RANEY ARONSON-RATH: I’m Raney Aronson Rath, editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE, and this is the FRONTLINE Dispatch. Today we’re thrilled to be recording at the Boston Public Library. And we’re getting ready to celebrate our 40th anniversary. The first episode of FRONTLINE aired on PBS on January 17th, 1983. I can think of no better way to mark this important milestone than to bring you conversations with some of the journalists and filmmakers behind FRONTLINE’s documentaries. One of those journalists is here with me today — A.C. Thompson. He’s a reporter for ProPublica, who has been a FRONTLINE correspondent for the past 13 years. A.C.’s investigative reporting has covered a huge range of subjects. His unflinching coverage of right wing extremism in the wake of Charlottesville and the years leading up to January 6th insurrection has earned him many plaudits,
A.C., thank you so much for joining me today.
A.C. THOMPSON: Thanks for having me here.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So I keep thinking about all of the different threads of your reporting, and I guess it would make sense that we would start with your reporting on Documenting Hate, which led to American Insurrection and all of your work in that area. Now, all of the currents of your reporting seem to be coming to the fore.
A.C. THOMPSON: I think when Trump left office, a lot of people thought like the Trump era is over, and I don't think it is at all. I think, like, he's still casting a long shadow over American life, over politics, and particularly over right wing extremism movements that are still inspired by his words, his worldview, and his general demeanor. So that's the first thing is like the Trump era is absolutely not over. More broadly, I would say there's this thing that a lot of these sort of ideas and currents that started bubbling up again — 2015, 2016— are really making their, their presence known today. And so you have what feels like a surge in antisemitism. You've had a surge in anti-Asian violence.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Mm-hmm.
A.C. THOMPSON: and hate.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Mm-hmm.
A.C. THOMPSON: You have, um, this whole angry discourse around gender and sexuality.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. Right.
A.C. THOMPSON: You have the battles at the school boards that are going on across the country, and you have, uh, a whole lot of people that, that are now sort of looking at January 6th and saying, oh, well, maybe there wasn't anything really too wrong that happened there.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Mm. So, all of this talk about the rise of antisemitism. Just sort of drill into that a little bit. Why now? Like what's happening?
A.C. THOMPSON: You know, one of the things that was interesting to me is if you go back to 2015, 2016, and you're looking at what people are discussing in right wing extremist circles, at first there wasn't a lot of talk of antisemitism. There was a lot of talk about, uh, anti-immigration rhetoric. A lot of anti-Muslim talk.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Yeah I remember cuz we were talking at the time and I kept saying to you like, is there antisemitism in the mix here? And you're like, there is, but it's not prominent.
A.C. THOMPSON: Right. And I felt like over time, if you were following the, the key sort of white nationalist and right wing extremist, um, talking points, you saw more and more antisemitism coming through and you saw this like long, old hoary cliche that like, oh, well, you know, we have problems with the gays, we have problems with the Muslims, we have problems with people of color, but behind it all are the Jews and they're really the puppet masters who are running this whole world, uh, that we don't like. They're the ones that are, um, destroying our country and they're behind it all. But that like was kind of a slow evolution with this new wave of white nationalist and right wing extremists. What I think you've seen since then is sort of a quiet but steady uptick in antisemitism and now it's bursting onto the scene.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Let's go back to the Charlottesville moment. You saw a lot of hate on the streets of Charlottesville. You did hear people chanting Jews will not replace us. Right? And I remember just as a Jewish person being pretty shocked that they were saying that in the open streets. Talk to me about seeing that, hearing that and then the conversations you were having at that time,
A.C. THOMPSON: Yeah, I mean, one thing that I always think about from that time period is I was staying at this hotel where there were all these neo-Nazis and fascists, and my colleague Karim, who's an Arab-American, was coming to my hotel. And all those guys thought that me and him were Jews and they were like threatening us. We've got cameras, we've got reporting stuff, and they're like, you're part of the Jewish media, you know, and they were very angry and threatening. And so eventually he was just like, I'm not coming to your hotel anymore. You know? Um, that was the sort of, uh, experience that we had uh there. yeah, that was, that was a scary moment and that was— you could see this bursting out, you know. And you could see that Trump had been sort of dog whistling about this for a long time, but there it is, like coming out into the surface and really violent and aggressive and horrible ways. Now what feels a little bit different about it is it feels like it's migrated from that relatively small subset of people into mainstream discourse.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. I mean, I think that's what has happened, right? It's become almost a pop moment, right? It's popped through to the surface. Um, so I was curious about a couple of things regarding the Charlottesville reporting that then of course led into a lot of your reporting beyond Documenting Hate into American Insurrection. And I was thinking, how do you take those threads, right, the rumble and the menacing quality of what's happening and relate it to your own life, to your own life as a reporter and your own reality?
A.C. THOMPSON: I mean, I think the thing that's important for people to understand is that we're living in this time period where there's a full spectrum information war going on. And so if you were a journalist, um, who is critical of the extreme right, and you're reporting on the extreme right, you need to expect to be targeted for harassment, abuse, and potentially even violence by those people. That is how things work. They look at you as the enemy and they will use any tool they can to keep you from doing the work you're doing. For me, you know. I have this problem that's like when we're in the streets, there's the potential for violence. You know, we've been there when people were killed. We were there when there were bodies all over the street in Charlottesville.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Mm-hmm.
A.C. THOMPSON: Um, we have people threatening us in the streets. You now see journalists that cover the right wing protest. Everyone brings a helmet and body armor and possibly goggles. Because they know that they could be seriously injured or killed. That's not, that's a new thing, you know, that's not normal, but it's become normal. Um, the other thing is, like for me, you know, like I've had, my family has been targeted. Uh, there was a federal criminal case involving people that we'd reported on with FRONTLINE and ProPublica, who then, uh, started harassing my family and swatted my office. So they called the SWAT team to my office in New York and said that um, you know, there was a killing in, in progress and the SWAT team needed to come there. They swatted my house and said that I killed my whole family and the SWAT team raided my house. Um, you know, those Nazis have gone to prison for that, but that's the kind of thing that you have to be worried about as, um, a journalist covering this stuff. And, and I think more broadly as anyone who's commenting on what's going on with these movements.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: I mean, we, um, of course know a lot about your situation and the security around yourself and your family and, you know, I can remember so many late night conversations that we had. Also, I had with the editor of ProPublica, Steve Engelberg, about how to keep you safe while you're reporting. One of the things that occurred to me when I'm thinking about the sort of trajectory of the last 40 years of FRONTLINE reporting is this is relatively new, as you pointed out, this not if you were reporting from a war zone, but if you were reporting in the US on issues that were around this nature. Right? The divisiveness.
A.C. THOMPSON: Mm-hmm.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: And I'm just, just even, even in your career, if we look at the 13 years we've worked together, I would say the last four or five years have really been the most volatile.And tell me what you think that's about. Like how did the journalist become at the center of this?
A.C. THOMPSON: Yeah. I mean, the first thing I have to say is thank you. Yeah. And I'm not just saying that cuz, cuz we're here talking, but the truth is, like you, you and my, my bosses at ProPublica have been incredibly supportive and incredibly helpful.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Mm-hmm.
A.C. THOMPSON: um, in super difficult situations over and over again. Um, the second thing I have to say is like, look, I've been to all these Trump rallies, I've been to one after another, and they are absolutely exercises in demagoguery, you could make strong, um, comparisons to them in fascist rallies from the 20th century. And when you have a president or a former president who simply goes down a list of enemies, one after another, and it goes like this, the immigrants are the enemies, the radical left Marxist Democrats are the enemies. The media is the enemy. And then he points out media members in the audience and basically is encouraging people to threaten, harm, and harass them, then it shouldn't be surprising when people go out and threaten, harm, and harass members of the media. I don't know if I told you this. When we were filming Trump rally in Arizona, we were filming with FRONTLINE crew and also local crew, um, audio and video journalists, and they, the local said to us, we don't want to go unless there's security, because when we go to these things people are trying to attack us. I mean, that's where we're at. But I think like a lot of people want to trace a lot of things back to Trump, but it's pretty hard not to notice a pretty direct line to a president who's trying to incite aggression towards the media and then there being aggression towards the media.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So I wanna take us back to the very first film we did together, Law and Disorder. That was a long time ago. That was 13 years ago if you can believe it. I'll have you tell us about what that was. But one thing that I wanted to say is that thinking about our 40 year anniversary and ways that we've changed, one of the things that you and I really cracked the code together with Steve Engelberg at ProPublica was this idea of working with a text oriented news organization in iteratively reporting something. So can you talk about that first year before we published the film and how we started to publish right away and how that was really at the time, 13 years ago, really earth shattering in terms of a collaboration.
A.C. THOMPSON: Right, so the model before that had been, you do like a big epic, uh, print story, text story, and that's gonna drop the same day as the film. And basically you're going to hit the audience, um, both in words and in pictures with some version of the same stuff at the same time. And I think , the thing that we started doing reporting on police abuse, corruption, um, in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was, we knew it would be a long slog. And I think honestly, you were not totally convinced that it was going to be a good story. Um, and so we just started digging in and publishing what we knew as we knew it. And that ended up being a useful way to do it in some ways because it got new sources right to come forward, right, and give us information we needed to continue reporting and get to where we wanted to be. You know, there's a minimum story that's like something really bad happened, it looks suspicious. Here's the facts we know. There's a maximum story that's like something really bad happened and here's who's responsible for it. By putting out the minimum story and putting out what we knew we were able to get to that maximum story, and that was a kind of breakthrough I think.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. It was really important I think, in public affairs terms and also just for the public to know what we were finding as we found it, right as you all were digging in. And then we also found a story that had integrity, you know, for the larger film. And that is what we've been doing since, and that partnership is really unique to you and ProPublica in a sense that we've really cracked this, but now we've taken it and we've really actually taken that method and applied it to all of our other collaborations. So you said thank you to me. I wanna say thank you to you because you were that person that I really was able to, to creatively collaborate with from the very beginning.
A.C. THOMPSON: You know, from that time period one of the things I really felt good about doing was we reported for the web and with web video and web text, on a hate crime attack against a guy named
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Yes.
A.C. THOMPSON: Donnell Harrington. And this was not the police, it was civilians after Hurricane Katrina. And we knew he'd been shot and we'd gone and we'd got, we knew he'd been attacked. We got his records from the hospital, but we didn't know, you know, who was responsible for it. We, we knew we had what looked like a horrible hate crime. We didn't know who was responsible. We had heard different things, and by publishing online we were able to get an eyewitness to the crime.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: I remember that.
A.C. THOMPSON: to come forward. We did stories with that witness and eventually the federal government prosecuted the, um, shooter for a federal hate crime. And he went to prison, you know, and it was like we never would've been able to do that maximum story if we hadn't done the early story that said, um, we're not sure who did this, but this looks really bad. .
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. And a lot of the work you did in Katrina to ask people to come forward, uh, it feels very quaint, right? Like remember we were printing posters and putting them in laundromats right?
A.C. THOMPSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: And now we have cell phones and we're texting everybody, you know, we're crowdsourcing information, but we were like early crowd sourcers. We were just physically putting it into places where we knew people could come forward with information and evidence. So I'm gonna move you into a new subject, You pitched me a story on trucking. Let's talk about that.
A.C. THOMPSON: So first off, I, I wanted a break from right wing extremism. I wanted to do something different, but secondly, what I started becoming concerned about is that there is this ongoing quiet epidemic of horrendous violence and carnage on America's roadways. More than 40,000 people a year are being killed in car crashes. I mean, it's astronomical. It is far higher than the number of people being killed in most developed nations. The rate of people being killed in most developed industrialized nations. And so that was like my motivation for, for kind of like freaking you out and being like, can we do something about trucks and roadway safety?
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Well, I know when you pitched us, I'll never forget it because you were trying to get my attention in all of these emails. You're like, Raney, pay attention and I'm really busy. And then I'll never forget, you came on and you showed me some of the footage that you've collected and that you've been given and um you know, it was like seeing what was happening on our roadways actually helped me understand what you were after. And then I, I think I told you, but I had to do a road trip right after that.
A.C. THOMPSON: Mm-hmm.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: and everywhere I drove I was seeing what you were seeing and I was seeing our roads in a different way. And it's a complete, you know, obvious shift for you. But it's also, I was thinking, You have this way of caring about the regular person, the person out there who's just, who's really, truly affected by this at a deep level. And so in that way, it's still in your, it's still in your bucket, right? Of, of reporting.
A.C. THOMPSON: It's, um, a thing that's become clear to me doing this reporting is we live in a country that's completely reliant on large trucks to make our economy work, to make every aspect of our society work.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Okay, so now we've gotta go global. 40 years of FRONTLINE. What does that make you think? Just when you hear that?
A.C. THOMPSON: Well, for me personally, I'm somebody that grew up in my teens and twenties watching FRONTLINE on DVD, often rented from Blockbuster Video store.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Wow.
A.C. THOMPSON: And, and like totally nerding out to every FRONTLINE that came through. So it's super exciting to be able to have a career making these films. It's a kind of crazy thing for me. Um, but what I think is there are simply not that many outlets that do serious, serious journalism and put it on screen. There's a lot of people at this point that make documentaries.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Mm-hmm. ,
A.C. THOMPSON: And I feel really lucky that we have an outlet that actually puts investigative reporting on the screen and has been doing it decade after decade. That to me is remarkable.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Well, I really thank you for your contributions.
It was really exciting for me to think of the number of people I'm gonna get to talk to about our 40th and to be able to talk to you in part because you and I have really crafted so many stories together, but we really grew up together too.
A.C. THOMPSON: Yeah.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: At FRONTLINE together doing this work. So I just wanna thank you and thanks for coming on the dispatch.
A.C. THOMPSON: Hey, thank you so much.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Thanks again to A.C. Thompson for joining us. His new film will air on your local PBS station and be available to stream online at frontline dot org. You can find more of AC Thompson’s investigative reporting there, too, along with hundreds of other documentaries from FRONTLINE’s 40 year archive.
