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Lowell Bergman
Producer/Correspondent, PBS's "Frontline" & The New York Times; Former Staff Producer, "60 Minutes"
When I got the request to come here and speak I, like many other people in the media business, was in the middle of the frenzy that followed September 11. "Frontline," the weekly public broadcasting program, went into high gear, and we did about four documentaries in the space of time that you would normally do fewer than one. They ranged from a report on Saudi Arabia to a report on the evidence and lobby in Washington that wants to take on Saddam Hussein, and to a piece called "Looking For Answers." I wanted to call it "Why?" Why did this happen? How could this happen? Just before that, PBS and "Frontline" had begun running the documentary we had done two and a half years earlier, "Hunting bin Laden."
One of the positive developments since September 11 has been most of the coverage. Media organizations based in the U.S. now global organizations do one thing better than anyone else in the world: cover catastrophes, disasters, car crashes and emergencies of any kind. It's been true in terms of live events and live television since its beginning, whether it was atomic bombs in the Nevada desert or an assassination here in the U.S. or the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, which also resulted in positive changes in the media. That coverage hasn't only been superficial on the networks and cable; it's gotten relative depth compared to most of the coverage that we're used to on commercial television. There have been documentaries and people have done groundbreaking reporting about things considered to be very arcane in the past.
September 11 has been called our "Pearl Harbor in the 21st century." As a result you will not hear what you had been hearing for years from network television executives: that foreign news means low ratings and no one cares.
Just before September 11, I was in New York and Washington at meetings between PBS and The New York Times, trying to work out how to do better television reporting, particularly in the international area. ABC News, which had its glory days in the late 1970s, moved into international news with "America Held Hostage," which became "Nightline." Most of the networks were proud of their international news-gathering operations. But in 2001, up until September 11, all the networks, including CNN, were laying people off, closing foreign bureaus, moving to entertainment-style programming, trying to compete with FOX News and what I call "food fight television," and pushing off the screen more serious, in-depth reporting. The rationale behind it was ratings and money.
After September 11, ABC started to bring back some of the people it laid off, because they didn't have enough people to do the work, especially to go overseas. We now know that foreign news and what is going on in other countries, and the impact of what we call globalization all of which we were insulated from by a moat of great oceans until September 11 is going to come back to haunt us.
The question "why?" cannot be answered until we have more information about what's going on. There were some network television people who refused to rerun a documentary about the India-Pakistan fight over Kashmir, saying it was "low ratings." Who would have believed, before September 11 that we would now be focused on Kashmir, that we even know where Uzbekistan may be, that we are beginning to talk about in public the plight of the 1.4 billion Muslims in the world and what their grievances might be towards us, others or their own rulers?
Reporting on international events and the status of what's going on in the third and fourth worlds is clearly becoming at least as important as reporting on bad hamburgers or other things that may be a threat to your children or your daily life, because now American civilians are dying, and more of us may die in the future because of the consequences of some of our policies and some policies overseas for which we are not responsible. The reaction to that, both in print and television, is a positive thing. In the past I had a hard time explaining to students why they should learn how to do quality television when there was nowhere to work. There will be more jobs, because even public television, which also has a tendency towards cooking shows and other things more entertainment-oriented, is now investing more money in "Frontline" you'll see a new series this spring, "Frontline World," produced out of San Francisco's KQED and UC Berkeley, which will be a magazine program focusing on international stories, using younger people and the new digital kinds of equipment, presenting stories that you haven't seen before. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has also put more money into PBS, into "Frontline" itself, to help it continue doing coverage on the war on terrorism. They have put additional funding into an organization in New York headed by Bill Moyers, which will be doing a weekly program on Fridays with National Public Radio, also focusing on international events and general subjects in depth.
A NEW DEFINITION OF NEWS
I'm hopeful that something that Walter Cronkite said not so long ago that a bonfire in the capital of a small country whose name we can't pronounce could turn into a mushroom-shaped cloud unless we pay attention is a warning that may, in fact, be felt by our population in general and by the people who control the media. Maybe the next time something like this happens people at least will have a clue as to why. Why is it that people don't like us? What is it in our policies that links us to people on the other side of the world who may be doing things that we wouldn't like? Is a policy of being allied with people who we would not find palatable here at home something that in the end will work? What is happening right now, when the U.S. government is making alliances in Central Asia or with the government of Russia? What are the implications of those alliances? If there are consequences from them, at least we'll have an informed public. There are those who believe that an informed public is not necessary. There is a serious group of people involved in the media business that believes this.
Look at the change that's taken place, particularly in broadcasting, about requirements for someone who owns a broadcasting license. Those requirements, while they still appear in principle in law, no longer apply in fact to the regulation of the media industry in general and broadcasting in particular. That's one of the reasons why there hasn't been more quality reporting and broadcasting until now. If you have any influence, call the stations, write letters. I'm not trying to be a Pollyanna about the possibilities here. In the end, it's a matter of national security. Because this is where most people get their information, the broadcast industry in particular will begin to regularly provide people with in-depth reporting.
Do you know how much it costs for a broadcast license? If you wanted to drill for oil, you'd have to make various lease arrangements with the state and the federal government and pay a percentage of the gross. You don't have to do that if you're a broadcaster. If it's a new license, it costs you $230 to use the public's airwaves. If it's a renewal, it's $135. No licenses of any major broadcaster have ever been yanked. Because the National Association of Broadcasters is one of the most effective lobbies in Washington, they've been living in that atmosphere for quite a while. Hopefully, in terms of what's happened most recently, that will change. The idea that there is a responsibility to the audience will become something more accepted.
In doing stories over the last part of the year, one thing I found people agreeing on in interviews on camera was and I'll quote Prince Bandar, who doesn't agree with the Saudi royal dissidents, because he wouldn't be alive very long if they took power that "Nobody in the United States spends enough time to understand the culture of other countries. What makes them tick?" This is Prince Bandar, friend of the Bush family. He is quite wealthy himself from his role in various arms deals between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. He has a large estate in Aspen, as well as one right next to CIA headquarters in Virginia. "What is the reality? What is the falseness? Because you don't do that, you don't want to know what other people need, it's a weakness. It's definitely a weakness." He smiled and went on and said, "It's a weakness we exploit, so maybe you shouldn't." I believe that just out of sheer necessity, the nature of what we do, especially on commercial television, and how we provide information, and to a certain extent in print, is going to change.
We are capable as a country of avoiding reality. But the fact of what happened isn't going to go away. People overseas I've interviewed since September 11 look at the U.S. and say, "Do you people realize that this was a coup attempt?" An attack on the financial center and the military headquarters and apparently an aircraft that was headed for the political capital Congress or the White House looked to them as an attempt to basically overthrow our government. That's how serious it was.
We shouldn't be surprised that the wealth that we have accumulated has also accumulated major enemies. People look at the regimes that are our friends for example, the moderate Arabs in the Middle East and the nature of those regimes and their history. In those countries, when you talk to people on the street, you understand that they look at the U.S and see the only way to get rid of that regime would be to go through the U.S. That's what we represent.
One striking thing we ran into two and a half years ago after the Nairobi bombings was the official U.S. government explanation: that a small group of terrorists from outside Kenya and Tanzania had infiltrated the country and carried out these two bombings simultaneously in both capitals. We discovered when we spent some time on the ground that the large minority in both countries was Muslim. They were, in their minds, generally oppressed. They didn't have social services. You hear about Saudi and other Muslim charities that funnel money to bin Laden that's the story that we hear here. Some of that is true; it does get to these other organizations. But in Islamic communities in Mombasa or Dar es Salaam, those charities are the only source of social welfare. They are not all run by terrorists or fundamentalists. Some money may get siphoned off. But these are separate communities dependent on international Islamic support. There's no foreign aid getting to these communities from the U.S. In the "Saudi Time Bomb" documentary, we went to the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean. They're Muslim. There is no foreign aid to these communities. The only educational aid for people to go into higher education is provided by fundamentalist Islamic schools in Egypt and Pakistan. They're funded by Saudi money. Some people who were involved in Al Qaeda went through that system. That's the reality in that part of the world.
QUESTIONS FOR THE COMMERCIAL NETWORKS
One great danger in all of this and many of the FBI officials that we interviewed said this is that we abandon exactly those freedoms that we have here in our pursuit of wiping out the terrorists. For that, the broadcast industry has not done a great job, starting with the phone call that Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, made to the network news executives back in October. President Bush wasn't happy that his speech announcing the bombing of Afghanistan was followed by a videotape from Osama bin Laden. That resulted in a call from Miss Rice in which she got the network executives to agree to "prescreen" all tapes from bin Laden or his organization before they put them on the air, and to watch what you put on the air, because there may be secret signals: He may be wearing something, or there may be a rifle. The network executives responded by saying, We're going to do something about this, think twice about this, and so on. The silliness and seriousness of this is that Al Jazeera and all the Islamic broadcasting companies in the world were not affected by this. There were no restrictions on putting his messages on the Internet and broadband. It was available worldwide, and there were no restrictions on newspapers or anyone else on providing the text of what he said in any of his messages. That immediate cave-in, without asking any serious, direct questions was a bad sign.
That said, in most other cases the networks have performed relatively admirably, and when the Pentagon made available a live feed of a video tape of Osama bin Laden making off-the-cuff remarks about how it was a great operation on September 11, they put it right on the air and didn't edit it or look at it first. Nor did the White House ask them to do that. So, it is part of succumbing to propaganda or pressure that the message might not be getting across.
In 1950, the FCC put out an order concerning who was qualified to hold a license to broadcast and said that a commercial station itself "must be operated as if owned by the public.... It is as if a community should own a station and turn it over to the best man in sight with this injunction. Manage this station in our interests.'" The standing of every station that is a licensee at the time is determined by that conception, and the Supreme Court, in one decision, said that it's the right of the viewers, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount. Hopefully, in reaction to what happened on September 11, those rules will have more effect and we will have better in-depth coverage in the future and we won't have to ask "why?" so much.
