tagged w/ Vanguard Journalism
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Correspondent Mariana van Zeller knows that usually journalists leave their emotions behind when reporting a story. In this exclusive Vanguard extra, she talks about the most intense interviews she's ever conducted.
"Vanguard," airing weekly on Current TV MONDAYS at 9/8c, is a no-limits documentary series whose award-winning correspondents put themselves in extraordinary situations to immerse viewers in global issues that have a large social significance. Unlike sound-bite driven reporting, the show's correspondents, Adam Yamaguchi, Kaj Larsen, Christof Putzel and Mariana van Zeller, serve as trusted guides who take viewers on in-depth real life adventures in pursuit of some of the world's most important stories.
For more, go to http://current.com/vanguard.Correspondent Mariana van Zeller knows that usually journalists leave their emotions... more
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In this scene from "Rape on the Reservation," correspondent Mariana van Zeller goes for a ridealong with "Hawkeye," a law enforcement officer on Rosebud reservation where often authorities reach a scene long after the crime has been committed.
According to national statistics, one in three Native American women will be raped in their lifetimes. In "Rape on the Reservation," Vanguard correspondent Mariana Van Zeller travels to Rosebud reservation in South Dakota to investigate the alarmingly high incidence of rape and sexual assaults.
"Vanguard," airing weekly on Current TV Wednesdays at 10/9c, is a no-limits documentary series whose award-winning correspondents put themselves in extraordinary situations to immerse viewers in global issues that have a large social significance. Unlike sound-bite driven reporting, the show's correspondents, Adam Yamaguchi, Kaj Larsen, Christof Putzel and Mariana van Zeller, serve as trusted guides who take viewers on in-depth real life adventures in pursuit of some of the world's most important stories.
For more, go to http://current.com/vanguard.In this scene from "Rape on the Reservation," correspondent Mariana van... more
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In this scene from "Rape on the Reservation," correspondent Mariana van Zeller visits a retreat for Native American women who are coping with sexual violence. In Rapid City, a very different kind of recovery -- for Indian sex offenders who have served time for committing rape or other sex crimes.
According to national statistics, one in three Native American women will be raped in their lifetimes. In "Rape on the Reservation," Vanguard correspondent Mariana Van Zeller travels to Rosebud reservation in South Dakota to investigate the alarmingly high incidence of rape and sexual assaults.
"Vanguard," airing weekly on Current TV Wednesdays at 10/9c, is a no-limits documentary series whose award-winning correspondents put themselves in extraordinary situations to immerse viewers in global issues that have a large social significance. Unlike sound-bite driven reporting, the show's correspondents, Adam Yamaguchi, Kaj Larsen, Christof Putzel and Mariana van Zeller, serve as trusted guides who take viewers on in-depth real life adventures in pursuit of some of the world's most important stories.
For more, go to http://current.com/vanguard.In this scene from "Rape on the Reservation," correspondent Mariana van... more
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In this Vanguard extra, correspondent and executive producer Adam Yamaguchi proves he lives up to his reputation as a man who will eat -- or do -- absolutely anything in search of a story.
"Vanguard," airing weekly on Current TV Wednesdays at 10/9c, is a no-limits documentary series whose award-winning correspondents put themselves in extraordinary situations to immerse viewers in global issues that have a large social significance. Unlike sound-bite driven reporting, the show's correspondents, Adam Yamaguchi, Kaj Larsen, Christof Putzel and Mariana van Zeller, serve as trusted guides who take viewers on in-depth real life adventures in pursuit of some of the world's most important stories.
For more, go to http://current.com/vanguard.In this Vanguard extra, correspondent and executive producer Adam Yamaguchi proves he... more
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In this scene from Vanguard's "Missionaries of Hate," correspondent Mariana van Zeller attends a press conference during which Pastor Martin Ssempa shows graphic gay porn to a room full of international journalists. Mariana traveled to Uganda to learn more about the growing influence of American religious groups has led to a movement to make homosexuality a crime punishable by death.
"Vanguard," airing weekly on Current TV Wednesdays at 10/9c, is a no-limits documentary series whose award-winning correspondents put themselves in extraordinary situations to immerse viewers in global issues that have a large social significance. Unlike sound-bite driven reporting, the show's correspondents, Adam Yamaguchi, Kaj Larsen, Christof Putzel and Mariana van Zeller, serve as trusted guides who take viewers on in-depth real life adventures in pursuit of some of the world's most important stories.
For more, go to http://current.com/vanguard.In this scene from Vanguard's "Missionaries of Hate," correspondent... more
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Correspondent Christof Putzel has journalism in his blood -- his grandfather, mother and father were all reporters, too. "I grew up surrounded by the news," Christof says in an exclusive Vanguard extra. He also talks about moving to Moscow as a kid when his parents were assigned to cover the end of the Cold War, and how that experience influenced his work on the award-winning "From Russia With Hate."
"Vanguard," airing weekly on Current TV Wednesdays at 10/9c, is a no-limits documentary series whose award-winning correspondents put themselves in extraordinary situations to immerse viewers in global issues that have a large social significance. Unlike sound-bite driven reporting, the show's correspondents, Adam Yamaguchi, Kaj Larsen, Christof Putzel and Mariana van Zeller, serve as trusted guides who take viewers on in-depth real life adventures in pursuit of some of the world's most important stories.
For more, go to http://current.com/vanguard.Correspondent Christof Putzel has journalism in his blood -- his grandfather, mother... more
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Dear Vanguard Fans:
After five memorable years, we are sad to announce that Vanguard’s executive producer Laura Ling will be moving on from Current Media. In a letter addressed to the staff, Laura felt it was time to focus on starting a family and the writing of a book with her sister Lisa Ling about her captivity last summer in North Korea and the bond they shared that helped them get through it.
“Working at Current and leading the Vanguard team has been the highlight of my career.” wrote Laura Ling. “It has been challenging, but thoroughly rewarding; intense, but fun. I’m extremely proud of the Vanguard team, which is working so passionately to raise awareness about some of the most important issues affecting our world. I will continue to be a champion of their work and of Current as a whole.” Dear Vanguard Fans:
After five memorable years, we are sad to announce that... more
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I grew up hearing about Colombian drug cartels dumping huge amounts of cocaine into the United States to feed America’s insatiable craving for the fine white powder that made entertainers and socialites feel amazingly cool. Our government went to war against drugs with billions of dollars and helicopters, social programs and guns. Eventually, for lots of reasons, cocaine use trailed off in the United States. In recent years the drug lords have seen their trade route through the Caribbean produce fewer mansions, private armies and the lifestyle of kings. But they found a new market.
In recent years, Europe has been consuming more cocaine than anywhere else in the world. So I headed there to find out how all that coke was getting into Europe.
Unlike the US, where coke was associated with high rollers and the rich and famous, cocaine today is the European everyman’s drug. We found it in pubs in England, public bathrooms in Italy and wherever young people gather to have a good time. The UK, Italy, and Spain have become the largest consumers of cocaine in the world. The bulk of it still comes from South America, but the trade route has changed. In order to meet their growing demand, South American drug lords use West Africa as their crucial transit point to get the drug into the European Union. With chronic poverty, rampant corruption and loose borders, parts of West Africa have proved to be willing partners in flooding Europe with drugs.
I tracked the drug at one point to a South American drug trafficker who’d settled in Guinea Bissau, but I had to find out where it was going from there. My producer, Joanne, and I traveled to southern Italy, where we heard smugglers gained easy access to the European continent. When we reached the tiny town of Castel Volturno, one of the largest cocaine trafficking hubs in Europe, we felt as if we had stumbled into an African slum.
Castel Volturno is a notoriously lawless town, overwhelmed with poor immigrants and controlled by the local mafia. I’ve reported from a lot of hot spots in the world, but Castel Volturno oozes with a special eeriness. We were searching for a drug trade that was practically invisible, but all the time we could feel the watchful eye of the Camorra, the local mafia, whenever we moved. People were often afraid to talk to us about cocaine or who was running the place, but we pursued every angle we could while our unseen targets watched us.
Cocaine Mafia (Video)
You can watch "Cocaine Mafia" or any of the previous episodes of Vanguard online.
Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- Lining up - Mitch Koss
- Does Sri Lanka offer lessons for Obama? - Darren Foster
- Kaj’s robot and weapon firing skills are put to the test - Lauren Cerre
- What Do You Want to Watch? - Mitch KossI grew up hearing about Colombian drug cartels dumping huge amounts of cocaine into... more
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My blog is a day late because yesterday we moved our offices from Hollywood to a production facility across the 110 Freeway from downtown Los Angeles. Conveniently, at lunchtime, when Tania Rashid and I were looking to shoot some test footage, we drove over to Skid Row, now less than half a mile away. If you saw that 2005 piece that Max and Jason did with Tracey Chang and me, you’d know that LA’s Skid Row traditionally has been the largest in the US, a teeming, tumultuous locale.
When Tania and went down there a couple of hours ago, we were expecting that it would be even more packed, given that California is the one of the states hardest hit by America’s economic hard times, and here in southern California we’ve been hit particularly hard. But when we got there, the place looked much less populated than in years past. Maybe everyone was at a matinee of New Moon---mid-day last Friday, Grace Baek and I pulled into a small town up in the series for a shoot and saw a huge line outside the local movie theater, not something that you usually see in that environment. But more likely, they were somewhere else. The question is where? Since we were just shooting a test, we didn’t do a follow up investigation.
But there’s a question. Homelessness seems like something that increases with hard times. But searching on-line just now, I found an editorial from today’s Los Angeles Times that says that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reports that homelessness in LA County is down 38% from 2007—when economic hard times began.
So here seems to be another example of why sometimes journalists are needed to investigate: There doesn’t seem to be a readily obvious explanation.
Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- There goes the neighborhood - Mitch Koss
- Eating on the run with Vanguard - Joanne Shen
- What Came Through the Wall - Mitch Koss
- Does porn have the answer? - Christof Putzel
- What world have we entered? - Mitch Koss
- Hey Electronic Arts, when you going to do a pirate video game? - Kaj LarsenMy blog is a day late because yesterday we moved our offices from Hollywood to a... more
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Tomorrow, Vanguard is moving offices from here in Hollywood to a lot in downtown Los Angeles. Like other lots, this one has a lot of security and badges and so forth. Where we are now is a little less informal, with a double garage door that rolls up to admit light and air on warmer days, such as today. It’s also, as I’ve alluded, in a pretty vivid part of Hollywood in terms of street action. I think I’ve also mentioned that back in 2001, a block away, Laura Ling and I shot an hour episode of the “Breaking It Down with Serena,” series that we produced for MTV called “A Week on the Streets.”
But the first time I shot a story here was in December of 2001. My friend and former colleague Anderson Cooper, then an ABC News correspondent, had gotten the news division to agree to do a story on the male street hustlers who stood out on Santa Monica Boulevard, and my employer of the time, Channel One News, agreed to loan me out to help produce it.
Anderson and I were happy to be working together again, and, so, one rainy and cold—for LA—night in early December, there we were on Santa Monica Boulevard. Anderson had a small format camera. I had a small format camera. There was a two person union crew with a beta cam to make things meet the union requirements then in place at ABC News. The only thing there wasn’t at the end of the evening were any male street hustlers on camera.
We all came back the following night, and initially, had no better luck.
It turned out that simply by standing there with all of our cameras, looking friendly, we couldn’t get them to walk up to us and spontaneously start telling us their stories. It was kind of discouraging.
But that’s because had lost sight of an important point in this business: You can’t be sure if people will talk to you unless you ask them. So I was obliged to start walking up to people and saying: “Excuse me, sir, I couldn’t help notice that you’re standing here on this curb, looking into the cars that drive past. Are you perhaps a male sex worker? If so, would like to be on ABC News?” After approaching no more than two or three people, I got one to agree. Then it was easy to find more. Pretty soon, there’s a street hustler who’s also selling methamphetamine, standing next to Anderson on the corner of Highland and Santa Monica near midnight on a Saturday, talking about what he looks for in the passing cars.
No one in Vanguard seems to have ever done a follow-up with these guys, to see how their business is serving the toughest economic times since the 1930s. On the one hand, you might expect that there are more of them out there now—the LAPD and LA Sheriff’s Department permitting. On the other hand, it could be the johns have less money to spend too. And now we won’t know, unless someone else does the story, because we’re moving out of the neighborhood and going downtown.
Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- Eating on the run with Vanguard - Joanne Shen
- What Came Through the Wall - Mitch Koss
- Does porn have the answer? - Christof Putzel
- What world have we entered? - Mitch Koss
- Hey Electronic Arts, when you going to do a pirate video game? - Kaj Larsen
- Christof’s Doc, the Porn Community, and Obscenity… - Mitch KossTomorrow, Vanguard is moving offices from here in Hollywood to a lot in downtown Los... more
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From music to movies to newspapers, the media industries are struggling to figure out how to use the Internet without losing their shirts. With some combination of envy and disgust, they've watched from the sidelines as the pornography industry seized every opportunity to get before the wider audience all of them sought. But today, the technology that once pushed the adult industry forward is stripping away its profits.
The 14-billion-dollar-a-year industry is facing its most serious economic slump in decades. Porn producers led the way in technological innovation and media distribution in the '80s and '90s. They were often credited with ensuring the domination of VHS over Betamax in the costly war for control of the format used on home video tapes. They boosted cable subscriptions, popularized the DVD as the successor to tape and leapt onto the Internet as the obvious new vehicle to give people access to porn in the privacy offered by their personal computer screens. Secure online payment systems and streaming video, not to mention nuisances such as spyware and spam, advanced with the increasing popularity of porn and the public's apparently insatiable appetite for watching online sex.
When I proposed to my bosses at Current TV that I look at the porn industry for answers to the quandary of other popular media, eyebrows shot up around the office. Was this just an excuse to look at porn at the office and hang out with naked women all day? As I ventured behind the scenes, what I saw surprised me in ways I never expected. The business people and techies I met were young professionals with credentials as impressive as those from some of the hot Silicon Valley startups. And contrary to their image as Internet pioneers with an ever-increasing market, I found porn producers just as perplexed as other media as piracy and the plummeting costs of production sucked away the sizable profits they used to enjoy. Even the sex has changed in the race to keep a step ahead of copyright thieves and amateur porn pushers. It's never been clearer that if the industry wants to survive in this day of age, it needs to adapt to a changing marketplace.
Editing "Porn 2.0" for Vanguard's documentary series was a challenge because the subject matter we were covering could not be shown on television. At the same time, we couldn't just show the talking heads of industry executives bemoaning the downturn. On the first day of work for our new crop of interns, I handed out a boxful of hardcore adult DVDs and told them to look for some "tasteful" clips we could use on the air. I knew the assignment would either get me called on the carpet for offending the newbies or go down in Current history as the coolest internship assignment ever. Luckily, it was the latter.
Vanguard: Porn 2.0 (Video)
Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- What world have we entered? - Mitch Koss
- Hey Electronic Arts, when you going to do a pirate video game? - Kaj Larsen
- Christof’s Doc, the Porn Community, and Obscenity… - Mitch Koss
- You Have a College Degree: So What? - Tracey Chang
- What Transformers 2 has to do with Japan's falling population - Adam Yamaguchi
- Why Should You Trust Us? - Mitch KossFrom music to movies to newspapers, the media industries are struggling to figure out... more
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Monday marked the 20th anniversary of the breaching of the Berlin Wall, an occasion of many reminiscences, but some questions. I’d like to write about some of those questions—questions which impact the role of Vanguard. But I’m in transit today, so before my flight boards, I’m going to cheat and link to a Los Angeles Times Op-ed that I did this past Monday.
I didn't see the wall come down, but I was in Hungary eight months earlier for what was in retrospect the beginning of the end of the Soviet system. At the time, we didn't know what we were seeing, but on March 15, 1989, I was part of a team from the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" on PBS, filming a crowd of demonstrators estimated at 100,000 who had flooded into the square that housed Magyar Televizio, Hungarian state television in Budapest. The people were carrying Hungarian flags and were there to deliver a petition demanding democratic rights.
Read more
I’ll follow up with more next Monday.
Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- Hey Electronic Arts, when you going to do a pirate video game? - Kaj Larsen
- Christof’s Doc, the Porn Community, and Obscenity… - Mitch Koss
- You Have a College Degree: So What? - Tracey Chang
- What Transformers 2 has to do with Japan's falling population - Adam Yamaguchi
- Why Should You Trust Us? - Mitch Koss
- My Second Tour of Sri Lanka - Mariana van ZellerMonday marked the 20th anniversary of the breaching of the Berlin Wall, an occasion of... more
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Since today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was going to blog today about the sometimes baffling era that we’ve entered since the end of the Cold War—and how trying to figure it out is one of Vanguard’s missions.
But since this is my last blog before Christof’s doc Porn 2.0 premieres on Wednesday, I’m going to write instead about the ramifications of the Big Bang in American jurisprudence that led to the creation of the modern porn industry, mainly in the San Fernando Valley, just over the ridge from Hollywood, where we in Vanguard have our offices.
First, you have to understand that while many varieties of porn are legal, obscenity is still not considered protected speech under the First Amendment. If it’s obscene, it can, and often still is, banned.
The trick is how you define obscenity. Throughout much of the 20th Century, the standard that judges used was “I know it when I see it.” Under this standard, where a few judges could impose their personal standards on the behalf of all citizens in our republic, a lot of stuff was banned.
But then, starting in 1973, with a US Supreme Court decision called Miller versus California, the standard for what’s obscene shifted from “I know it when I see it” to “contemporary community standards.” That is, if a particular community tolerated something, it was okay. That’s why the first places modern porn was available in the early ‘70s was in seedy theaters in collapsed commercial districts. The idea being that since the community in these blighted districts contained a number drug users and sellers, prostitutes, homeless people, etc., the addition of a theater showing pornos wasn’t going to see like that much of a burden—maybe the theater even paid some taxes.
But then technology expanded the community. With video tape and home videotape players, it became possible for porn consumers to go into an adult store, leave with porn on tape, and watch it at home. Suddenly the community where porn was consumed had broadened. With DVDs, and the Internet, the community broadened further---now it’s a cyber community. Just as the Internet made it possible for extremists—who might otherwise be marginalized in the communities where they reside—to find each others and make communities, so too with porn. So now, attorneys who defend porn producers in an obscenity cases are considering the option of trying to subpoena marketing data from Internet search companies—if it turns out that lots of Americans are on-line searching for the particular activity that is accused of being obscene, then, under the community standards provision, maybe it’s not. Partly, it depends on how big a community has to be.
But, as you watch Christof’s doc this Wednesday, you’ll see that prosecutors are not what’s threatening the porn business today. But I won’t give the plot away: Watch on Wednesday.
This Week On Vanguard: Porn 2.0 (Video)
Porn 2.0 airs this Wednesday on Current TV at 10pm ET/10pm PT.
Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- You Have a College Degree: So What? - Tracey Chang
- What Transformers 2 has to do with Japan's falling population - Adam Yamaguchi
- Why Should You Trust Us? - Mitch Koss
- My Second Tour of Sri Lanka - Mariana van Zeller
- Chinese Mobsters and Megacities - Joanne Shen
- The world: A dangerous place for do-gooders - Kaj LarsenSince today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was going to... more
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On my long transatlantic flight this week, I managed to catch up on a movie I'd been meaning to see for some time. It usually takes flying to force me to commit to watching anything on the screen for more than 20 minutes. So between a couple short naps I finally watched Transformers 2. Though the movie was lame, I'd been reminded of how much I loved the Transformers as a kid. I grew up wanting to be an evil Decepticon who wreaked havoc on humankind. (Just seemed more fun than to be a friendly Autobot.)
So I guess it was my childhood fascination with cartoon robots that fueled my interest in the idea of a robot takeover of Japan. And while that is far from being an even exaggerated reality, we're surely seeing a growing number of them pop up in Japan. For a number of reasons Japan's population is in decline: xenophobia, women are choosing to pursue careers and saying no to marriage, the Japanese aren't having sex (no explanation).
And so, robots seem to be the solution -- in a very odd Japanese way -- to the shrinking workforce that's threatening Japan's economic vitality.
Since I did my story in Japan there's been a slew of new robots, including a robot fashion model, scary horror movie child robots, jumping robots, even a sex robot (you can google that one on your own). How these robots --except perhaps the last one -- address population decline, I'm not sure. But they're fun distractions I suppose. Perhaps they're not alone, though...because now, we're starting to see robots invade other nations. This just might be the oddest one yet. Enter the shopping mall robot guide in the UAE.
Japan: Robot Nation (Video)
Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- Why Should You Trust Us? - Mitch Koss
- My Second Tour of Sri Lanka - Mariana van Zeller
- Chinese Mobsters and Megacities - Joanne Shen
- The world: A dangerous place for do-gooders - Kaj Larsen
- The world: A dangerous place for reporters - Darren Foster
- Sometimes that which seemed impossible actually comes to pass - Mitch KossOn my long transatlantic flight this week, I managed to catch up on a movie I'd... more
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Adam Yamaguchi and I are making a presentation next week to a group of public information officers for large institutions on the topic of why Vanguard is great and worth co-operating with. Which, as we prepare for it, forces us to confront the question: Are we?
One of our ambitions for being in the Vanguard is to tell you about important stuff that you ideally didn’t know too much about, if at all. Think of the new episodes that we’ve put up this season, and the worlds that Mariana and Adam and Adrian have entered to show you things that you should know. We sometimes like to think of ourselves as sometimes serving as an early warning for issues that later will become prominent—hence our name. But for you to heed what we’re telling you, you have to trust that we know what we’re talking about, that we’re not exaggerating, or misunderstanding, or misrepresenting the situation at hand.
Why should you trust us?
The same question pervades what we do in producing Vanguard. A lot of what we do behind the scenes involves talking with various individuals and institutions and asking them to cooperate for free with us in putting together one of our documentaries. Imagine that you’re minding your own business and I call you up, say my name and the name of this network, name some subject or another that I’m researching, and launch into a series of questions. If I were calling on behalf of some more recognizable entity—such as MTV or the Newshour on PBS, which I have—it still requires a leap of faith for you to engage me. What if I’m lying? I could be: 1) a prankster; 2) an identity thief; 3) a salesperson; or 4) a nut. When you add to that dynamic the fact that I work for a new series, Vanguard, on a new network, Current, that average person might not yet know about, then it’s even more amazing how the vast majority of people respond cooperatively. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed by how nice people can be and feel like blurting out into the phone: “Thank you sir/madam for not hanging up on me!” But that would probably make the person on the other end of the line suddenly wonder if I was 4) a nut.
Anyway, what we hope persuades the subjects who agree to help with or be in our documentaries, is the same thing that persuades you to trust our work when you watch it: As much as possible, we approach our stories without a particular angle. We’re not trying to prove a particular point, we’re trying to illuminate a situation so that you can make your own mind up about it. If, for example, Laura makes a Vanguard documentary in which there are both cops and criminals, which she has, then we like to think that she could show the result to both an audience or cops and an audience of criminals, and both groups would feel fairly represented. Ideally, if you cooperate with us when we’re shooting a story, we portray you as you are, without us filtering the information or telling the viewer how to feel about it. And similarly, if you watch one of Vanguard’s documentaries, you shouldn’t get the feeling that we’re manipulating you to react in a particular way. The human spirit rebels when it senses that it is being pressured to abandon independent judgment. Oscar Wilde put it most famously: “It would take a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” Three quarters of a century later, Andy Warhol used a more laconic version of the same thought: “But that’s what I like about it.” We try our best to bring you compelling stories with important information. We leave it up to you how to react. And we like to think that this makes us trustworthy.
Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- My Second Tour of Sri Lanka - Mariana van Zeller
- Chinese Mobsters and Megacities - Joanne Shen
- The world: A dangerous place for do-gooders - Kaj Larsen
- The world: A dangerous place for reporters - Darren Foster
- Sometimes that which seemed impossible actually comes to pass - Mitch Koss
- Doctors Wanted: no experience necessary! - Cerissa TannerAdam Yamaguchi and I are making a presentation next week to a group of public... more
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There’s a lot of soul searching going on in the field of journalism these days. It’s been a tough year. And I don’t just mean for the declining newspaper industry.
It’s a little early to be doing end-of-year accounting, but it relates to Vanguard’s story this week, so bear with me.
Looking back, 2009 was a year that saw perhaps more high profile cases of journalists in jeopardy than in a long while: freelance reporter Roxana Saberi, New York Times reporters David Rohde and Stephen Farrell, Newsweek’s Maziar Bahari and of course our colleagues Laura Ling and Euna Lee, just to name a few.
Reporting, especially in conflict zones and repressive environments, has always been and will always be a risky endeavor. Our president of programming likes to quote “The Godfather” when we talk here about the risks that reporters often assume: “This is the business that we have chosen.”
And while it’s true that many of us often choose to parachute in and out of risky places in order to tell stories that we believe need to be told, there is also the understanding that we have a safe place to retreat when things get too dodgy.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case for local reporters.
While reporting this week’s episode of Vanguard, "Sri Lanka: Notes from A War on Terror", Mariana van Zeller and I encountered one of the toughest media crackdowns we’ve ever experienced. Like all independent reporters, we were shut out of the war zone, refused entry into hospitals where the sick and wounded were being taken, and banned from refugee camps. But worst of all, in Sri Lanka’s War on Terror the government had drawn an eerily familiar line: “You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror.” And few people felt comfortable speaking openly or challenging the government’s prosecution of the war out of fear that they would be labeled a traitor or worse, a supporter of terrorism.
Much of the risk reporters take on is when trying to navigate around the barriers that are put up to block them from getting information, information that is often vital to drawing a true picture of events. Needless to say, Sri Lanka’s media crackdown was frustrating for us. But the struggles we faced were put into perspective when we visited the office of The Sunday Leader newspaper. There we found the empty office of Lasantha Wickramatunge, a prominent Sri Lankan journalist and editor of the Sunday Leader. Lasantha was a dogged reporter who spent his career exposing corruption and misdeeds in government. He was also a vocal critic of Sri Lanka’s War on Terror. It was a stance that would cost him his life.
In January, just months before the war officially came to an end, Lasantha was shot in the head and killed by unknown gunmen while on his way to work. But knowing that he was a target, just days before he was killed, Lasantha wrote an editorial that on his instructions was only to be published upon his death.
“When finally I am killed,” he wrote. “It will be the government that kills me.“
Lasantha’s letter from the grave received worldwide attention. But he was not alone. According to Amnesty International, at least 14 Sri Lankan journalists and media workers have been killed since 2006. And many others have been assaulted, arrested or fled the country. Unfortunately, Sri Lanka is also not alone. All over the world, there are journalists who daily suffer repression and intimidation, risk imprisonment and sometimes their lives in pursuit of truth.
This is the business we have chosen.
***
Within the journalism community there is a healthy debate now taking place about how we can better look after ourselves and members of our community, and still cover important stories. A few weeks ago, Mariana van Zeller and I were invited to New York by PBS’s FRONTLINE/World to participate in a small gathering of journalists and media representatives to discuss the challenges of covering conflicts and working in repressive environments.
The participants ranged from New York Times reporters to freelancers, established media organizations to fairly new upstarts like ourselves.
The idea is to eventually create a resource for journalists of all stripes when it comes to covering difficult stories. For more info go here.
Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- Sometimes that which seemed impossible actually comes to pass - Mitch Koss
- Doctors Wanted: no experience necessary! - Cerissa Tanner
- All you ever needed to know about Vanguard, and then some. - Mariana van Zeller
- Kentucky Targets “The OxyContin Express” - Mariana van Zeller
- A Shout-Out to Interns Everywhere - Tracey ChangThere’s a lot of soul searching going on in the field of journalism these days.... more
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Happy? Or scared?
Today’s big economic news is a report showing the US Gross Domestic Product grew 3.5 percent from July through September, the first GDP growth in over a year. Wall Street was happy. Stocks on the Dow Jones average rose nearly 200 points. The Obama Administration’s $787 billion stimulus program, combining tax cuts and government spending got some of the credit. At the same time, another report this week showed that American consumer confidence is down, partly due to unemployment continuing to climb. It’s almost at 10 percent now, while wages are mostly flat and home prices remain low, 401Ks are not recovered, blah, blah, blah…
If you’ve looked at a newspaper, or TV screen, or the Internet in the past 18 months, you’ve seen all the dismal stats.
So now that the GDP is growing again, which way are things going for you? Not in the next six months, but in the next six years. What kind of economy is going to emerge from the greatest economic decline since the 1930s? That’s the big question, and it points out one of the big dilemmas of journalism. You would think that the really important stuff would be stuff that you would want to pay closest attention to but the important stuff — the average American’s position in the economy — often builds over a lot of time, sometimes over many years, in the way that you’re supposed to boil a lobster, starting with the water at room temperature, so that by the time he or she is cooked, he or she doesn’t notice (so they say). So although this present recession seemed to start abruptly, the factors behind it kind of crept up on us. And that’s what’s tough to cover, and tough to follow.
As I've said before, at Vanguard we try to look forward. In May, we did a documentary mini-series in which we tried to look at the economy that we’ve had in the US since the 1980s, against the backdrop of its collapse. Laura Ling went to Las Vegas, formerly the fastest growing place in the US, for "Lost Vegas."
Adam Yamaguchi went to China’s manufacturing center for "Outsourcing Unemployment."
And Lauren Cerre and Tracey Chang went to Argentina for "Thank You, Recession."
Basically, we were looking at what kind of economy will emerge from this present downturn. Will we manage to go back to the system we’ve had since the 1980s? There we had tremendously high levels of consumer spending on cheap stuff — cheap because we’ve outsourced many of our manufacturing jobs to places where wages are lower. And our wealth creation came from real estate, stock, and equity inflation — essentially a series of bubbles. Or we could go back to the system we had in the ‘50s through the ‘70s, where there wasn’t so much economic separation in the US — we were essentially middle class — and wage growth was the key to economic improvement.
As we travel around the world, there is also another model that we see in globalized economies: Those economic engines of the developing world, like China and India, where the “developed” portion of the economy, the economy that we see and which looks like ours, doesn’t include all the population, or even most of it. Many, or most citizens, in these countries are invisible in economic terms. In fact, when Tracey Chang interviewed the COO of Infosys, the poster child of India’s high-tech development, in Bangalore India, he pointed out to her that India’s growth was not including most people.
So where are you going to emerge? Right now there seem to be three directions.Happy? Or scared?
Today’s big economic news is a report showing the US Gross... more
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Tonight, Vanguard premieres The Forest of Ecstasy at 10pm ET/ 10pm PT on Current. Not too long before our trip, I’d bought myself a new digital SLR camera to satisfy my then-newfound passion for still photography. (Some photos below) As I go through the hundreds of photos I took during our trip, I’m reminded of all the moments and experiences my colleague Joanne and I experienced during our trip to Cambodia.
While the ecstasy trade, and its impact on Cambodia’s rainforest was one of the main focuses of our trip, this was just one of many many stories that caught our attention. In her blog entry, Joanne touches upon how the drug trade has overrun the heretofore vulnerable nation – today, mostly in the form of meth.
In the mid-late 70s, Cambodia was run by a genocidal regime, known as the Khmer Rouge. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge took over the country, and declared the beginning of Year Zero – and all cultural institutions and traditions were to be wiped. Essentially, the nation would hit the restart button, and only new revolutionary ideas would hold.
These guys were responsible for killing nearly 1/5 of the nation’s population, wiping out entire classes of intellectuals and professionals, and instituting an entirely socialized, agrarian society.
During the campaign of terror, the country was essentially hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world. This isolation would outlast the regime itself, which was driven from power in 1979. Ongoing violence and instability kept much of the rest of the world from wanting to engage, or do any business in this dangerous country.
Drugs, like many other legal products, are part of international business. Cambodia’s instability proved to be too risky for the drug traffickers, who steered clear. So even though the country sat in a region known for massive flows of drugs, Cambodia was entirely drug free.
In the years since the Khmer Rouge have lost power and melted away, Cambodia has begun to rejoin and re-engage with the world. This has meant increased trade with its neighbors. And now, the drugs are flowing in, in massive amounts.
Drug pushers are finding Cambodia to be rich, fertile ground for the proliferation and sale of drugs. Meth has proven to be particularly viral for this broken population. At the same time, those who are resource-hungry are also finding Cambodia ripe for exploitation. Like the forests full of the ecstasy precursors and the exotic animals deep inside.
Unfortunately for Cambodia, this is what democracy, the ideals of freedom, and trade have brought. Development has been extremely positive for Cambodia, and the nation is far better off than it was under the Khmer Rouge. But did liberty and freedom have to be so costly?
Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- A Geologist’s Analysis of the War in Afghanistan - Kaj Larsen
- Everything is connected: ecstasy, rainforests, and beyond - Adam Yamaguchi
- Street Hustlers, Militants, and Vanguard’s Mission - Mitch Koss
- Cambodia’s Coming Drug Crisis - Joanne Shen
- Preparing for armageddon in the year 2012 - Adrian BaschukTonight, Vanguard premieres The Forest of Ecstasy at 10pm ET/ 10pm PT on Current. Not... more
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Over the years, I’ve worked on a number of environmental stories that have taken me from one part of the globe to another -- from Madagascar to China and all the way to Greenland.
For me, this entire journey has been a bit accidental. I’d never really considered myself to be truly “green” in any one way, but when I came to Current, I committed myself to doing stories of large global import. As I began mapping out the big stories that I felt needed to be told, many of them have happened to point back to the health of our planet.
This led me to the realization that everything is somehow tied to the environment. By simply paying attention, we can see and understand how most every action we take, nearly every product we consume, has an effect somewhere else in the world. That reaction may not be within sight – conveniently, it often isn’t – but somewhere, you can bet there’s a cost.
I began tossing around ideas about how best to illustrate that idea. Examples abound – like plastics accumulating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, electronic trash burning in an e-waste wasteland in China, or sushi’s acceptance as a global cuisine leading to an emptying of our oceans. My colleague found an unexpected, nearly grotesque example.
Ecstasy.
A few months ago, Joanne Shen and I traveled to Cambodia to see how the global demand for ecstasy was helping drive the destruction of what was amongst the most pristine, intact rainforests in Southeast Asia. It’s a great example of how the demand for various goods can, and often has, massive, reverberating effects halfway around the world. These ‘ecstasy hunters’ are burrowing deep into the forest to obtain safrole oil, the precursor to MDMA, or ecstasy. This is the crucial ingredient for the drug.
In “The Forest of Ecstasy” you’ll see me trudge through the rainforest in search of a rare tree that’s being cut down for its high quantities of the essential oil. And we came across safrole oil ‘factories’ in the middle of the forest, extracting and refining the oil before it’s sent out to become the ecstasy pill. The damage doesn’t end there. As the guys create roads into the forest, they’re paving the roads open for poachers looking for the wildlife bounty inside. It’s a chain reaction caused by club kids looking for a good time.
I’m not suggesting we stop doing all the things we do in any given day, or stop consuming the things that have become ‘necessities’ in our lives. But a greater level of awareness just might make you think a bit more about the choices you have to make.
The world is far more connected than you might imagine.
The "Forest of Ecstasy" airs tonight Wednesday, Oct. 28 at 10/9c on Current TV. For more information, visit Vanguard on Current.com.Over the years, I’ve worked on a number of environmental stories that have taken... more
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Last Thursday, I was going to tell you about how the neighborhood around Vanguard’s Hollywood production office is the unofficial transgender street hustler capital of Los Angeles County, but instead I wrote about the narco war in Mexico, and its possible spill over into the US—or not. But the next afternoon, just to show you that I wasn’t exaggerating about the street hustlers, I came back to the Vanguard office from an offsite meeting and my colleagues Benita Sills and Lauren Cerre informed me that, while I was away, an SUV had pulled into my parking spot so that a street hustler could perform an sexual act on a customer.
And this allows me to repeat that, in Vanguard, we like to think one part of our mission is to give you a heads up as to what might be coming in the future. We’re not fortune tellers, but if we can point to stuff that’s out there that you might otherwise not hear much about, when something does happen, it’s not such a shock because, ideally, it’s more understandable.
So instead of writing about street hustlers today, I’ll encourage you to watch a story that Adam Yamaguchi, Tracey Chang, and I shot three years ago this month in Pakistan.
We shot this story during a trip across Pakistan, in which we drove through the Khyber Pass in the militant-infested Tribal Areas along the country’s western border with Afghanistan—the place where all the fighting has been going on this past week in the Pakistani Army’s offensive against militants. Now, the instability has spread, and foreigners can’t even get up the Khyber Pass, even with a Pakistani soldier in their car, as we had.
But while we gave you a heads up on that situation, that’s not what I want to point out. While we were on our trip, a bomb went off a few hundred yards from us and killed seven people in the city of Peshawar, a few miles outside the Tribal Areas. Three years ago, such a bombing in Peshawar was rare. Now bombings have become common, not just in areas near the Tribal Areas, but across Pakistan. And that’s what I wanted to point out.
If you notice, the story I’ve put up, "Pakistani India Envy," wasn’t shot in or near the dangerous Tribal Areas, but all the way across Pakistan, in the bustling city of Lahore, in the Punjab, near Pakistan’s border with India. If you don’t watch the piece, the point is that there are militants like the ones hiding in the Tribal Areas (backed by the tribal people there), but there are also militants throughout Pakistan because the government used to back those who were deemed useful in Pakistan’s decades-long struggle against its much larger and stronger neighbor, India. But now that the militants in the Tribal Areas want to terrorize the rest of Pakistan, they’re able to turn to these other militant networks, which were only supposed to fight against India, on Indian soil.
Which means that now they’re a problem for Pakistan. It’s somewhat similar to the lesson that the US learned with its first involvement with Afghanistan, in the 1980s. At the time it gave hundreds of millions of dollars in weaponry to some members of the anti-Soviet resistance in Pakistan, which included a broad collection of groups and individuals, some of which later founded militant organizations like Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The lesson seems to be that militants pose the danger of staying militant, even when the assignment you gave them has ended. And, if that analysis proves to be correct, we told you so three years ago.Last Thursday, I was going to tell you about how the neighborhood around... more
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