|
|
| |||||||||||||||||
 | |||||||||||||||||
 |
 "There's a major difference between 'All The President's Men' and 'The
Insider,'" Lowell Bergman has said of the comparison between the 1976 film on
Watergate and Hollywood's new version of the events depicted in FRONTLINE'S
report, "Smoke in the Eye." "In 'All the President's Men,' the editors and
reporters are heroes. That's not the case here." What is the case, Bergman believes, is that "60 Minutes," one of America's most venerated news programs, made an epic mistake in not airing an exclusive interview with tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand until the substance of Wigand's claims had already been made public by others. Bergman speaks of his "astonishment" and "disillusion," but he stops short of branding it a "betrayal." The same cannot be said of "60 Minutes" correspondent Mike Wallace and executive producer Don Hewitt, who have not hesitated to use the word--and others less kind--when asked about Bergman's own decision to go public with his version of the matter. For months leading up to the November 5, 1999 release of Hollywood's "The Insider" (in which Bergman is portrayed by Al Pacino), Wallace and Hewitt railed against Bergman as a self-promoting traitor to the news division who began work on his "Hollywood revenge" even before leaving "60 Minutes." They called the film an inaccurate record of events and an unfair characterization of their respective positions on the decision not to air the Wigand interview. In an early review, Frank Rich of the New York Times agreed that "'The Insider' fudges chronology and makes Mr. Pacino's Bergman into a superman that even the real-life prototype finds a bit 'too neat.'" But, Rich continued, as Hollywood history lessons go, "It is no more fictionalized than was 'All the President's Men,' or, for that matter, 'Schindler's List.'" On this last point, Bergman, who was interviewed for FRONTLINE's "Smoke in the Eye" (April, 1996) and co-produced FRONTLINE'S "Inside the Tobacco Deal" (May, 1998), largely agreed: "It's not a documentary," he told Time magazine. "It's more of a historical novel."
The original "60 Minutes" story was stopped in mid-stride. It wasn't done. We
were still reporting it. Now, that was extremely important to me in terms of
the meaning of what was going on. And it's not explained in the movie. That's
a little too complicated, I guess, for Hollywood. I tried to keep pushing, but
it didn't get in. From a journalism point of view, it's extremely important
because, in the cases of ABC/Philip Morris or other related matters, it's
usually a question of the story gets on the air and then there's a lawsuit or
something happens and that results in whatever is going on. In this case, it
was really pre-censorship. This was self-censorship. There was no
lawsuit pending from Brown and Williamson. As far as we knew, there was no
communication from Brown and Williamson to CBS about the matter.
Yeah, the rules got changed in the sense that. . . Let's put it this way:
There was no rule that said that if someone had a confidentiality agreement you
shouldn't try to get them to talk. The rule was that, if what they have to say
is newsworthy, then it's fine. And, in fact, the general counsel [Ellen Kaden]
said, when asked, Well what does this mean about FBI agents who have
confidentiality agreements? Is it illegal for them to talk to us about 6E
material, or potentially illegal, if they talk to us about investigative
information? Or a CIA guy? Or anybody like that. And her response is,
"That's fine, you can do that." So there's no question that it was fair game
to use confidential information from the government. But the new rule was:
Don't use confidential information if it comes from the inner-workings of a
Fortune 500 company, where the source has signed a confidentiality agreement.
And don't try to get the person to talk, because that will be seen as "tortious
interference" with their contract.
The meeting I went to at Black Rock [on September 6, 1995] was the first
time anybody ever mentioned the words tortious interference to me. It was
explained in more detail at a subsequent meeting with the general counsel.
No, no. At the time, I wrote a memo about a week after the final decision came
down to kill the story. The memo said, So is this the new rule: that no one
in the newsroom is supposed to gather information when somebody has a
confidentiality agreement, particularly with a large corporation? And I never
really got a formal answer to the question other than, "Oh no no, this is one
case. This is a special case." How do you know if it's a special case or not?
The reality is that, with the exception of an article in the Wall Street
Journal no publication, either legal journal or anything else I've seen has
ever taken the notion seriously. In fact, there have been a series of law
journal articles that said this was ridiculous. . . It was explained at one
point that, in fact, if Wigand had told us information that was untrue -- let's
say he fabricated everything he said on camera--there would have been no
tortious interference. So the truer the story the greater the damages. I
think I said in "Smoke in the Eye," this was a psychedelic experience, you
know?
The problem isn't so much the conduct of the lawyers coming up with warnings or
new concepts. The question is what is management's reaction to that? . . . So
at the end of the process, when the general counsel delivered her final opinion
[not to air the Wigand interview], which was October 2nd of 1995 -- at that
point, we had no indication from an executive at CBS that this was the
decision. And I called [Eric Ober], the then President of CBS News, the next
morning and I said, You never said anything at the meetings. What's the
position of the company on this? That's when he said to me, "The corporation
would not risk its assets on this story."
Initially, when the word came that we had to go meet with the general counsel,
I prepared a script that was very rough-- sound bites with sort of rough
narration in between--of what the Wigand interview that we had already done
might look like as a piece. That was for the meeting on the 12th of September.
Then, after that, towards the end of September, as we were awaiting this
so-called second opinion from an outside counsel, which we all assumed was
going to just confirm what the general counsel said, I prepared a rough
assembly on videotape and showed that to Hewitt, Ober, and Wallace. So they
knew what we were killing. I didn't want any ambiguities here about what was
in the works.
Hewitt jumped up and down and said, "Pulitzer Prize." In fact, he was
prescient: When the Wall Street Journal ran some of the material on its
front page, they got the Pulitzer Prize. But they didn't run it until the
middle of October, at which point Wigand was free to talk to whomever he wanted
to.
In that same issue--in the back pages--was a report based on an
SEC filing
by CBS News Inc. that indicated that Ellen Kaden, the general counsel, was
going to get some portion of $8.7 million on the completion of the [CBS merger
with Westinghouse]. And then an examination of the actual document revealed
that the president of the News Division was to get $1.2 million in stock
options that he would have to cash in. . . When you have an attorney giving you
advice, it would be nice to know what their financial relationship is to the
advice.
No, Larry Tisch says he wasn't involved at all. But I'm not an idiot either. In court, there's a difference between hard evidence and circumstantial evidence. There is no hard evidence that the money involved in the merger, in some way or another, made people come up with the idea of tortious interference as a way to stop this story. On the other hand, there is a whole series of circumstances which, I think (a) should have been reported by "60 Minutes" in that November [12th of 1995] broadcast, which is, How much money were people going to make? I mean, in the SEC filing the actual chapter is called "Persons who will profit from this merger" and it lists Kaden and Ober. Now we don't know what other people had--if they weren't corporate officers of some kind, then they don't have to report it. So Hewitt's an employee, for instance, so you don't have to report what he might make. But, it was clearly a lot of money at stake at this time.
The subject of the merger was brought up at my very first meeting at Black
Rock. . . We didn't know at the time that Brown and Williamson Tobacco was in
the midst of selling $35 million worth of cigarette brands to Lorillard
Tobacco, a wholly-owned, privately-owned subsidiary of Loews Corporation owned
by the Tisch family. . . But we did know that Jeffrey Wigand was to be
interviewed by the Department of Justice as part of a criminal investigation of
potential perjury on the part of the seven tobacco CEO's. One of those CEO's
was Andrew Tisch, president of Lorillard. . . In the news business, the best
way to deal with those kinds of conflicts is to lay them all out on the
table.
That wasn't done. And, specifically, what wasn't done was the Monday before
the censored version of the story ran, information about the financial
interactions here was in the studio introduction of the original piece. And,
after a meeting on Monday, it was agreed, apparently by Mike Wallace and Don
Hewitt and Eric Ober--after a heated meeting that I was in--that they were
going to take it all out.
I wouldn't call it betrayal. I would say that it was astonishment on my part.
After the September 12th meeting, I thought I had an understanding with Mike
Wallace in that meeting that I would be sort of the fact person and he would
get up, if you will, and jump up on the table--which he's good at. He's been
doing it a lot in the press recently. And he didn't do it. He raised a
question about the merger and that was it. And then she [Kaden] denied it and
then we went on. And Hewitt didn't jump on the table. . . Here's some guys who
are--and Cronkite says this in "Smoke in the Eye"--here's some guys who
are in their seventies, have had the most successful careers in the television
news business in the history of the United States, they're multi-
multi-millionaires. They like to get on TV and say they'll do any story that
comes along they think is true. They think the story is true, they think the
story is worthwhile, and they're just not doing anything. They're sort of
saying, "Oh, we'll wait for the next opinion." Well, it was clear the next
opinion was going to be, "Forget it."
That's malarkey. These guys, all they had to do--it may not have been
successful, but, to satisfy me, at least--I expected them to raise some hell
and maybe threaten to go public. . . From the beginning, Mike made it clear
that [he wasn't going to resign over this] and that meant from the beginning
that we had no bargaining chip. . . The story did not run here in the end until
it was all published basically in the Wall Street Journal. There was
never any risk taken. They decided to go with a censored version because they
knew that the story was coming out one way or another. "So, let's get ahead of
the curve and talk about how we've been censored by the general, you know, the
corporation." I told them I wasn't interested in that kind of story. They
said, "Okay, Phil Scheffler," meaning the senior producer, "will write the
script." He tried. He failed. They came back to me and said, "Okay are you
going to do it?" At that point, Wigand was tied up with Scruggs and it looked
like he might be testifying. So, I thought, we might actually be able to run
the story if he testified. That didn't happen and, on top of that, they pulled
out all references to financial, if you will, remuneration for people involved
in the decision-making process. That was the last straw for me.
No. My calculation, at the time, became: I could resign, as some of my
friends in print suggested, quietly, and walk out the door and forget about the
whole thing. I contemplated resigning and going on the front steps and holding
a press conference. But the problem there was that Wigand was still my
confidential source, if you will. So I could not reveal his name and, by doing
something like that, I would probably just get him in more trouble, and not be
able to help him. So my compromise position was that I'm going to stick around
here as long as I can and use their system to get this story out one way or
another. In the back of my mind, in terms of my self-interest, you have to
understand that, having been in the business for twenty years, that I know that
the producer is expendable, that, if they're going to blame anything on
anybody, it's going to be the producer. The correspondent is never wrong.
Mike Wallace is making that absolutely clear now, publicly.
If that's what he wants is a 48-hour mistake, then so be it. But it is a
mistake. The mistake is not to fight the company when it's doing something
that potentially is destroying not just privileges that you use to make a
living, but also when the company is cutting somebody loose for the wrong
reasons.
Number one, for me, at this moment, is that I had been involved in a process
over a year and a half of trying to convince [Wigand] that he should tell his
story in public, face on camera, not be a confidential source; that he should
get out there because a) the story needed to be told and b) that the story
would be more effective to tell it without any anonymity; that he should count
on us, at least, for a joint defense in a libel proceeding; and that, by airing
the story, once we had vetted it for truth, that that would provide [Wigand]
with a certain degree of insulation or protection. He wouldn't be an easy
target, an anonymous leaker somewhere that they can go after. And, to my
surprise, I'm ordered [by CBS counsel] not to have anymore contact with him.
At one point, I was ordered out of his house by the legal department. I was
told not to do anything that might indicate to Brown and Williamson that we
even knew him or were checking out any of the information that he may have
imparted to us. I was not to do anything to help him. So that was a personal
crisis for me that I don't think was shared by anybody else. No one else had
had that sort of real personal contact with the guy or his family.
I would probably not be in touch with Wigand today if all of this hadn't
happened. There's plenty of people I've dealt with on a single story who I'm
friendly with, but I don't have reason to interact with them. But this thing
has become a five-year saga.
[Wigand and I are] in synch, I think, at this point about the movie. . . As I
read ["The Insider"], it's basically about censorship. . . The fact is that
network television news is censored, mostly self-censored. And the networks
won't do a story about it. That's how bad it is. They'll deny it, when they
know it's true.
I'm not sure that it's new. It's always difficult with any publication or
broadcaster to take on a subject or an institution that is as big as you are,
or bigger, that has some commercial link, especially, to your organization.
It's always difficult. . . What has been adjudicated and established in the
wake of Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement is the ability of the press to
basically write or broadcast almost anything about the government. There's
very few restrictions in that way. It's not true when we're talking about
private power, especially major Fortune 500 corporations, or people worth more
than, say, a billion dollars.
But don't screw with General Electric. |
| |||||||||||||||
home | talk with lowell bergman | interviews | trail of the b&w documents | webumentary | readings | join the discussion synopsis | tapes & transcripts | links
New Content Copyright ©1999 PBS Online and WGBH/FRONTLINE | |||||||||||||||||
