Lowell Bergman

Interviewer: So you’re saying that your name is…

Lowell Bergman: Lowell Bergman, l o w e l l and one N at the end of Bergman.

Interviewer: OK, so tell me a bit about your background and how you got to 60 Minutes, please.

Lowell Bergman: I came to 60 Minutes after spending about six years at ABC News and they had moved me to New York to play executive for a little while. And I insisted on moving back here and I did that for about a year. And then we decided to part ways. And I got a phone call from Mike Wallace asking me if I wanted to go to work for 60 Minutes, and to which I replied, Yeah, sure sounds great, Mike, but I got to live here in Berkeley. California, mm hmm.

Interviewer: And what do you say?

Lowell Bergman: Well, we don’t like to do things like that, and there was some resistance and I just said, well, that’s my precondition. They flew me to New York, we met, talked about it, and eventually they were able to get the approval of upper management initially on a trial basis. But the trial became custom and I never moved.

Interviewer: People who say that you get to 60 Minutes by something happening that brings you to their attention. What happened at ABC that brought you to their attention?

Lowell Bergman: Well, I had been involved in both the startup of 20/20 and and of Nightline, and I had done a bunch of pieces that apparently Mike watched and liked. I think the last one he was talking about was I did a piece, interestingly enough, with Johnnie Cochran in the Ron Settles case, a story of a Long Beach state halfback who drives from this little town called Signal Hill, which is part of Long Beach and winds up hanging in the jail cell. Really? Yeah.

Interviewer: Knepper to the attention of Mike. What was the first piece then you worked on?

Lowell Bergman: From when we worked on a piece that was called The Coronado Mob. It was about a group of high school students in Coronado, California, Navy brats who decided that they were going to get into the marijuana smuggling business. They were surfers and they live right near the border and they team up with their high school Spanish teacher and eventually become the largest dealers in tie sticks and various forms of marijuana for a number of years became a multi, 130 million dollar business. Something like that, really.

Interviewer: So first shoot with Mike Wallace.

Lowell Bergman: Oh, well, the first shoot was we never really worked together. And he arrives and we have an interview with the head of the DEA in San Diego. This is the day of film, you know, in nineteen eighty three. And we’re setting up a sit down interview the guy and he’s getting ready. Mike sitting down and the phone rings and he says, mm hmm. And he puts the phone and says, well, I just got a call from Washington, says, I can’t do this interview. And that’s the way things are in news, film production and whatnot, but Mike, though, because the cases were still pending, because part of it had to do with a one of the chief defendants, the high school teacher in this case, who had rolled over on his former students and they let him walk. So there are a lot of different issues. They were they had rated a law office. It was the first case involving a federal government search of a criminal defense lawyers offices where they taken all his files out. So the whole issue of when as a lawyer, part of the criminal conspiracy, when he’s just a lawyer in this particular instance, this is one of the precedent cases. So it’s very sensitive. So he said, I’m sorry, I can’t talk or make turns to me. Looks at me and he says, follow me and he gets up and. I follow him outside the building into the parking lot where I proceed to get. Dress down is only the only way I can describe it in at a decibel level that results in people opening the windows in the office building to listen.

Interviewer: Wow, very shoot. First interview.

Lowell Bergman: Welcome to 60 Minutes. Right. That was. Oh, you know, you wonder at that point, what are you doing here? Who needs this professional level, I just kept trying to go through the day and do what we had to do and it worked out, I took a little revenge on Mike. A little later in the shoot, things started to gel and come together. Part of the shoot was going out in a cigarette boat, basically a high powered motor boat that they used for smuggling. And we had two of them. One was Mike with a smuggler in the boat and the other one with a camera. And Mike gets in the boat and he didn’t realize that this boat is going to go 100 miles an hour. So I can hear him screaming on the radio, Mike, as we’re heading out, you know, off offshore and then we get out there. And lo and behold, our camera broke. So we had to go back and leave Mike bobbing in the ocean for 45 minutes because he felt annoyed he was a little longer.

Interviewer: Now, you also said that he he likes to reproduce the sort of shoots you said you get on a shoot with him and he redirects the lights.

Lowell Bergman: Well, Mike, I always like to say about me that I think he’s quoted once said that the Bergman wants to be the executive producer of the Charisma and that the producer, the reporter and the cameraman. Right. And I think that’s more Mike, what really Mike is describing himself, actually.

Interviewer: So he changes the lights right now, what was the first screening like then for you?

Lowell Bergman: The first screening was really interesting because. I got exposed to the storytelling ability of Don Hewitt. We showed him a very rough assembly. And because it was my first piece and, you know, anyone would be nervous on your first piece of what’s going to happen and really what happened was and I think this has been Don does this regularly with people in their first screening. He just went to work suggesting ideas, things that you hadn’t thought of from a reform point of view, where to set the story up, make it a little cuter. And and he actually went back into the editing room with me and worked on it. Now, that had never happened to me in the six years I was at ABC at the network and never had an executive producer come into the editing room. Right. And, you know, usually they tell you, change this, do that, make it this way. You take notes, you go and do it right. This guy actually came back in and said, here, just we’re going to do this, this, this. I mean, absolutely. Hands on. You know, don’t worry, this is going to work. So in that sense, it was great and the piece came off really well, and this was the piece you were just telling me about. Yeah, yeah. So I went from the depths of, you know, what the hell am I doing here? And who is this maniac to. Hey, they’re going to help you make it even look better. And put it on the air and you sit there and you for the final track, and this is 83, so Mike is only. Sixty something years old and early 60s, and you hear this voice come out of the loud speakers, you know, the speakers in the sound recording room, a voice that I had heard since the mid 50s. And it’s going into your piece. And so that was a positive experience.

Interviewer: Yeah, Haeju, it is interesting how Don does get right in there and that is unusual. That is an unusual aspect of 60 Minutes from everyone’s experience. You always agree with his. I mean, what do you think happens when you disagree, shall I say?

Lowell Bergman: You can fight with Don about it. That’s everything. I mean, you have to be. Willing to fight or after a while, you get you learn from hand signals in the editing room, in the screening room. Hand signals in the screening room and and eye contact with different people that maybe you shouldn’t challenge him right now. But what about tomorrow, especially if it’s a factual thing and I haven’t had too many disagreements with him. Actually, in a sense, if you understand that 60 Minutes is a form that both he has created and has become part of him, that he’s absorbed other people’s input at the same time that it’s his show in that sense. I haven’t had a lot of disagreements with him about what form he wants things in. It took a while to understand that he believes that the sound in the story is more important than anything else in terms of the storytelling, people being able to follow the story. That’s why you don’t see any graphic, Kyra, and whatnot in 60 Minutes. So it’s more of, I guess, the bigger fights I’ve had with Don, if there have been over issues or maybe if content in some way or another.

Interviewer: Talk to him just for a second about that that form to talk a little bit about the forum for me.

Lowell Bergman: I believe that it’s you know, it’s there are a number of ways to talk about it. It’s become the grammar of television news that that people have absorbed so that it’s almost in this in the United States especially. It’s an unconscious form that people have absorbed from seeing it so often and seeing it duplicated so often so that you if you’re sitting back there, it’s easy for you absorb information or what’s going on, because it’s in this comfortable form that Don really has refined in many ways. It may be a cliche at this point. You know, it’s it’s the 60 Minutes format, which is what? Well, you can you could close your eyes basically and follow the story in almost all cases, unless the pictures are extraordinary. Right. Everything is explained. All the basic things are explained by the storytelling is done by a correspondent. So, for instance, you would not be in the story right now. The editing is set up to the to a certain extent that it’s you hardly ever hear or see the producer. So it’s the adventures of the correspondent. Everyone has to speak clear clearly in English or it’s narrated over. I remember I did a story. It took me three weeks to get members, members of this Chinese organized crime group down in Southern California to actually go on camera and talk about working for the Taiwanese CIA and assassinating somebody up here in Daly City. Big international case, Henry Lukasz. But the guy’s English was he went to Stanford, but it was a little hard to understand. We narrated it over the whole thing. So it’s like wall to wall narration. So those are the really main main parts of the forum, I mean, and, well, the tight close up sometimes it’s not always that way, but the tight close up has evolved as sort of a 60 Minutes signature. But it’s not absolutely necessary and it doesn’t always work, particularly with Mike. You have do it tight close up of the correspondent.

Interviewer: They say that you never have heard of the format, how I understand it is the format. The format is such that the correspondent is never close to the subject, is always right.

Lowell Bergman: Oh, and the correspondent never loses an argument, but that’s become universal in television news, which is probably one of the biggest fictions that has been maintained, but it’s also part of that form that makes it easy for people to understand as part of the understanding process you don’t see on 60 Minutes and all the magazine shows the the correspondent never learns. Something through mistakes in the story, which is a normal way to learn things, you get it wrong and then you learn, right. But we oh, it’s all straight. Line, no dialectic. Right down, right down the line, unless it’s an interruption argument kind of thing going back and forth. And that makes the correspondant seem almost heroic. I mean, some kind of way, doesn’t it? Or yeah, or.

Interviewer: Without fault, let’s put it that way. What was your first impression of Don?

Lowell Bergman: Here’s this contradiction, he’s the boss, but he acts like the guy he met on the street. He was without it, seemingly without pretense. Which was unusual, I was, you know, I mean, I came from ABC where there was a number of executive producers who were somewhat Napoleonic, you know, they almost wanted to have their hand in their jacket. And here’s this guy who just seemed like he was talking vernacular and talking about anything that came into his mind.

Speaker It came right out his mouth. I mean, it didn’t seem to be any mediation between the two anyway.

Speaker What was being with these insights, I mean, as the same time, insights into the form into what you were doing, into the work? That were striking. I mean, you know, an immediate sort of vision, let’s try this idea, you know.

Speaker What was the word about on air 20, 20 from afar? I didn’t really know much about them in.

Speaker There was a Weston who was an executive producer and a vice president at ABC at the time when mentioning Don would sort of roll his eyes. I mean, he had been at CBS for a long time. And shake his head. But I knew nothing more other than that 60 Minutes was. What is the, in a sense, the most quality television news broadcast of its time?

Speaker Yeah, I haven’t done any research on it and I really haven’t checked him out, but when you went to 60 Minutes the early 80s, 60 Minutes really was on top.

Speaker Yeah, they already had been. Number one, they were worried about staying in the top 10, right.

Speaker Dance, I don’t know, are you aware of the documentary that he produced on Frank Sinatra?

Speaker I’ve heard about it and every time I mention he mentions it all the time. I mean, you know, I’ve just never bothered to look at it. Apparently, Frank didn’t like it, even though it was sort of a puff piece.

Speaker Yeah, I mean, it was a positive late 60s, he did it right before it was actually mid 60s.

Speaker Mid 60s. Yeah. And then Sinatra won’t do anything with them since then. Or he doesn’t understand why.

Speaker I was just kind of well, I’ll go for a different direction. Do you think there’s similarities between Don Hewitt and the early men who started howling with the Samuel Goldwyn’s, the Jack Warners, the.

Speaker The early studio heads.

Speaker You may not. Well, you know, I’m sure there are similarities. I don’t think they got as involved in the actual production.

Speaker They were dealmakers coming out of the garment industry. And maybe there’s some of that ethos. And, Don, the deal making, wheeling, dealing, you know, let’s do this. Let’s do that. I think that the thing that sets Don apart is, is his integrating of his form that he’s helped to create so that and either through luck or through deserving it, having this show that’s lasted with his influence in this audience. So he as a result, he’s become a major influence on the way people learn things through television and the way they understand things.

Speaker Absolutely. And we kind of have an American history as seen through the eyes of 60 Minutes.

Speaker Right, or even through the life of Don Hewitt, I mean, you go back to the Andrea Doria, you go back to the Nixon Kennedy debates, you go through Edward R. Murrow and so on.

Speaker Absolutely. You’ve worked with for quite a few of the course fans abundance over the last year. And you’ve worked for quite a few of the correspondents over the last 15 years. I mean, you worked with with Wallace. You worked with Kroft and Harry Reasoner. Tell me a little bit about differences, Diane, and tell me a little bit about the idiosyncrasies of working with the various producers correspondent.

Speaker The differences, the main difference for a producer, the two main differences for a producer or one, how much the correspondent is actually involved in the story, both in terms of questions that they asked reporting that they may try to do on their own, and the other is their ability to perform on camera and how they perform on camera. Just in terms of the shooting of the story, the editing, how much is involved and how much they want to control that story.

Speaker So let’s start from the beginning. We have Mike.

Speaker Mike wants to, in a sense, do everything, give it to you again.

Speaker Mike wants to do everything and he understands.

Speaker Most of the process does very well because he’s gone through all of it. I mean, he’s had to go from film to tape and he’s gone through editing and writing and so on.

Speaker And so in that sense, he is the most complete correspondent. And at the same time, the most you know, it’s hard to describe Mike Wallace because he is somebody who has invented the tough interview and then you’re with him doing the tough interview. How can he be doing it wrong? He did it right. He invented it. So it’s hard to compare him to anyone else. He’s also got a you know, he has this unique personality that went along with Hewitt that you just you couldn’t invent it.

Speaker I don’t know if you’d want to, but you could invent it, Harry Reasoner, at least in the years that I worked with Harry, was in failing health. And as everyone says, a great writer are really laid back in many ways was his personality. He was it was kind of Mr. Natural, you know, in the sense of a natural guy. He wouldn’t push himself into a situation and he was able to get people to to build that level of empathy. In a very genuine way, do you regret your copy and rewrite it?

Speaker Yeah, rarely he would change it to his words or sometimes write stuff, but I have a lot more freedom with Harry to go off and do the reporting, do the shooting, even do shooting interviews myself and then cutting myself out in order to help the story work. So in that sense, the stories became the content anyway, became more my own creation, I had less of an on camera person to a gorilla to, you know, maneuver with the dance with.

Speaker Diane, Diane is, in my opinion, is a great reader.

Speaker Steve Kroft. Steve Kroft.

Speaker Well, he’s he’s got good editorial judgment in terms of stories Krofft is the most frustrating person to work with in terms of writing, he just will take a script and disappear into his office for days on end while you’re sitting there waiting. So it’s very frustrating in that sense, I.

Speaker But he gave me I mean, he was he was relatively easy in the sense of story selection and so on, I didn’t have to fight with him about whether this was a story or that’s a story. I just went ahead and did them.

Speaker But like you had a fight with, you had to convince him you got a make.

Speaker You always have to you always have to keep him on board. I mean, first of all, you got to get, you know, OK, we’re going to do a story together. Fine. Right. Then you researched the story, right. And he looks at and says, I don’t think it’s a story. I mean, what do you mean? You know, I think it’s a story this guy is going to go on. I don’t think it’s a story. And then walk out the room. Or, you know, with Mike, it’s a constant, you know, back and forth both sometimes incredibly good editorial questions to check out. And and then also a lot of, I suppose, reflecting his own insecurity about whether it’s a story or not, but pushing it on you, you know, or you give him a memo and you say, well, why don’t you tell me about this before I said, Mike, you don’t want to give it too much material, right? And they know just you know, it’s that he is like Don. Yeah, they are. I mean, they are very much I think they’re in a sense the same generation, although Mike is a little older, they come out of, I think, the same apparently out of the same sort of social cultural military of New York in the 40s and 50s where they want to go get the story. You can almost see them with their fedoras on and a little press ticket in their hats. You know, that’s how I like to see themselves, even describe themselves that way. And the problem is you don’t want to get run over by these two, you know, guys whose energy level is already very high. When when you see the two of them together, you know, you want to step out of the way.

Speaker Ed Bradley and is really one of the few people I’ve met. Who’s on camera, who’s a star, who has maintained a clear place in his life for something other than work really, or tries to as much as he can. You know, so he’s he doesn’t get in the way of the production and he his on camera abilities are great, so he adds to it.

Speaker You know, when we talk about television production, you’re talking about a group process, however, screwed up the various and neurotic. Various people are in the process, however big the salary differences may be or the recognition differences may be in the end. It’s a group process. It’s unlike print reporting, which I used to do. It’s not one person. That it rests on the reporter or one person, and is that his or her editor? It’s this group dynamic. And so the most important thing is that the various people bring their talents or their abilities to this group process and make it all work. So if the person on camera, not only like people say about me, that I have a voice for television and a face for radio. Right. So if the people who are on camera can can articulate the story, can do the questions, can deal with the person on camera, can help with the writing, can deliver a narration that has more training, more impact in terms of the voice it adds to the whole process. And when those things happen on certain stories, for instance, as a producer, you always remember then that when everybody is working together and the product usually is that much better because it happens. It’s going to give me an example. Well, the most the one story that I can think of that really just everything fell together on was when I went to Lebanon with Mike. Actually, I went there first. This is 90. Beginning in 93, I think it would be beginning and we plan in interviews with the Hezbollah or the, you know, Hezbollah, you know, those guys, you know, they used to keep us hostage and they aren’t known for being very happy about Jewish people in general. You know, I mean, they say they’re not prejudiced, but, you know, it’s not a recommendation for longevity and. The people who helped set up an old friend of mine who helped set up the liaison with the Hezbollah, the camera crews that showed up, the whole operation on the ground that took place was very cooperative and productive for like a week before Mike arrived. Mike arrived.

Speaker He didn’t bat an eye.

Speaker I mean, some of the places we were going because they were pretty well, I mean, you know, here we are walking around the southern suburbs of Beirut, you know, and we I had arranged for two for a squad of Lebanese army troops as our bodyguards in exchange for some dealings we did with defense minister in Lebanon.

Speaker They would not go with us into this section of the southern suburbs. They waited outside.

Speaker OK, they couldn’t go in.

Speaker We shot this whole thing with Mike on the ground.

Speaker You know, after a week of setup, we shot it in three days, we got on a charter, we flew back to New York via England, and we were gotten to New York on a Tuesday night and it was on the air that Sunday. And the whole process was just a process where everybody did the best they could do. Everyone added what they could add, both from the shooting to the editing, my editor, Tony Baldo know who was the champion at staying up all night?

Speaker People in New York were no hassle, you know, in terms of, you know, Don was just the only argument I had with Don was about I thought the audience could use at least a minute of history. But, Don, nobody cares about that. Take it out. Do the things I would have liked in it. Yeah, right. But the process itself was pretty rewarding.

Speaker And Mike, who apparently I didn’t find out until somewhat later, had been going through various emotional battles himself, just was straight forward through the whole thing.

Speaker I got a pager going off here, going up. And I’ve got to ask you one more question. After this ten year old, you do your picture, OK? Is it now? Yeah.

Speaker How did the title come about? Well, that’s a typical Don Hewitt situation.

Speaker There we are in the studio, actually in the control room because they’re still doing the art of walking away and because we’re rushing here and Don turns to me and says, we need time, we need title. And I said Hezbollah now. And something similarly mundane. And then how long are you in Beirut? Oh, I was there eight, nine days time because no, not you. How long was Mike there? Three days.

Speaker He says. That’s the title Three Days in Beirut, I said, Don, I was there for like nine days when we got my ass shot off, he says. Nobody cares about that. Nobody cares about that.

Speaker That is a typical down story that is perfect. One of the thing about the correspondents, a lot of producers have related their relationships with the corresponds almost like a marriage, so that it’s sort of like a you know, it’s a very tight relationship. Is is that how you see it? I mean, your relationship, especially with Mike, which has gone on for many, many years.

Speaker Marriage is not about a marriage.

Speaker I’d say it’s a partnership, and as I said, I’d say it’s a partnership and it has to be because you’re part of this group process and doing the work again, forget who’s on camera, who gets the money, who, you know, whatever, whose longevity it is for the process to work. It has to be a collective partnership. It has to be a level of trust developing. And in the course of one of the first two stories or so to continue that, you can actually get all of this done. There has to be some level of mutual support, symbiosis or for it to work.

Speaker Other people have said that the criticism is sometimes like picking up again for some producers sometimes told me that they’re almost like free agents. They they they go from one producer sometimes to another, excuse one correspondent to another. The producers are like free agents in baseball. They could end their contract with one correspondent and move to another. Is that your choice or is that their choice or how does that.

Speaker It happens both ways. I mean, Mike traded me to Diane when she came on board. And so, you know, it depends if you don’t have a correspondent, you don’t have a job. Usually the very few people at a certain point the show changed. There was a time when producers, in a sense, had a little more power and could float more.

Speaker When was that?

Speaker When I first came to the show. I mean, most people were attached to a correspondent, but the idea of like moving around or being free floating wasn’t unheard of. I think so. Over the last, let’s say, decade, it’s become more and more formalized in that way. And also in terms of editors also really. Right. So editors tend to work for only one correspondent team, if you will, and associate producers as well, so they don’t float around.

Speaker Where do you get your stories from?

Speaker Well, for me, what I try to do is do stories that that in a sense.

Speaker In a way described as simply what I like to do is I like to do reporting.

Speaker In the vein of being a newspaper or any news organization, it says news magazine, so I tend to try to do stories that haven’t been in print or if they have been really haven’t become national stories and advance the story. So I have a lot of sources have been around a long time and I tend to work off those sources in terms of finding story ideas or subjects or things that we can that we can do.

Speaker Did you start actually as a newspaper reporter?

Speaker Magazines, mostly some newspaper freelancing? I started out in the underground press where I learned that I could apply with some friends again, working together, sort of the basic principles of sociological research in terms of who ran a city.

Speaker This case was San Diego and new stories which had an impact on what happened in the town, both with some of the wealthier people in town and the police department and the hierarchy of the city government.

Speaker Are you an outgrowth of the 60s? I mean.

Speaker Yeah, I’m a I’m a proud child of the 60s. I think I learned a lot and I learned how to make a living.

Speaker And I actually learned, having been disenchanted with the system, I learned what made it valuable. I think what makes it valuable to me.

Speaker So, yeah, there was a movement of new journalism that came out of the 60s and the Rolling Stone magazine, Tom Wolfe, all those people. Do you think that some people feel that 60 Minutes is an outgrowth of new journalism at the beginning? Do you?

Speaker I don’t know. I was at Rolling Stone. I was an editor there for a while in the early 70s, mid 70s. I don’t know that 60 Minutes is I think 60 Minutes is got a lot of 60 Minutes got a lot of, if you will, Caché because of Watergate more than anything else, I think the idea of looking in-depth at subjects and doing them regularly and time in a timely fashion and the relatively serious orientation of the program helped it a lot, at least for me in those days. Looking at it as a print person, it became more interesting as a show. I also at Rolling Stone, I learned how 60 Minutes worked because I remember the magazine came out every two weeks and invariably and I was involved in sort of the hard news side of Rolling Stone, and we would always get phone calls from Barry Lando or Marion Golden or some producer at 60 Minutes who wanted to put pictures basically in one of these longer print pieces.

Speaker Right. You share your sources with other producers sometimes.

Speaker Rarely. Depends, I mean, was rarely mean.

Speaker Well, it seems like a lot of producers come to 60 Minutes and their sources are this sort of their stock and trade.

Speaker That’s that’s their strength. All reporters have like a quiver of sources or a level of expertise.

Speaker If you’ve been in the business for a while, and particularly if you’re into doing what’s called investigative reporting. But I would just call it in-depth reporting. You know, you have certain areas where you develop things, but I’ve introduced quite a few people to people who know about what they want to talk about or whatever, I think. But that’s because my background is in kind of collectively working together, whether it was the original Arizona project in 76 where this guy got blown up, Don Balls and a bunch of reporters came together to do a series of stories or the Center for Investigative Reporting, which I helped start. Or so the idea or the the underground press stuff I did before. The idea of working together to me has always been much more productive idea in terms of doing stories.

Speaker Well, on that on that tone. See 60 Minutes as a family that is like that.

Speaker It is and it isn’t the basic production side is collective or is mutually supportive, the ethic that’s brought to this show both by the nature of the marketplace and also through the backgrounds of the people who run the operation is competition.

Speaker You said to me that on the phone we talked the other day, when an issue is not black and white, we tend to force it into a black and white mold to make good TV. Can you talk to me about this?

Speaker Well, as a person coming out of print, one of the hardest things and this is before I get 60 Minutes, one of the hardest things to get to make it in television news coming out of print, you have to start giving up all of these wonderful facts and information that you spend all the time gathering. You have to keep simplifying the story and honing it just like you will now in terms of 60 Minutes, so you can’t write a book and you can’t write a 15000 word article. You’ve got to get it all boiled down and understandable, particularly in the days before a videotape for a one pass for people to understand it and stay focused. So you lose a lot of the texture of the information and of the story. Things become simpler and to a certain extent distorted when you do that. And I still have that problem in terms of presenting a story. Many times I want to keep most producers do want to keep some little thing or this or a little bit more of that, or let’s draw this out a little more of what the time constraints or the priorities of the form of Hewett’s form force you to drop some of that, especially if you don’t have someone expressing it really articulately. I’m talking about the gray areas. So a person is either guilty or innocent. They’re either good guy or a bad guy. It’s hard to maintain the texture, the complexity of real life.

Speaker I’d love to have come back to without my question being there about it being how the nature of black and white, how that is kind of part of television. Can you give it back to me?

Speaker It’s coming from print. I mean, that whole. Yeah, just television. Just the short part of it. The fact that television has to be black and white in order for it to be. Well, because there. No, not my question.

Speaker So I can because people generally only see television once you can videotape and play it back, but generally only see it once. It’s got to be simplified for people to follow it for people who care about it. So the gray area is the texture, the the values and information in everyday life that make you understand that somebody may be a murderer, but you don’t necessarily have to execute them. That gray area is lost a lot of the times in television news in general, in the magazine form of 60 Minutes in particular, we have a little more time in the evening news to develop things, but we still have to have, in a sense, that casting that goes on in the story. So while you could get some of that gray area in a profile of someone, it’s very difficult to do it, on the other hand, in an exposition story about a particular situation.

Speaker We talked about stories that, well, we haven’t, but what stories can’t you do?

Speaker Well, me for 60 Minutes, if you don’t have anybody on camera, it’s very difficult unless the visuals are that really incredible, where the information is so wild that, you know, you can do it all in narration, but it’s hard to sustain 13 minutes of narration. You can’t do a story unless you have a correspondent who’s willing to do it.

Speaker I’m referring more to subject matter we talked about.

Speaker Well, I, I it’s hard to say what you can’t do.

Speaker You know that there are certain areas, some of which Don has made clear in the past and that people are inarticulate or, you know, speak broken. English is rarely going to do a story that’s like in a foreign language with translation unless it’s, you know, land mines or something where the drama of it I mean, the the pictures actually are so dramatic.

Speaker There’s no story you can’t do. You can’t say it in those words that you can’t do. There are stories that are easier to do and and the scale of what’s harder to do, you know, it may be impossible to do is on the other end, I was thinking a little bit we talked about big business, about an area that is generally, you know, there’s no blanket rule that you can’t do it.

Speaker The hardest stories to do for any.

Speaker Publication are stories, and it doesn’t matter if it’s print or TV or 60 Minutes are stories that come home that are either about the organization and how it works that you work for or the owner, the owner’s friends, the owners, advertisers, so that they’re the standard problem stories for any news organization. It’s a problem that exists, I believe, for 60 Minutes, although probably less so than most places I’ve been. I mean, the stories that have conflict of interest, well, conflict of interest or, you know, before you write about the organized crime or publish the organ, alleged organized crime connections of someone of great wealth.

Speaker You have to think once, twice, three times and realize that on the way to getting it published, for instance, all kinds of things could happen, Extra-Curricular things could happen as opposed to, let’s say, doing a story about a drug dealer who’s in prison like last week who wound up doing business from.

Speaker Jail, you can do him fine, just what’s he going to complain or, you know? Who’s going to who’s going to screw around, so it’s always true, I mean, I like to tell the story there. When I first got into television news, which was to work on helping create six 20-20, I first got in and was working on 20/20. They told me right after I signed the contract, supposedly hiring me to do corporations organized crime, what we call high end investigative stories. They told me you’re going to go investigate Chappaquiddick. And when I said I don’t do traffic accidents, they said, then you’re fired. So I said, OK. And I went off and I kept trying to kill the story, drive a car off the bridge with cameras. I’m sorry. Can’t do that. The state police won’t let you. Finally, after doing a lot of investigation, I discovered that on the morning of the accident, Teddy Kennedy’s first phone call was to his administrative assistant. And I wrote a memo and said, this guy hasn’t been interviewed. He wasn’t even questioned in the inquest. What happened in that conversation and where is he now?

Speaker He’s the vice president of ABC News. End of story went away. So it’s a when you get close to home, however badly they wanted this very, very much money they were spending on sending me and two other people actually to Martha’s Vineyard, you know, Wassan, whatever disappeared.

Speaker Did you do anything in Chappaqua? No, I don’t do traffic accidents. And Princess Di included. In the speech he gave the commonwealth in San Francisco talking about the Commonwealth Club. Yeah, the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, you talked about a litmus test. Litmus test. Yeah. Can you tell us your.

Speaker So basically, my litmus test for sizing up a news organization is are they willing to do stories about suppliers, about themselves, about friends of the owners, the owners? And how do they behave in those circumstances, how do they behave in a situation where the subject of the story is the same size or bigger than the organization itself? And then you can also determine the level of credibility you can have in that news organization, who to trust you, not to trust in what’s going on. And it’s not a question of going out gratuitously and just looking for those subjects. It’s that when those subjects happen, I mean, a good example, I would say, is the lack of reporting in the networks and newspapers on the owners of professional sports teams who they are, where they come from, where they got their money. Too hot to touch. There are a lot of different interests involved. Yeah.

Speaker And to sort of Jeffrey, what I can tell us how your relationship began with Jeff Wagan.

Speaker Well, there’s a more important question, I think, in terms of when you were asking about starting in, but. There is a group of people.

Speaker In the United States, who are more difficult to interview, especially on the record than almost any other group. They’re not CIA agents.

Speaker We get them all the time, they’re not mafia chieftains, they’re corporate corporate executives, people who have served in major corporations in positions of responsibility. And as corporations become much more important, they’ve always been very important. But now they are basically the masters of the universe. These people become much more important, it seems to me, from a public interest point of view, reporting point of view than ever before. And you can count on your one hand the number of corporate executives in the last 20 years who have ever gone public and talked about what actually goes on inside the organization on 60 Minutes, on a New York Times anywhere.

Speaker And that’s what Jeffrey Weigand. Was for me.

Speaker I was not a antitobacco activist, I smoked for 20 odd years, I never asked for money for it. I didn’t even occur to me when I first heard about Jeffrey Weigand that it would have any in a relationship with Lorillard Tobacco and Larry Tisch, although I figured that out pretty quickly. It was the idea that a corporate executive who had insider knowledge might be available not so much to spill the beans, even to me at that point when I first heard about Jeffrey because I had a pile of documents that had been dropped on me from inside Philip Morris and by the issue of fire safety and cigarettes.

Speaker And if you read these documents, you thought you knew what they meant. But as my associate producer at the time, Debbie DeLucca Shea, now to Lucashenko, I said, yeah, I think that’s what it means to.

Speaker But I wouldn’t bet on it because there would be words in these documents that are not in the Oxford Dictionary. So it looked around for who could read these things authoritatively and you could not find anyone from inside this tobacco industry who was really available to talk. So when I heard that there was a guy who might talk.

Speaker I was attracted to that idea, and then when I heard he was a vice president, I said, well, that even be better if we could get him to talk.

Speaker Now, these papers literally arrived on your doorstep.

Speaker Yeah, well, I tell people often that, you know, there’s a whole thing about confidential sources that not only is it done very lightly, a lot of times in the news business, but people don’t realize that a lot of ways in terms of litigation situations where a confidential source is revealed is that they ask for your notes, your files and the company’s expense accounts and everything else, and that’s how they find them in litigation. So if somebody says that they have something or may have something, I usually tell them, send it to me in a plain brown wrapper or no return address or have it delivered to my doorstep some way. Just don’t put any return address that’s real on the box. And that way I can testify that I don’t know where they actually came from. I could guess, but you don’t guess in depositions, you know, gets on the stand.

Speaker Right. So you knew you were going to be receiving a box of papers from Philip?

Speaker I thought I might be receiving a box of papers from Philip Morris.

Speaker I see. And so, you know, I had these documents.

Speaker I looked like an interesting story. A hundred kids die every year in fires caused by cigarette. Cigarettes are the biggest cause of death by fire in the country. I told somebody in the public interest community who is involved in this issue that I was looking for someone to read the documents. A couple of months later, he called me and said that he had just talked to somebody named Jeffrey Weigand, who apparently was in the middle of a big battle with Brown Williamson Tobacco. He had met him because they were on some congressional commission together and he had been the vice president for research and development. And this person said, I gave white man your phone number because he said he would talk to you. That was the first lead that was like in September of.