60 Minutes was always theater. We knew that, right? We never really thought those blow-dried, million-dollar correspondents did the real work of researching and reporting their stories. And we never thought those watch-’em-sweat interviews were anything like real-time, real-life encounters. If a 60 Minutes crew came into our neck of the woods, we could also see that the stories weren’t necessarily original. Many are slick retellings of material that has been doggedly covered by the local press before it drifts up to the 60 Minutes editors and is anointed for a national audience. But we watch the finished product. It’s news fashioned to work on television, and it works well. There isn’t much discussion about whether the artifice employed to make it work somehow discredits the stories it reports.
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So it was a surprise to former 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman when The Insider, the Oscar-nominated movie about his battle to get a tobacco industry expose on the air, drew criticism because some aspects of the story had been changed for dramatic impact. Since The Insider (inspired by a Marie Brenner story in Vanity Fair) came out last fall, Bergman, a consultant on the film, has been accused of shaping the story to make himself look like a hero, of taking credit for things he didn’t actually do. Mike Wallace, as angry as the target of a 60 Minutes ambush, objected to the portrayal of himself buckling–leaving Bergman and his whistle-blower, Jeffrey Wigand, twisting in the wind when the network sniffed a possible lawsuit from the tobacco company Brown & Williamson. Bergman says Wallace’s objection is unwarranted. As for the rest of it: “Some people have forgotten–the movie’s not a documentary.”
But they’re not the ones complaining. “I’ve always said the movie gives me too much credit for too many things,” Bergman says. “But you’ll have to talk to Michael Mann about that. The criticism is coming from people who take credit all the time for stuff they didn’t do. Every week. On 60 Minutes. That’s the whole way the show is built–to make the audience think that the characters you see, the correspondents, did everything. The movie shows accurately that Mike Wallace early on made it clear to me that he was not going to push the edge of the envelope on this issue. The reality is that people who had very little to lose, in my opinion, were unwilling to take risks.”
Bergman, now at work on a four-hour Frontline documentary on the international narcotics industry (to air in the fall), will speak at 7:30 PM, March 20, at Harper College. He’ll talk about “what goes into making the sausages we call television newsmagazines” and the thing that interested him in Wigand’s story to begin with–the rare peek it afforded at private-sector power. His lecture will be given at the theater of the Business and Social Science Center, 1200 W. Algonquin Road, Palatine. Admission is $7; call 847-925-6100.
