There were other losers. Ted Turner, his vision and $9.7 million spent trying to get it on the screen. The audience, of course, but who cared about them? That’s the saddest thing for me. Suzanne Arden, Robert Wussler, Jeff Bieber and WETA, Pat Mitchell, and PBS, none of them really cared about the quality of the reporting, the sharpness of the writing, the craft behind the story telling and the provocative ideas that we thought Americans needed to hear. They never even thought about that stuff. They just wanted something conventional that comforted people in power and wouldn’t create any problems for PBS. “We don't want another Bill Moyers,” Coby Atlas had warned me. Of course, it’s impossible to tell the truth without angering the powerful.
It was hard not be bitter. Then my brother told me that although terrorists murdered his whole family, he wouldn’t let them also kill him with bitterness and anger.
My brother and his wife became activists again, both politically and in small but very meaningful ways -- working here in the U.S. with young kids to teach them to read, providing micro-credit to families in developing nations, helping to start a midwifery clinic in Afghanistan and protesting the war with Iraq. They had become disengaged while their grandchildren were growing up. After the kids were killed, they returned to working for a world in which everyone has a future.
Marty Schram ended the companion book to the Avoiding Armageddon series with my brother and his family’s story and that final, healing sentiment. Unfortunately, those thoughts were not considered appropriate for a public broadcasting audience.
Most people missed the series entirely. Ratings were poor and press reviews were polite at best. A couple of friends called to say they saw one of the shows, but they didn’t even notice that our names were not on the credit list. (I insisted they be taken off.)
When I talked with the few people who saw the series (or parts of it) they told me they didn’t think they were that bad. The awkward bridges, the confused order, the broken stories, the easy generalizations, and the deplorable discussions that followed didn’t bother them. Expectations for the quality of PBS documentaries were depressingly low. I was struck by how irrelevant PBS had become in the lives of my friends.
A Tuscan retreat
My broadcasting career was over. I loved the craft, but I hated the business. I wasn’t sure what to do next. The bitterness of defeat lingered, and I sunk into a kind of desolate bog. Idanna Pucci, who worked with me on several documentaries we filmed in Italy, invited me to join her and her husband, Terence Ward. They were home-sitting an ancient farmhouse and promised to help me recover.
Idanna and Terence are writers and filmmakers, with a worldwide network of friends who are working for social justice. “Like the old “movement” of the sixties?” I asked. “We call it, ‘The Organization,’” Idanna replied. It sounded very Italian.
Both Terence and Idanna have paid their dues, lived through their own nightmares, and survived, so I knew they would provide a sympathetic shoulder. Terence is a red headed Irishman who grew up in Iran with a progressive mother and father and three brothers. Idanna is a scion of one of the oldest families of Florence, once close to the Medici. Her uncle was the fashion designer, Emilio Pucci.
They picked me up at the airport in their tiny Toyota, well suited to the narrow, twisting Italian roads. It looked like a toy on the outside but sat four comfortably with their luggage inside and it got 38 miles to the gallon ... an important point for two committed ecologists in the early Twenty-first Century.
The Tuscan roads became narrower as we climbed into the hills. Terence turned between two stone posts, down a dirt trail out along a narrow ridge. We passed a farmhouse, where we would get our eggs, milk and fresh mozzarella. The ground fell away precipitously on both sides of the road. A deer ran in front of the car followed by a wary buck. Idanna told me this was wild boar country.
The four-hundred-year-old farmhouse in the remote hills of Tuscany was a rambling set of stone rooms with massive ceilings amidst olive trees, pears, and peaches, overlooking a quiet valley. The summer sun beat down mercilessly in the worst drought northern Italy has known in thirty years, but the massive stonewalls and thick cast tile roof kept the rooms cool during the heat of a baking August afternoon. This house was built to last forever.
At dusk, we sat outside, eating tomatoes and basil from the garden, with home pressed olive oil and fresh mozzarella. Friends of Idanna and Terence had brought a bottle of Chianti. The Tuscan air was still and moist. It felt like rain. Lavender and rosemary set out in pots against the house were redolent in the heavy atmosphere. Cicadas drilled the evening air. Bats came and went.
Idanna’s guests reminded me that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were symbols of America’s commercial and military power. Didn’t Americans bear some responsibility for the outbreak of terrorism against them? That had been a prominent theme in our version of Avoiding Armageddon, one that my generation learned in childhood. “Take responsibility for what happens to you. It’s the only way you can make things better. Be accountable for your actions.” We all knew that General Eisenhower had carried a penciled note in his pocket as the invasion of Normandy was launched. It said simply that he took full responsibility for the invasion’s failure. This basic human lesson, one imbedded in every self-help program, was not what PBS wanted its viewers to think about. Accountability was a touchy subject among Americans after 9/11.
The conversation switched to Italian, an intense discussion of the attempt by multinational corporations to control rural water in India. I tried to follow. Fresh water may well become the world’s most precious resource. Unlike petroleum, which makes life easier, water is an essential to make life possible. The corporations that control water where the supply is limited stand to make a killing.
A few days later, we headed into nearby Regello to shop for food. Everything in Italy closed between 1:00 pm and 5:00 pm, so we left early. On a sharp curve around the spur of a mountain, we passed the large workshop of a local stone carver. Idanna and Terrence were looking for counter tops for their new kitchen in Florence and they stopped to investigate. I discovered a bas-relief of Dante and Beatrice. The poet looked heavenward in anxious expectation of some kind of understanding while Beatrice looks straight ahead with weary patience.
As Idanna and Terence chatted about the proper marble for their kitchen, the artisano kept glancing over at me. I was clearly a foreigner. Idanna explained that I was an America. Raul Sottili, the stone carver, looked directly at me. "We like the liberal Americans, but we don’t want the Bush Americans.” Raul didn’t give a damn what I was. He wanted me to know who he was, and he launched into an informed discussion of the pitfalls of the war in Iraq, the dangers of American hegemony and the connivance of Bush’s Italian clone, Prime Minister Silvio Berluscone.
Looking back at the post World War II history of Europe, Raul said, Italians made a huge mistake. They identified with the policies of the Soviet Union. "We should have aligned ourselves with American liberals," he explained. "With such a coalition between a European left and an American liberal we might not be in the trouble we are in today."
Raul was born in 1935. He was my age and remembered the war when his father had been mayor of Regello. Partisans crept into town at night to see their families. "They told my father, ‘When this is over, we must start the revolution.’ But my father said, ‘what revolution, we are too hungry to fight. Forget the revolution, we have to get food first.’” The Sotilli’s were pragmatic.
One thing led to another. We were soon inside the Sotilli’s home. His wife, Giammaria, apologized for the state of their living room. "I am ironing, sewing and watching these idiots," she said, pointing to a panel of politicians on television discussing Italy’s future. She wasn’t watching a soap opera, Oprah, a reality show, news experts or a news digest. She was watching the political discussions themselves. Think C-Span.
Idanna told them the story of my firing. They listened intently. Idanna explained that I lost family members on 9/11 … the largest American family killed that day. None of what Idanna said came as much of a surprise to Raul or Giammaria who replied, “My grandmother said that hardships should be welcomed, like inoculations against deadly diseases. ‘Whatever you’re going through,’ my grandmother always said, ‘You can be sure that there’s worse to come.’" And she and her husband burst into laughter.
"You have to laugh," Giammaria explained. "That’s the only way you can get the bastards. If your enemies see you laughing, you’ve shown them that they haven’t defeated you no matter what has happened." She brought out a rare bottle of chilled white wine, and poured out glasses all around. "Here. Drink up! My husband and I, we just go dancing." As we finally left, Giammaria reminded us, "When you come back again to visit, we’ll all go dancing together. That’ll show the bastards."