MARC SHAFFER is an award-winning filmmaker whose documentary credits include numerous specials and series for PBS such as Frontline, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and California Connected. He began his career at CBS News, where he produced Nightwatch and 48 Hours. Shaffer's work has received many honors, including the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Community Service from the Society of Professional Journalists, the National Mental Health Association Media Award, the Cine Golden Eagle, a national Emmy nomination, and many others.

Shaffer has produced numerous films for Exposé, most recently the story of the journalists who exposed the bribes-for-contracts scheme that ultimately landed Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham in jail ("Quid Pro Quo"), and our third season premiere, "Mr. Heath Goes to Washington".

Read below about his experiences producing "Charity Begins at Home," "Friends in High Places," and "A Sea of Trouble".

What was your experience working with the The Oregonian reporting team on the "Charity Begins at Home" episode?

There were three reporters and a photographer. The three reporters who were brought together to work on the story don't normally work together -- Les Zaitz, Jeff Kosseff and Bryan Denson. As I understood ... it was Jeff's story, he's the one out of Washington who decided to start sniffing around this program and started coming up with questions and wrote some of the first stuff. Les Zaitz is the veteran investigative reporter who would bring experience and skills, especially into digging into financial backgrounds and finding information about [Bob Jones's] background and his history and his earlier businesses and lawsuits against him -- he was particularly good at that. And Bryan as I recall, definitely helped in El Paso, went to El Paso, helped with writing the thing up and giving it a voice. But he also did a lot of his own work painting the picture of the people who actually needed this money, that this program was designed for.

In the case of this one [disabled] guy that he found, he didn't even get into the program. It was almost comical that the guy said that they were told that their people were too disabled [laughs] for a program for the severely disabled. And you look at the things that are being directed into this program, and you have to wonder at the federal level if it's just well understood by the contractors that this is just a big fraud. That it's really being directed from the top. I mean severely disabled means these are people who, you know, might have severe Down syndrome or other severe physical or mental developmental problems. Are these people you would want making chemical warfare suits for the troops? No. This doesn't seem like an appropriate item for that population to be working on.

The [reporters] get all the credit in the world for figuring out that this program was terribly off-the-tracks, and they lucked out from a storyteller standpoint [because there was] a "bad guy" at the center of the piece, a really great villain to focus in on.

How did you handle the issue of the anonymous source in this episode?

In all of the stories, there were people who didn't want to talk on camera. In this case, there was a significant anonymous source who I did manage to track down ... I met him in a coffee shop in El Paso. I basically figured him out. The reporters refused to tell me who he was, but the other sources in the story who I began interviewing suggested that they thought they knew who the key source was that had not gone public and they gave me his name and phone number. And so I arranged a meeting with him thinking maybe we could interview him on camera. Maybe he was ready after the article [was published] to speak fully and openly. Possibly even do a shadow interview or something like this if it was appropriate. But he was completely ... you know, he was gracious. We met, he confirmed for me some of the things that appeared in the article, but he was completely not able or willing to participate in the TV story at all, and so we left him out.

What was it like working with such renowned investigative reporters like Donald Barlett and James Steele ("Friends in High Places"), and Eric Nalder ("A Sea of Trouble")?

I think print reporters, by nature, tell other people's stories and I think that there's a certain humility in that. Barlett and Steele, certainly, given their career accomplishments and their stature in the field, could be real haughty types, and they were not. They were very down to earth, very cooperative.

Investigative reporters have a kind of tenacity and a belief in themselves that they can find information out and Eric Nalder certainly had that belief in himself. He [has the] ability to, using his term, "hypnotize people," to release information, to get them to share things that they either don't want to or don't even consciously know.

. . . In the case of Barlett and Steele, they talked about being able to dismiss sources as really not as knowledgeable or as expert as they were reputed to be. [Investigative reporters] develop an independent command of the information that makes them very valuable figures. They're not just collecting perspectives or information from people who "know the story," they begin to know the story as well as, or better than, their own sources. In each case there was information that people didn't want them to know that they uncovered. Sometimes it was leaked, or began as a human leak -- something very simple like a phone call. That's how Eric Nalder's Seattle Post-Intelligencer piece began, with a phone call to a newspaper, a whistleblower prepared to share information. But even in that case, with Nalder, he took the information from Jim Legg and developed it well beyond what Legg was prepared to share.

What was your experience working on the "Friends in High Places" episode with Barlett and Steele?

This was a very challenging story for television. It was hard for a lot of reasons. One reason was the story did not involve a lot of process that I could observe ... They're old school: they read, they read, they read. And how much can you film somebody reading? Seriously. How often can you go back into a scene where you see a person on a computer screen reading a document from the federal government, or reading a lawsuit, or reading an annual report?

It was challenging because there was no human bad guy. It was similar [in that way] to "A Sea of Trouble." It wasn't some villain that you could hang your hat on. It was like analysis built with investigative techniques rather than what a lot of us think of as investigative work, which is sort of the "gotcha story" – get the bad guy, send him up the river. In fact, I asked them about the fact that so much of their work seems to be broad social analysis. And they said that early in their career they did a lot of work in which they sent people up the river and that's what investigative reporting was: find the crook, bust the crook – that's it. They got bored doing that and they saw more value in looking at the big picture that these small crimes reflected. [In the case of the SAIC story], what is the contracting culture of Washington like? What are the dangers and what does SAIC teach us about that? That can be pretty hard stuff to communicate narratively.

What do you hope people take away from watching that episode?

I hope they take away an appreciation for the fact that SAIC is just one of a whole industry of giant contractors who are profiting from public money and tax dollars; who have been commissioned to do the public's work, but who are, because of their status as private companies, largely unaccountable.

I'm personally a big picture guy. That's the kind of storytelling I like to do. I like my stories to add up to a larger understanding of the forces that are at work in our society, and that's what their story did.

Did you have the chance to watch Eric Nalder interviewing anyone?

I watched him kinda go in and talk with folks at the bar and he was like never off the clock. He had his notepad out; he was asking real things he might want to follow up on. He had a very casual style. He did not come on like a prosecuting attorney, like a district attorney. He did not interrogate, he just had a conversation.

I remember . . . he was trying to get a government official to give him some data that the official didn't want to give him. He has a very unthreatening kind of a high voice, he doesn't sound like Burt Lancaster coming over to beat you over the head, you know, so you're going to give him names. He also can be very direct and aggressive. [I remember] he said to this guy: "Well, Jim, I'm sorry that you're taking this position. I know the law's on our side, and I know we're going to get this information, I just think it would be a lot easier if you were to just give me the information right now and not make me go through my lawyers and make this a difficult case, because I know I'm going to get it and you should just give it to me now." The guy projects a kind of self-confidence in his own ability to get the information, and at this point in his career he's got the track record to stand on. It's not going to be a happy day if you're a corporation and you find out Eric Nalder is going to do a story on you.

Why was "A Sea of Trouble" a big story?

Journalists tend to be followers, we tend not to lead, unfortunately, and we wait until sources or others tell us what's important and then we report it. Even investigative reporters will often wait for a story to come to them rather than advance it independently. And it's rare for a guy like Nalder to independently say I'm going to go back out and look at this important issue. I'm going to jump in with both feet and unpack this story.

The upside to that is very real. If he detects or discovers or uncovers holes in the safety net of the shipping industry, he could prompt reforms that could prevent a catastrophic incident. By the same token, if there hadn't yet been a catastrophic accident, there's no dramatic storyline to focus on. This wasn't a story about Exxon-Valdez. Each thing might seem little. You find seamen drinking in a port town and you think, what's the big deal? Or you find other things that he managed to discover: the cleaning of the ship mid-sea, a little of this, a little of that. [Eric saw that] if these little holes in the safety net were to line up just so, you could have a giant oil spill which would destroy the economy and the sea and the lives of one of America's major cities.