tagged w/ Mitch Koss
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This week in Copenhagen, negotiations are going on toward producing a pact to fight global warming, a pact that is supposed to be ready for world leaders to ratify at the end of the week. Whether or not the pact will be completed, or will be strong enough to accomplish what people who want to fight global warming want it to accomplish is unclear at this moment. But it does at least show that the world is trying to contradict that famous saying by someone who may or may not have been Mark Twain: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
One of the first pieces that I ever shot for Vanguard, back in the summer of 2005, was a story set up by Adam Yamaguchi, looking at the shrinking of glaciers in Alaska.
Glacier (Video)
What we saw was pretty shocking, in terms of weather changing the landscape of Alaska, but as someone who’s been living in Southern California for many years, the idea that the weather can have a big impact on your life wasn’t actually a novel idea. I’m a native of Michigan, and, growing up, it was always my ambition, to leave and move to southern California, sunny southern California, to get away from weather. Ironically, as it turned out.
Certainly, in my adopted state, I can barbeque in my backyard on New Year’s Eve more easily than one can in Michigan—I tried it last New Year’s at my father-in-laws, when it was 10F, and it’s doable, though bracing. But, as it turns out, cold and snow aren’t necessary the kind of weather that can have a big impact on your life.
Here’s where the irony comes in: It stopped raining yesterday in Los Angeles, much to the relief of the people living in my canyon, because the rain ended before the mudslides began. There was a danger of mudslides because the side of the canyon 400 yards from my house was entirely denuded by fire this past August—one of the early fires in what turned out to be nearly a two month siege of them, including the Station Fire, the biggest fire in the recorded history of Los Angeles County. The fires came because it’s been so warm and sunny—and dry.
The fire came into my canyon as I was driving home early from work on what seemed like a pretty great day---as I was driving Laura Ling and Euna Lee were in the air, en route home to LA from North Korea in Bill Clinton’s plane. I saw a plume of smoke from the freeway, and thought to myself, “on this good day, someone else is having a bad one,” and pulled into to my canyon to hear sirens. At first I couldn’t see anything, but then a car with fire department officials pulled in front of me, and four officials got out and looked up at the hillside where there was perhaps a fifty foot wide fire. I drove on into my driveway, and said to me wife, kind of casually, ‘there’s a fire in the canyon.” We stood on our front driveway watching it, and within minutes it was half a mile wide, and very loud—it was crackling like a fireplace in a Christmas commercial. We ended up calling out kids and telling them not to come home, then evacuating our photo albums, dog, turtle, rabbit, guinea pig, my son’s guitars and my daughter’s harp. The next day, we returned—and fortunately no homes in our canyon were hurt. But ever since, the majestic pine in my neighbor’s yard looks like a potential torch of death.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that in my native Michigan, I felt annoyed and persecuted by the weather, but in my adopted southern California we are sometimes obliged to be afraid of the weather. And that seems to be what they’re debating in Copenhagen, whether or not the world as a whole, in general, should start being afraid of the weather, and, in contradiction of Mark Twain or whomever’s observation, start doing something about it.
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- Kaj’s robot and weapon firing skills are put to the test - Lauren CerreThis week in Copenhagen, negotiations are going on toward producing a pact to fight... more
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Yesterday morning, outside the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, I stood in a long line for two hours with thousands of other people. We were all braving a pretty cold morning for Southern California, but we weren’t lined up for tickets. The line was over half a mile long, and ended in a big circus-style tent. Inside, amidst many helium filled balloons, 50 nurses were dispensing H1N1 vaccines. Lots of little kids were crying. “It’s just like the county fair,” I observed to my son, “except with shots.”
We were all there because swine flu vaccine is scarce, and the Pasadena Health Department was making it available to people who are under 24, over 65, pregnant, or facing chronic health issues. Most of the people standing in the line were not eligible to get the shots themselves, they were parents. There were a lot of strollers. Other people brought little chairs for their toddlers, which they kept moving as the line moved, ala Woody Allen playing the cello in the marching band in “Take the Money and Run.” Kids left the line to play nearby when they couldn’t bear it any longer. My son got a bit restive also, but since he’s in high school, and has a driver’s license, I gave him the keys to my car and 20 bucks, and he left for an hour to get breakfast.
All in all, we were an orderly bunch, and everything went smoothly. And that’s what struck me. Among the many different subjects I’ve covered over the years are disease outbreaks. In April of 2003, I covered the SARS outbreak in Hong Kong and China. And in November of 2005, Laura Ling and I covered Avian Flu in Vietnam—a flu that unlike H1N1, swine flu, never produced a serious outbreak in people.
Battle Against Bird Flu (Video)
Pandemic (Video)
But what struck me yesterday in Pasadena, and struck me on those previous stories, is that there are some situations which don’t seem like they’ll get better unless government is efficient, and everyone is willing to cooperate in an orderly fashion toward a common goal.
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In today’s Los Angeles Times, there is an article on reality shows that portray people doing dangerous jobs, a trend that began with shows like Deadliest Catch, about fisherman off Alaska, and Ice Road Truckers, which is perfectly described by its title, a feat that is considered elegant in the TV business, comparable, say to when in the physics business, a simple formula sums up a lots, for example, E=MC2.
Anyway, there is some speculation in the article as to why the trend in reality shows is going the way of people doing dangerous jobs. For example, the people shown are doing their jobs, not like the people are on, say, Survivor or Big Brother, because they’ve been assembled for to the purposes of being on a TV reality show, they’re doing them because those are actually their jobs and they’d be doing them regardless. The article talks about authenticity and viewers identifying with ordinary heroes.
But from the perspective of the Vanguard Journalism unit here at Current TV, there might be another reason. Maybe people are watching these shows because this is where reporting on television tops out. When was the last time you saw a TV news documentary that gave you a plausible reason why the stock market has been going up while the unemployment rate is going up? Because we don’t seem to be very good at delivering believable coverage of the stuff that’s most important to you—questions such as, will I have a job in six months or will I be dumpster diving to support my family?—you the viewer are obliged to stick with the last level of coverage that is believable. And you tend to believe, say, the guys at Original Productions when they show you that those truckers really are driving over ice. It’s coverage you can trust.In today’s Los Angeles Times, there is an article on reality shows that portray... 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.
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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.
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Last week was the 20th anniversary of the breaching of the Berlin Wall. It also found President Barack Obama still deliberating about what to do with the US Commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McCrystal’s request for 40,000 more American troops. If you think about the kind of world that we began to enter 20 years ago, perhaps the two events of last week are somehow related.
As I mentioned briefly last Thursday, in March of 1989 in Budapest, Hungary, I covered the first breach of what used to be called the Iron Curtain—the physical, coercive, and legal barriers keeping the people in Communist eastern Europe from entering western Europe. Back then, I didn’t know the significance of what I was seeing in Budapest. But when the Wall fell in November of 1989, it was assumed, via Cold War logic, that the East Germans pouring through the wall were joining us, that we had won and they had lost. Because that’s how the zero sum logic of the era worked.
Coincidentally, in October of 1989, the month before the Berlin Wall began to fall, I was working in Afghanistan, where under an agreement between the US and the Soviet Union, Soviet troops had recently withdrawn after a decade of futilely struggling against Afghan insurgents who had been supplied with hundreds of millions of dollars a year in weaponry by the Reagan Administration. Part of the agreement leading to the Soviet troop pull-out was that the US would stop funding the insurgents.
And that made sense under the logic of the Cold War, where you had to either be in the Soviet camp or the American camp. Once the Soviets left Afghanistan, the insurgents were in our camp, and would do our bidding, regardless if we continued to pay them or not.
But maybe when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later, we didn’t assume control of the whole world. Maybe we entered a different world.
In May of 1994, I went to Afghanistan with Lisa Ling, and we found it far from US control, or anyone’s control. After the Soviet pull-out, the insurgents fought on, first driving out the Soviet installed government, and then, turning their US supplied weapons on one another. In speaking engagements, Lisa sometimes mentions our visit, because while I was rolling on Lisa doing a stand-up in the midst of some insurgents, one of them, an adolescent who didn’t know how old he was, pointed his weapon at us and threatened to kill us—or at least pointed his weapon at us and made me jump, and it’s tough to jump with a 22 pound betacam on your shoulder but you can check the footage and see that I did.
A few years later, in January of 1997, Lisa and I drove from Peshawar, Pakistan, to Kabul, Afghanistan, a few weeks after a new group called the Taliban had captured the Afghan capital. By then, it was impossible to imagine that the anyone every had control of this place. Ten years to the week of that visit, I was back in Kabul with Kaj Larsen. In the intervening decade, the Taliban had been defeated by the US, after a brief post-9/11 bombing campaign, and then re-vitalized.
And now we have the dilemma that President Obama is facing, and thanks to the events of 20 years ago last week, facing it in a world that might not be zero sum game, where one side loses and the other wins, but something more uncontrolled, where all sides might be able to win, if Thomas Friedman and his “race to the top” theory is correct—albeit tough to believe in during this year of terrible economic decline—but it might also be a world where all sides can lose, because there might be no entity enforcing the rules.
Fear of Spring (Video)
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- What Transformers 2 has to do with Japan's falling population - Adam YamaguchiLast week was the 20th anniversary of the breaching of the Berlin Wall. It also found... 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.
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- 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.
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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.
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- 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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Every now and then, something that seemed impossible to achieve, comes to pass. But we don’t always notice and say, “Holy Shit!” That’s because we live in an age where an over-abundance of trivial information is coupled with a rapid pace of change. Often, when we learn about a new occurrence, it’s difficult to think back even a few years and remember why it’s significant.
That’s the case with the subject of this week’s Vanguard doc, Mariana van Zeller and Darren Foster’s Sri Lanka: Notes from A War on Terror. Which is one of the reasons why it’s so cool.
Without spoiling the suspense in Wednesday’s episode, in it Mariana and Darren look at the recent demise of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam, the LTTE, one of the nastiest and most formidable insurgent/terror organizations in the world. With the US facing escalating violence in Afghanistan, they’re telling an important and engrossing story with big implications.
But besides plugging their episode, what I want to do here is vouch as to how nasty—and seemingly impossible to defeat—the Tigers really were.
In April of 2000, when the Tigers had a huge offensive going, Laura Ling, Gotham Chopra and I went to Sri Lanka, after Laura succeeded in getting us journalist visas in two days of trying, after I tried for a year and a half and failed. We arrived in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital, and found out that in order to get past the military checkpoints to head to the conflict zone, we needed a Road Permit, which we didn’t have. It took Laura a few days of negotiating with the Minister of Defense to get us the permit, and meanwhile we looked around Colombo a bit—what struck us was how common large suicide bombings by Tigers were. Our hotel had been bombed, and many public places had huge doves painted on the pavement—a sign that there had been a bombing. Hundreds of people had been killed in the city in the previous couple of years.
Outside the capital, fighting between the Tigers and the Sri Lankan government continued to intensify. The week prior to our visit the Tigers had staged an amphibious landing at Elephant Pass and over-run a large Sri Lankan military base. The guys at the US Embassy in Colombo told us: “There are only two groups in the world that could stage an amphibious landing of that size—the US Marine Corps, and the Tamil Tigers.” The city seemed to live on edge.
Laura finally got us our road permit, and we drove out to the east, where the government controlled the main highway via a series of fire bases built along it—until night fell, and then the Tigers controlled the highway, along everything else off the highway which they controlled during daylight also. En route to a safe hotel run by a Tiger sympathizer, the sun set on us, and we had a pretty intense few hours driving the highway in the dark, afraid the soldiers in the fire bases we were passing would mistake us for Tigers and shoot, while the Tigers would mistake our van for a military vehicle and shoot.
The second day, we reached the end of where the government controlled the highway. There was a military base, and a barrier, like a train crossing, leading to Tamil Tiger country. Laura got on the phone with her friend the Minister of Defense back in Colombo, the soldiers raised the gate and we headed into Tiger Territory driving a steady 40 km per hour and honking our horn every 100 meters as a sign to the Tigers not to fire on us. Finally, some Tigers flagged us down, took us to a nearby command post. For such dread folks, they seemed very soft spoken and placid. They served us ice cold Coke—it was hot—and then showed us the cyanide capsules around their necks—they all wore them so they could commit suicide if captured. Then they gave us a tour of the area. We met a couple 16 and 17-year old girl Tigers who’d already had several years of combat experience. They were also placid, but now it began to seem spooky. Not surprisingly the Tigers were big into a culture of martyrdom. They showed us a lot of monuments to dead leaders, and a cemetery with 1000 fresh Tiger graves. They offered to let us stay to the night and go with them to fire mortars at a Sri Lankan military base, but we decided to head back.
My conclusion back then: What a nightmare. So when Laura and I heard early this year that the Tigers might be close to being defeated, we found it astonishing. And then Mariana and Darren went over to check out this important but underappreciated development. And the result is not only fascinating, but important. Check it out Wednesday.
This Week on Vanguard: Sri Lanka: Notes from A War on Terror
"Sri Lanka: Notes from a War on Terror" airs this Wednesday at 10pm ET / 10pm PT on Current TV.
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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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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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I was about to tell you about how Vanguard’s office here in Hollywood is located in the unofficial transgender street hustler capital of Los Angeles County, and about the effect that recession seems to have had on them, when my colleague Darren Foster mailed me this link.
I can switch subjects because even though, in March of 2001, Laura Ling and I shot an hour doc for MTV on street hustlers one block from where my desk at Vanguard now is, Laura and I also shot one last fall on the war among Mexico’s narco-traffickers.
When considering the size of the recent raids around the US against what’s happening in Mexico, one question is why the narco war down there isn’t up here, given how big the narcotics distribution networks here seem to be. The standard answer is that the cartels in Mexico didn’t used to be particularly violent either, until the federal government started to pressure them. In the old days, before the year 2000, when Vincente Fox was elected Mexico’s first president from a party other than the PRI in 70 years, cartels could maintain their position as multi-national corporations pretty much in the way that other multi-national corporations maintain their positions in their host countries—they were too big to fail. But once Fox, and his successor as President, Felipe Calderon, started to act against the web of corruption that bound the cartels to law enforcement and government officials, the cartels were obliged to maintain their positions the old fashioned, Chicago-in-the-1920s way, by shooting it out.
Another view might be that we seem to have just passed out of one of the more violent epochs in American history, the roughly 40-year period from the mid-‘1960s, until just a few years back. And if you look at all the urban homicides we had in that period, and look at how many were related in some way to narcotics, then maybe we already had our narco war. It was simply that, unlike what’s going on now it Mexico, ours wasn’t organized, just low-level dealers and users committing murder, often against each other. And where violence by powerful organized criminal groups can be viewed as a threat to the state, unorganized violence is just a threat to the neighborhood.
On the third hand, we seem to be in an era where globalization brings us all sorts circumstance that we don’t seem to have seen before, and sometimes when you’re in the middle of something, it can be tough to see which way the trend line is moving.I was about to tell you about how Vanguard’s office here in Hollywood is located... more
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There was an article in the New York Times this past week about war correspondents in Afghanistan. Within the article, Richard Engel from NBC said, "It's like the Baghdad class of 2003 is now the Kabul class of 2009." The point being that the journalists who cover conflict zones basically moved from Iraq to Kabul starting in 2007. The greater implication of the headline is that the war in Afghanistan is now the war that matters, and that Afghanistan, which looked like the fairer cousin back in 2006, is really more the ugly stepmother. The truth is that Afghanistan was always only rosy in comparison to the “Fiasco” (adopted from title of Tomas Ricks’ book on the subject) that was Iraq. In 2006 most of the serious media was paying attention to the violence in Iraq, and ignoring the growing chorus of discontent coming from the other theater.
In 2006, I was in Afghanistan with Mitch Koss. Mitch and I had been having lengthy discussions on how we both thought Afghanistan was on the precipice. Mitch -- who had been to Afghanistan in the early early days with Lisa Ling -- knew how difficult it was to make forward progress there. I was also an Afghan veteran and was writing my masters thesis at the time on the escalation of the poppy problem in the country. We both were keenly aware that Afghanistan was a success only in comparison to Iraq.
What we found on that journey were precursors of all the issues that are manifesting in Afghanistan today. The security situation was really beginning to plummet. We missed by just a few minutes a friendly fire incident between the US Army and the Afghan police. We observed growing dissatisfaction among the populace about the lack of progress in development and the economy. We saw the impotent reach of the government outside of a small radius beyond Kabul. Shortly after we left, our hotel was attacked by RPGs and machine guns. Perhaps most interestingly considering today's headlines, we heard over and over again from Afghanis who were unhappy with Hamid Karzai. At the time, the media and the administration were heralding Karzai as the savior of Afghanistan, able to hold all these coalitions and factions together. But on the streets, in the meat markets and the tea shops, we heard differently. One of the final moments in our piece “Fear of Spring” ends with a random voice in the crowd yelling “Fuck Karzai.” Well, now its 2009 and the world is finally starting to hear the voices in the crowd in Afghanistan.
There was an article in the New York Times this past week about war correspondents in... more
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Last week, the US dollar hit a 14-month low against the euro, coming just shy of the point where it takes $1.50 to buy one euro. Commodities priced in dollars, such as oil, went up in price to off-set this decline, and the weak state of the US greenback set off a certain amount of discussion in the media. But in keeping with Vanguard’s mission, we warned you about this decline nearly two years ago… Sort of.
In this story, which was shot mostly in the fall of 2007, Adam Yamaguchi looks at the reason behind a phenomenon that we’d been noticing first hand as we traveled the world on stories: In recent years, the dollar seemed to buy less and less. In July of 2000, when the US government had a surplus, I was shooting for MTV in Germany with Laura Ling, and less than $0.90 US bought a euro, and Europe was charming.
By the time “The Poor Dollar,” was shot, Europe was challenging. Scenes of Adam experiencing first hand the weakness of the dollar versus the British pound and the euro, of Tracey Chang witnessing the weakness of the dollar versus the Canadian dollar and Filipino peso, are interspersed with Adam’s look at the causes of the dollar’s decline: The US trade deficit, the US government’s budget deficit, and overspending by US consumers—throughout this decade 70% of the US economy was based on consumer spending. In fact, our spending what we didn’t have was the engine of the world’s economy.
And, indeed, throughout the first half of 2008, just as we told you in "The Poor Dollar," oil prices skyrocketed, in part due to speculative frenzy—the stock bubble had started bursting the previous fall, driving speculators to new areas—but in part due to the dollar’s downward spiral.
So at that point, we felt that Vanguard had fulfilled its mission of giving you an early heads up on important changes in the world. But, when we’re doing our job properly, we’re just an early warning system, not prognosticators. In looking at the dollar’s decline, we didn’t factor in the effect a dose of worldwide financial collapse would have on the greenback. As America plunged into the deepest recession it’s had in 70 years, Americans cut back spending and started saving. The trade deficit dropped also. Oil prices collapsed. And the dollar got stronger.
But as the US economy revived a bit during the summer and the US government hit its highest proportional deficit since 1945, the dollar has been sinking again, and you can take another look at "The Poor Dollar." Our warning seems to be germane once again.
Last week, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner warned that after the recession is over, the US government dials back on deficit spending, the only way the dollar can be strengthened is if Americans learn to live within their means. And that raises a larger question, one that Laura and Adam looked at this spring in "Lost Vegas."
That is, can we continue to base our economy on US consumers supporting the world, and on stock, real estate, and commodity bubbles that go with that, or is the only way to avoid our country declining like our currency is to find some other way forward? We don’t know, but we’re pointing out the question.Last week, the US dollar hit a 14-month low against the euro, coming just shy of the... more
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I’m sitting at my desk in Vanguard’s LA office wearing my Dodger blue t-shirt, because a friend got my son and me tickets to today’s opening game of the National League Championship Series. With apologies to those of you in Philadelphia, we’ll be in Dodger Stadium late this afternoon, rooting for our home team. Last year, we watched these same two teams play in the NLCS. The Dodgers lost. Starting for the Phillies today is ace Cole Hamels, whom the Dodgers find hard to beat. Opposing him, the Dodgers are starting 21-year old Clayton Kershaw, who only has a year and half experience in the Majors.
Why am I telling you this? I’m telling you because it’s important to many of us, not only here in southern California, but around the nation.
But also I wanted to talk a little bit about what we here in Vanguard think is important, which relates to why we do what we do, and why we want you to pay attention to us.
For example, if you glance down the list of documentaries in our new fall line-up, you’ll notice that covering sports isn’t something that we do. And, in fact, if you just read summaries of our docs, and don’t watch them, you might get the impression that often times here at Vanguard, we seem to be sitting around all day long worrying about how this or that is causing the fate of the world hang in the balance. We might seem like an over-earnest bunch of folks.
And yes, it’s true, what motivates us, our mission, is to try to keep track of important changes in the world, changes that affect us all, but might not get a thorough examination if we don’t look at them. We try to tell you important stories that otherwise might not get told—because we think it’s important for society that we know and understand. But that’s just why we do what we do, not why we hope that you’ll watch us.
In fact, we don’t expect you to watch us because we try to do important work.
We hope you’ll watch us because we’re interesting.
In contrast, who wins the NLCS is important. It’s important to me. But speaking as a Dodger fan who watched them lose the NLCS last year, watching them lose is not an experience I would describe as “interesting,” anymore than watching a candidate you back lose an election is “interesting.”
In contrast, there’s Vanguard. Although you’re learning important information when you go with Mariana to Sri Lanka later this season, or Adam to Cambodia, or Christof to Italy, or Kaj to America’s military R & D centers, we understand that you’re going along with them because you want to, because it’s an interesting experience—at least, we hope it’s interesting and we try our best to make it so. We hope you agree.
Vanguard Season Preview (Video)
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Vanguard is here - Kaj Larsen
A big day for Vanguard - Lauren Cerre
A premiere dedication - Mariana van ZellerI’m sitting at my desk in Vanguard’s LA office wearing my Dodger blue... more
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Ten years ago this week, Laura Ling and I, along with Serena Altschul and producer Pat Lope, started working on a MTV documentary on the methamphetamine business that led, the following year, to the four of us creating the MTV doc series, “Breaking It Down with Serena.” Back in those days, this was a fairly new genre, and viewed a bit skeptically. The previous year, Serena had had to fight hard for the opportunity that she, and Pat, and Laura and I got in October of 1999. And at that point, we were on the spot to prove that what was then a fairly radical approach to journalism based documentary filmmaking would appeal to viewers.
MTV’s “Breaking It Down,” series went on to become one of the two documentary ancestors to Current’s Vanguard documentary series. The other was a series of PBS documentaries, starting in the mid-90s that first Anderson Cooper and I, and then Lisa Ling and I, and finally Laura and I did. Ten years ago, at the mainstream network news level, there was a degree of formula to the film-making. For trying to deviate from the prevailing standard, Anderson and Lisa and Serena were sometimes figures of controversy and consternation. Behind the scenes, people in power would ask me things like “Why do you let him be so informal?” “Why do you let her be in every shot?” “Why do you trust her?” And “why can’t you hold your f***ing camera steady?” To which I would answer something akin to “Well…” and wait for the subject to change. But the actual answer was that Anderson, and Lisa, Serena, and then Laura were radical. They weren’t interested in annoying the mainstream simply for the sake of pissing people off. But they were interested in using whatever new film-making techniques that they could if they thought this would make their journalism stronger and make their documentaries more illuminating and compelling.
In the ten years since, there has been a lot of change in what the mainstream of this business accepts. Serena is at CBS News, Anderson has his own show on CNN, and you can go into your local video store and rent the National Geographic docs that Lisa has made in recent years. And Laura is the vice president in charge of Vanguard, Current’s documentary making department.
Today, I still don’t hold my camera steady, but the approach to film-making that we use in Vanguard is no longer so controversial in the rest of TV. In this week’s premiere episode, The Oxycontin Express, I can’t imagine much criticism coming, say, because Darren Foster chose to shoot an interview without using a tripod. Similarly, Mariana Van Zeller did not have to get in a big fight behind the scenes with anyone here at Current to establish the freedom to ad lib on camera while shooting Oxy. But where we no longer have to fight so much for creative freedom, we still struggle and push ourselves to look for new innovations, for ever-better, ever more compelling and illuminating ways to tell stories that otherwise don’t get told. We really appreciate this opportunity. We hope that you appreciate the result, our new season of Vanguard.
Watch a few episodes of Vanguard:
- Rebels in the Pipeline - Mariana van Zeller reports from Nigeria
- Narco War Next Door - Laura Ling reports from Mexico
- I Heart Global Warming - Adam Yamaguchi reports from GreenlandTen years ago this week, Laura Ling and I, along with Serena Altschul and producer Pat... more
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In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Lisa Ling's husband Paul Song announces that the editorial we have been waiting 2 weeks for will be published very soon! Laura Ling and Euna Lee "will detail the circumstances surrounding their arrest and detention"
The Current TV crew consisting of Laura, Euna, and Mitch Koss travelled to Yanji (China) in March to conduct interviews with North Korean refugees. They were assisted by Durihana Mission Pastor Chun Ki-won in Seoul, who arranged their China itinerary and referred them to an ethnic Korean local guide that led them to the border. They also had cooperation from Durihana's Pastor Lee Chan-woo in Yanji, who facilitated reports at an orphanage and interviews with female North Korean refugees.
What happened next has been the subject of speculation but here are the facts we have so far:
1. Laura and Euna were arrested after crossing the China border at Yueqing onto North Korean territory along the Tumen River. Yueqing is located south of the town of Tumen, about an hour away from Current TV's assignment in the city of Yanji.
2. A camera and video were confiscated by Chinese police from Mitch Koss, who escaped capture by North Koreans at the border area in Yueqing.
3. A camera and videos were also confiscated by North Korean border sentries and used as evidence in Laura and Euna's trial in Pyongyang.
4. The ethnic Korean local guide, a citizen of China, was sentenced to six months in jail.
5. Lee Chan-woo's house was raided on March 19 by Chinese police who confiscated his computer, camera and various documents containing the personal information of 25 North Korean orphans staying at Yanji orphanages, as well as the phone numbers and addresses of human rights activists.In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Lisa Ling's husband Paul Song... more
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