Source – thedailybeast.com
– Recriminations and accusations are flying after the PBS series shelved veteran reporter Lowell Bergman’s documentary about the gambling industry in Macau.
Can this media marriage be saved?
Given that the separation has been prompted by the cancellation of a documentary on the gambling industry, the odds are probably less than 50 to 1.
Meanwhile, a once-devoted partnership is—like many divorces—devolving into recriminations, anger and injured feelings.
The petitioner is swashbuckling investigative reporter Lowell Bergman, a star professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and director of UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program; he was famously portrayed by Al Pacino in The Insider, the Oscar-nominated 1999 movie that dramatized how Bergman, as a producer for 60 Minutes, brought Big Tobacco to its knees.
The respondent is Frontline, the 32-year-old award-winning public television series that regularly speaks truth to power, along with its founder, David Fanning, and its executive producer, Raney Aronson-Rath.
Bergman and his team of producers, cinematographers, reporters, film editors, and fact-checkers had made a 90-minute documentary, Bigger Than Vegas—the result of a two-year investigation into the shrouded activities of Chinese organized crime figures and money-launderers, and their alleged ties to American-owned casinos, awash in billions of dollars that apparently violated Chinese currency restrictions in China’s special administrative region of Macau.
A former Portuguese colony on the Pearl River Delta, Macau boasted only around 640,000 permanent residents, yet its gambling and hospitality businesses threw off an estimated $80 billion a year.
For the past quarter-century, Bergman, 69, has worked prolifically with Frontline, toiling as a producer, writer, director, or correspondent on 27 Frontline investigative documentaries, notably A Dangerous Business, a collaboration with The New York Times about a multibillion-dollar pipe manufacturer’s rampant safety and pollution violations—for which Bergman shared the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
“In the end we had to make a difficult decision about whether the film as constructed met our editorial standards. It did not.”
Most recently—just last week—Frontline aired Rape on the Night Shift, a joint production with Univision, for which Bergman is credited as director and writer and also appeared as a correspondent. But that, by most accounts, was his swan song.
Bigger Than Vegas (originally titled The Gods of Gambling) had been planned as the Frontline series’ season finale in May 2014, then was postponed until the following September 30 season premiere, which was advertised in a promotional trailer shown on PBS stations a couple of weeks beforehand.
Then, after much handwringing and many disagreements between Frontline and Team Bergman over various edits of the film, it was delayed once again, tentatively rescheduled, and finally cancelled for good on January 22 of this year.
“I don’t think that that’s unusual in journalism,” Frontline’s Aronson-Rath told The Daily Beast in her only comment for this story. “Journalists and editors have editorial disagreements. You’ve been in the field long enough to know that that’s the case.”
But Team Bergman contends that Frontline, which owns the footage and funded the film to the tune of $700,000, killed it mainly out of a fear of litigation from billionaire gambling titans Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson.
Fanning and Aronson-Rath had already decided to postpone the documentary last September when Wynn, 73, slapped a slander suit on hedge fund manager James Chanos, who was interviewed on camera for the film.
Wynn sued for remarks Chanos made at Bergman’s annual investigative reporting symposium in April 2014 on the Berkeley campus, where excerpts of the rough cut were screened for an invited audience.
Chanos, who famously made a killing in 2001 by shorting Enron stock before that fraudulent energy company collapsed in scandal, told the crowd, according to court papers, that he “got a little nervous the deeper we dug into Macau”—by far the planet’s largest gambling venue, churning money at six or seven times the rate of Las Vegas.
Chanos added that he “began to really get concerned about the risk I was taking with clients’ money under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and a variety of other, you know, aspects of exactly how business is done there.”
Mentioning “U.S. operators like Mr. Adelson and Mr. Wynn,” Chanos argued that while “they might be adhering to every aspect of legal requirements in what they were doing, there was still an attempt to mislead and an attempt to obfuscate,” according to court papers.
“Almost any company doing meaningful amounts of business in China,” Chanos continued, “probably could be found in violation of the FCPA.”
Federal Judge William Orrick ultimately dismissed Wynn’s lawsuit with prejudice, declaring that Chanos’s carefully parsed comments could not be construed as defamation, and ruled last month that the casino mogul was liable for $422,380 of the hedge fund manager’s legal fees.
Still, Team Bergman and Frontline considered Wynn’s lawsuit a “shot across the bow”—a warning that the billionaire would be ready to drag them into costly litigation, even frivolous litigation, at the slightest provocation.
The 81-year-old Adelson, meanwhile, has repeatedly filed lawsuits against nosy journalists who dare criticize his casinos, although he’s better known as an extravagantly generous donor to Republican candidates who pledge their support for Israel.
“We at the Investigative Reporting Program believe that the story was killed for two reasons—their editorial concerns and their concerns about the legal consequences,” Bergman told an audience of fellow journalists who attended this year’s symposium in late April.
He added that Frontline’s decision to cancel the documentary, and the refusal of another public television outlet to carry it, were symptomatic of “the chilling atmosphere that exists today when you have potential deep-pocket litigants.”
Bergman had provided Frontline with an advance copy of his remarks; Fanning pleaded with him not to make the cancellation of the documentary an embarrassing public issue.
When Bergman went ahead anyway, that was enough to send the Frontline folks to battle stations.
Fanning, who stepped down last month to become Frontline’s executive producer at large, and Aronson-Rath, who succeeded him in the top job, responded with a blistering press release that essentially accused Team Bergman of sloppy journalism.
Bergman “is suggesting that we acted out of fear of litigation from powerful entities,” they wrote in an unprecedented airing of dirty laundry. “To be clear: our reasons for canceling the film were editorial…“[W]e tried over many iterations to reach an acceptable final edit. We postponed the broadcast twice because we didn’t believe it was ready, including finding out about serious factual issues less than two weeks before air last fall.”
They continued: “Despite more time, Lowell and his team were not able to provide strong enough sourcing and reporting to support key elements of the film.
“In the end we had to make a difficult decision about whether the film as constructed met our editorial standards. It did not…[U]nfortunately, the film did not live up to the journalistic obligations to accuracy, fairness and proof that Frontline demands.”
The press release amounted to a declaration of war—a strange and upsetting circumstance for both sides, considering their impressive journalistic credentials and long history of friendship and collaboration.
Members of Team Bergman told The Daily Beast that they were deeply offended and outraged by Frontline’s public statement.
They said their film had been “triple fact-checked,” in the words of one Bergman partisan who accused Frontline of “managerial incompetence” and vowed never to work with the PBS series again.
Others said Fanning and Aronson-Rath, after months of hesitating, took on the project having been explicitly cautioned by Bergman that a lawsuit from Adelson, Wynn, or both, was a near-certainty.
Worse—according to Bergman’s legal advisers—Frontline’s harsh public critique could easily become evidence in potential litigation concerning not only the Macau exposé, but also any other lawsuit prompted by Team Bergman’s future investigative projects.
Any prospective plaintiff, they argue, would likely subpoena Fanning and Aronson-Rath to testify against their former collaborators.
“I don’t think people are well served on the side of investigative reporting by throwing charges at one another,” said prominent First Amendment attorney Gary Bostwick, who had been counseling Bergman for the better part of a decade.
“I started as a plaintiff’s lawyer—I have that sensibility,” Bostwick added, noting that he represented convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald against writer Joe McGinnis in one famous lawsuit, and baseball star Steve Garvey against Newsweek in another.
“Just from a law professor’s point of view,” Bostwick said, “I can tell you that as a plaintiff’s lawyer, if I looked at statements like that [such as Frontline’s], I would agree…that opens you up. You’ve just said, ‘I’m a witness. I’m a witness to possible actual malice.’”
Fanning, for his part, told The Daily Beast: “I find this really so unseemly—we are being accused of chickening out in the face of litigation.”
Read Full Article…
RIELPOLITIK 