LECTURE
Brian
Palmer
Audience: I was just curious, but in a war
zone, and you may or may not be able to answer this question, but
in a war zone, to what extent does the term “secure area”--like
when the U.S. government will say that we have secured a certain
area. I can see on the
surface that you’re not going to get shot by snipers, but I’m
also wondering to the extent that it’s been sanitized that
when the media comes in, certain things are not seen. Do you think they do that?
Palmer: You mean in terms of the U.S. military in Afghanistan? Or the Israeli military?
Audience: Yes,
right, because sometimes I hear that journalists are going outside
of these secured areas, and you guys are either on psychotropic medication
(Laughter) or you don’t seem to be getting the truth in these
secured areas so you’re going out.
Palmer: That’s actually a very good question, and it varies from
area to area. Secure
area, I’m not sure that they would use that exact term. I think, for example, in Operation Anaconda
in the Paktia region in Afghanistan where I did that live shot in
my little fuzzy fleece thing, a few days after that the U.S. military
claimed to have secured a particular area in the mountains and gotten
all the fighters out of there. That’s
not an area that we had access to. It’s
a remote area and they did fly members of the press up there when
it was conducive to doing so, and when the military decided to do
so. So that’s the only reason you got
any media pictures out of there is because they took a pool in--actually,
the first pool that they flew in there were six journalists, two
of whom were from CNN, named Marty Savage and Scotty McQuinny, a
correspondent and a cameraman, and things didn’t go exactly
as planned. They got caught in a firefight--they weren’t so much
in danger as separated from their cold weather gear. So during the day it’s 60s, 50s, in the mountains, but
at night it drops to well below freezing. So
six of these journalists and some of these reporters almost died
because between them and their cold weather gear, were an unidentified
number of Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. The
best laid plans of mice and men get really fucked up sometimes, and
I think in that situation, after that, the U.S. press and everyone
was pretty much reporting what the military was saying, that the
Al-Qaeda forces had been driven out of this area. Well,
you know, unless you can independently verify that, unless you can
get on the ground and verify that, you don’t know. So that
was a very hard thing for people to report because obviously, if
the Brits had to launch Operation--what was it? chicken-snipe, whatever?
(Laughter) It had some odd name, but they had to launch another operation
several weeks later. Obviously,
that wasn’t a secure area. Now, as far as areas like countries like Haiti or wherever,
that’s a similar situation. I
went into Haiti with the U.S. Army in 1994 when Bill Clinton declared
he was going to make this administrative landing, and if you travel
with the Pentagon pool, then you agree to play by their rules, so
that means that if they tell you that your photos and your reports
are embargoed, which means you can’t release them until we
say, you can release them, that’s fine. Generally they don’t censor anything
anymore, they just tell you when you can put it out or not. So they did that in Haiti, but we had
the choice of leaving the pool at a certain point. When you’re
out on a U.S. naval ship, you can’t leave the pool. You have to play by their rules. But if you’re on the
ground in Haiti and you’re willing to forego their protection,
you can just walk out, which is what we did after a certain point. So yeah, unless you can independently
verify that an area has been pacified, secured, whatever, it’s
like any form of journalism--you need more than one source and the
U.S. Army, U.S. Navy and the entire military structure, they’re
going to give you the version of the story that they want you to
hear. It’s not
necessarily a lie, it’s not necessarily the truth, but it is
an interpretation of events that they want publicized. That’s a long way to answer your
question.
No
TV questions? Oh, yeah?
Audience: I’m
wondering with the editing? You said you have a lot of control about how a story gets
packaged, but I was wondering, how much control you have, say if
you are out in the field and you’re sending footage back, then
how that gets together, in terms of images?
Palmer: That’s a really good question. There are a zillion different ways, well,
not a zillion, maybe about five different ways that packages get
put together. The package
I did last night, which I don’t know if anyone saw it, it was
on at 10 a.m., it was on the priest sexual abuse scandal, one of
the bishops, the bishop in Long Island, gave a mass of reconciliation
and healing asking people for forgiveness, so fair enough. It’s
news. He got up in the
pulpit, he gave this blanket apology, essentially, without getting
very, very specific, so then we went to talk to one of the victims. So I conducted all of those interviews,
thankfully. I don’t
always get to conduct all my interviews because of the pace that
we work at. Sometimes we send a producer here, I
go here and someone else goes there, and then I have all this stuff
left and I try to put it all together at the end. Since
I’d worked the entire day I wrote this script, I chose what
I felt were the most moving pictures, and I just write that into
the script, and then I turn that over to the producer at that point. If I have a good relationship with the
producer, I turn it over, particularly if I’ve already worked
a 12-15 hour day. If
I don’t necessarily feel that that producer has the same aesthetic,
or just the same understanding of the story, then I’ll go into
the edit room. So I can go from soup to nuts if I wish,
when I have time. The
Little League piece was pretty much a similar process. I did all the interviewing. Some of the Afghanistan pieces and most of the security pieces
were cut in Atlanta. We
would feed the video to them and they would decide pretty much what
pictures to use. Since
I’m writing the script, they can’t--like if I say Hamid
Karzai walks down the road, they can’t show Britney Spears--it
would be pretty tough to get away with that. I
do control things to a large degree, but there’s so much outside
the picture that I don’t control. As
I mentioned, I pitch about five percent of my total production, so
about 95 percent of the stories that I do are assigned. I
do the stories the way I want to do them, but generally, I’m
executing someone else’s ideas. But
it is really heartening to be able to shape things the way that I
want them shaped. It’s
not like what comes out of my head, what comes out of my fingers
goes directly onto TV. There is a gatekeeper. There’s a senior executive producer,
I think I mentioned this, before anything gets made into TV. From like my tapings on a computer to
a cut piece, I have to pick up the phone to a supervising executive
producer in Atlanta on the row. There’s
this row. During the
week it’s a row of people on Sunday it’s usually just
one guy. And they go through your script, and
generally speaking, these are people who are experienced reporters
and experienced journalists which is a pretty damn heartening thing. I say that in distinction to folks that
are going to be really conscious about, like, “Can you say
that? Is that going to offend our core demographic?” We
don’t have a lot of those people on the row which is a good
thing. They’re generally approving scripts for, like, “Did
you back-up this fact or this point that you make.” I can only recall one instance of having
something taken out of my script without someone telling me. This illustrates that larger point of
I don’t always get to do what I’m assigned. You know what happened in the Crown Heights neighborhood in
Brooklyn ten years ago? A
summer or very concentrated period of what were called riots, but
sort of malaise and violent confrontations between members of the
Hasidic community and members of the Caribbean and African-American
community after a young Caribbean-American boy was run over by a
car that went out of control. That car just happened to be in the motorcade of the Lubavitcher
rebbe, one of the fundamentalist sects of Hasidic Judaism. And there are already tensions in that
community. I covered
that for The Voice in ’91 as a photographer. It
was a very, very meaningful, and something that was near and dear
to my heart, because of the fact that you had these two communities
living together at each others throats, and then the cops trying
to figure out how to keep them apart. It
devastated New York, it brought down a Mayor. Ten
years later I said, we have to do this story. So
that was my idea, I got everything going, and at the last minute
someone decided we didn’t need to do this ten-year anniversary
story. What we needed
to do was a story on Harley Davidson in advance to George Bush’s
trip to a Harley Davidson factory. So
I was tasked with producing a kind of piece about Harley Davidson
and I had issues with that. I
had such a personal connection to the Crown Heights story. I
was there in the wee hours, watching people throwing rocks and people
going after each other with kitchen knives--it was part of history. But also, it’s a community that
hasn’t entirely healed. There
have been some dialogues and people have gotten, blah –blah,
whatever, but . . .
Younger: .
. .but there have been some really heroic efforts . . .
Palmer: Yes, yes, which is what I talked about in the story. That was the story. There’s a group of women from the
Hasidic community and women from the Caribbean-American community
who got together and started the dialogue. There
was a lot of stuff going on there. One of my enduring interests and one of the reasons I became
a journalist, was to talk about this really horribly cancerous racial
situation in this country. How
everything, so much of everything, that we look at is through this
prism of black/white race relations. This
country is so cancerous in that effect, we can’t even look
at . . .
We’re
totally nuts and we’re secretly obsessed with it, we can’t
talk about it openly--that’s why I wanted to talk about it
openly in this story. So
I’d already started work on it, we were driving back to the
bureau on a Friday. Friday is my Wednesday, by the way, because
I work Saturdays and Sundays, so I was really psyched. We got a whole bunch of really great
interviews with some of the women in this group--a lot of people. “We need you to do this story and
we need you to do it fast.” So
I said, well, I didn’t exactly say “no,” but I
said, “What about the Crown Heights story?” My deputy bureau chief said, “It’s
dead.” And, I
said, “No.” Because
I didn’t say it as succinctly as that, I think I had some “fucks” and “shits” in
there. So my producer just took the phone from me and wouldn’t
let me speak to my boss. My
boss is a true journalist, and she fought with the powers that be
not to kill the Harley Davidson story, but to let us do both. Which means that you’re doing two
stories in the same time that you did one. Anyway, to make a long story short, we sent a whole bunch
of producers out to do Harley Davidson-related stuff; to find those
guys who have those Harley clubs and they ride and they sit around
and they rub their bellies and they do whatever Harley Davidson rider
do, and they interviewed them, and say, “Hey, why did you get
a Harley?” and they’d say, “Well, you know, it’s
great, it’s an American tradition, blah-blah-blah, and it’s
not a Jap bike.” We
interviewed not a huge number of people, but of all the producers
and me that we sent out, probably about a dozen Harley riders of
various stripes, and that term “Jap bike” came up fully
a quarter or third of the time. So
I put it in the story, thinking that this was an appropriate representation
of some of the riders that we talked to. And
the script was approved, and needless to say, I left the office thinking, “Wow,
I did a little something that they didn’t expect, but I thought
needed to be done with this story,” because it’s not
just this sort of seamless, isn’t Harley a great company? Harley
has a very problematic past, and one has to look at that past. They have positioned themselves as this
all-American company and they’ve encouraged this cult of Harley. And I also had a stockbroker riders,
the yuppie riders, the guy who divorced his wife and bought a Harley,
and whatever, and that Jap bike reference disappeared from the story
when it aired, and there’s a whole long chain of email about
why it was taken out, and it was taken out because they thought it
would offend the viewers. That kind of thing happens occasionally,
but I guess I would have preferred to have been at the table discussing
that. Some people may
very well have been offended by that term, and I could have possibly
found a way to say all of those things in my own voice without using
the racist term. However,
I felt that since someone said it and it wasn’t just a single
person, it was a representative of a lot of people that we talked
to. . . what do you think about that?
Audience: The
propaganda? The commercial
aspect of Harley being a company that possibly promotes monies, does
that make sense?
Palmer: Yeah,
and I think that’s something that both Marc and Danny talked
about.
Audience: I guess I’m asking this question because does everybody
know the history of Harley in terms of military?
Palmer: Yeah, and not everybody thinks that’s a bad thing. Harley made military bikes way, way back
when during WWII, and that’s a brief history.
That’s
the other thing that we were sort of talking about. Like what constraints does a TV reporter work under? Time. It’s luxurious for me to get two minutes and 30 seconds
to tell a story, and if I go above two minutes, people start twitching,
because they’re like, how do we fit that into our show? You can’t say a lot in two minutes,
and you certainly can’t talk a lot about nuance, but as far
as the corporate propaganda issue, I would say that companies are,
well, business journalism, the coverage of companies, has been um,
um, I’m trying to think of a diplomatic way to say it, but
I think it sucked largely, and I think there’s an unquestioned
premise that, generally speaking, ah, forget diplomacy--a lot of
business journalists don’t know what they’re talking
about, and I think you saw that in reporting on all those Internet
companies in the late 90s, and I think there is a sort of boosterism,
buy into the myth, that corporate health equals economic health,
so there wasn’t much questioning of what companies actually
did and whether companies were actually making money, but again that’s
some heavy-ass nuance that’s really hard to get into when you’re
doing a story. I could reference that in a passing line,
like Harley Davidson tanked in the 80s, they had a really tough time,
but that’s a line. So
you’re basically hitting bullet points the best that you can,
and you’re trying to leave the nuance for the people themselves,
and you hope that you just get a sound byte that is coherent and
spiffy and, as Danny said, under nine seconds. People
flip when I put a 20-second sound byte in a story, because they’re
wondering if I can told the viewer’s attention for that long.
Audience: I
have a question about something that Danny Schechter said last time
when he talked about the Dan Rather coverage that was in London but
only in one tiny place in the States, and that kind of coverage or
non-coverage in the U.S. media? And
I also heard through different sources about the Chinese Embassy,
was it Kosovo that got bombed by the American military? And
that there were all these reports about the Chinese doing a lot of
espionage and shuttling information through their embassy and the
Americans didn’t like that, so anyway, that it wasn’t
just a mistake. It could have been a mis-que, but it wasn’t a mistake. But
that wasn’t covered anywhere through U.S. media. I
think it went internationally. . .
Palmer: And that’s the thing--it was covered, but I think that,
I mean, I happened to be in China about a week after that B2 bomber
dropped a joint direct attack munitions, don’t ask me why I
know that, on the Chinese embassy and killed, I think, five people. All of my Chinese friends, because I lived in Beijing for
two years, from the not so educated to the graduate-school-educated,
did not believe that the U.S. could have done that by accident. Like how could the advanced military
in the world do something so stupid and make such a big mistake. Like the CIA got the address wrong. They
didn’t believe that. But
me, sort of thinking, well gosh, this is a totally--it’s a
series of bureaucracies that are out of control--it was conceivable
to me. I think the problem
in the U.S. press is because of the culture of the people writing
the stories and doing the reporting, they were predisposed to my
predisposition, that this mistake was possible, so that was a real
cultural bias, I think. I
think Europeans, at least the European press, they’re probably
a bit more skeptical of US policy--not probably--they are. And
I think that you saw a more sustained treatment and probably a more
even-handed treatment of those Chinese doubts. I
think that there was perhaps a bit of a dismissive tone adopted toward
those Chinese doubts, like “oh, these people just don’t
know what they’re talking about, state-controlled media, they’re
not getting real information.” So
I think that was more of a cultural barrier. In terms of the other barrier that you’re talking about,
Dan Rather’s remarkable 180, which I actually didn’t
read, I didn’t know about it when Danny said that, it goes
back to something else that both Danny and Mark talked about, and
that I talked about. I didn’t use the words “self-censorship,” but
I think that people who shape the news are largely from the same--well,
it’s a different culture argument--are largely from the same
culture (A) and (B), they’re serving shareholders, they’re
serving a different bottom-line, they have to be conscious of the
product they’re putting out in the world because the product
has to be consumed otherwise their company tanks, the stock prices
go down, and their ass gets fired. People
do, at the higher level, think in those terms. It
might not be the foremost thing in their mind, but I think it does
perhaps keep people from delving into those really thorny stories,
like Dan Rather defying conventional wisdom, or the story I mentioned
before. Like maybe it’s time to talk to
a woman and a family who are in the welfare-to-work program here
in New York. One woman
who was working for, another woman who isn’t working for, but
that takes time, that takes money, it takes reporters to go after
this, you’ve got to get your facts straight, isn’t it
easier to just go live from the Chandra Levy press conference. You
don’t need to do any reporting. Period. So anyway.
Younger: Okay,
this is not Jon, this is Phil Gefter who’s on a little bit
later. Do you know Phil?
Palmer: Yes. Yeah, Brian
Palmer--I used to shoot some stuff, way back, for you.
Younger: I wanted to ask you one question, since we’re going to
be dealing with it most of the day, when CNN started broadcasting
about how we went to war, because I saw that like boom-boom-boom,
well it’s the story of the Jews, well it’s this, they’re
blaming these people, now we’re not going to Muslims, it was
almost like a program--boom, boom, boom--of how we were going to
go to war and who we were going to go to war with.
Palmer: What I wanted to do, in your description of how the media turned,
and I don’t know if you folks, you probably read that because
it’s in your program description, a day or two after 9/11,
you said that the tenor of coverage. I
actually don’t agree with that. I
think that. . .
Younger: I
taped it.
Palmer: But Tom’s reports say that for the most part, the media
focused, during that first period, focused better on facts. Fact-based. I think people were sort of scrambling to report what had
gone on at the Pentagon and New York and in this field in Pennsylvania. That’s not to say that the interpretation
that wasn’t coming on around that, but for the most part, I
think that when we think of the news broadcasters and the anchors
and the correspondents, I think that people were generally sticking
pretty well to the facts. Now
that banner, that “America’s New War” shit, oh,
I shouldn’t say that, that live shot that I showed you was
from the 15th, so yeah, that stuff popped up pretty quickly,
and I wasn’t in the corporate board rooms for those decisions,
but again, I think that was a decision made by people at a very high
level, that we have to circle the wagons. I can’t claim to have any deep insight into what the
powers that be in Atlanta and New York and the other networks were
thinking, but there was a conscious decision to play-up first, the
America Attacked angle, and then it moved into. . but what troubled
me more is what Danny was talking about. Having
covered 9/11 for like ten days straight, with barely enough time
to wash my underwear in-between live shots, and I did, by the way,
but. . . it wasn’t the dissent so much, there was a groundswell
of “we are family” kind of feeling at ground zero, in
lower Manhattan, all over New York, I felt it, and that’s what
I felt was given short shrift, and then I think the administration
sort of cynically blew by that or co-opted that and turned that into
jingle-isms, so instead of some other color ribbon that we might
chose to symbolize the fact that Jews and Muslims and Koreans and
African Americans and Caribbean Americans died in the world trade
center, it was about this American Hero who died, and that was when
the manipulation happened. Again, I don’t know how it happened,
and I think that’s something we should delve into today.
Younger: There was one other thing I noticed too. It’s when people would be interviewed,
if they started to express an opinion, well, “wait a minute,
let’s see who did it first, or let’s not jump to conclusions,” they
honestly cut them off and went to somebody else. And Michael Moore was never on television.
Palmer: I
think we have to be specific, and if anybody remembers any of the
specific newscasts, I think you have to be specific about the newscasts
and the newscasters that you talk about, because I think there was
so much reporting going on and there were so many styles, I think
there were, and I obviously can’t name names, but there are
people I was very, very disappointed with because I think there were
some newscasters who decided that the version of the story that would
get out is the version of the story that they wanted out, and they
were the ones who chopped off debate. That
was problematic. But
when I did my live shots, I made it a point to entertain, or at least,
if a person had a couple of brain cells, more than a couple, had
an intelligent position, then I would want them on the air, but most
of the reporting I was doing was disaster reporting.
Younger: Yeah,
you were right down there. You
weren’t like up on 14th Street or what we were seeing
all over the rest of the city, walking around
Palmer: No, and I think that will hopefully be something that we get
into a bit, both from the print side and the whole issue of dissent,
because I think that gets into the self-censorship thing. The argument was “this is war time, circle the wagons,
and defend America.” Other
people have a different impression or opinion of how you defend. Like first you own up to the mistakes
that landed to this event and try to assess. . .
Younger.
. . who really did it.
Palmer. Yeah, and then you go from there. But there’s a different agenda. There were a whole bunch of . . .
Younger: I
just wanted to add one quick comment. It was CNN only that I was listening to because the tower
went down.
Audience: At
the time, I live in New York, and I don’t have cable, and the
only station that was available to me was CBS, and I couldn’t
get news for two or three days, maybe longer. I
don’t know when the news stations started to get their antennas
back. Imagine the population
of New York not getting information. Even
the radios were down. So
anything that happened spontaneously, we didn’t know.
Palmer: Right. That’s
a really good point. I
think that’s a tremendous point.
Younger: Why don’t you let him ask his question.
Audience: This is back in the whole idea of self-censorship, because
when you were talking about how you turn over your stories to one
of the all-powerful people who goes through it line by line, to me,
that’s sort of analogous, and the commercial photography I’ve
done is showing your Polaroids to the art director. It
occurs to me that we learned really quickly from four to five projected
Polaroids, what the Polaroids were getting accepted should look like. So I’m wondering to the extent
that you think there’s that learning curve for people, and
even if you, like you did with the Harley Davidson story, just say, “You
know what? I’m
just going to spit it out there,” and even if you’re
trying, to what extent media-wide do you think people do that for
five to seven years, get spent, and just want to get out?
Palmer: I think that’s a good point. I think it has to do with the heart and the goals of the individual. Speaking
from this individual’s perspective, I know that I pick and
choose my fights. When I first wrote scripts, I thought, “Damn
it, I’m going to get everything in there,” you know? And
my voice will be undiluted on CNN, and you end up in endless script
approval processes with your executive producer. And
it’s not that I’m writing things that I think they want
to hear, but my style has changed and I think it’s both for
the better and the mediocre, simply because that’s the TV format,
and that’s the CNN format, but I don’t think I ever compromise
the essential things, which is if this story is going to focus on
the victim of priestly sexual abuse, I’m going to pick what
I hope is the most poignant sound byte. I wish we could do a whole documentary on him or her, but
that’s not going to go away. I
can’t speak for other people, but you have to look at whether
people’s loyalties are--you know, people have complicated sets
of loyalties--but, whether your loyalty is to the ethics of journalism,
to the people in your stories and/or to the bureaucracy. And I don’t think they’re always mutually exclusive. I
think if you work for a good benign bureaucracy, then those loyalties
aren’t always in conflict, but sometimes they are. What
will it cost me, what will it cost the next person to go to the mat
and say, “Listen, this is not negotiable. This fact is important, I’ve researched it, I’ve
documented it, it’s reported, I have sources. Just because it makes you uncomfortable is not my problem. This
is news.”
Audience: Do
you have that right? Can
you say, if they want to make a change, can you say “no” and
then the story dies?
Palmer: Well
obviously not with the Harley Davidson thing, no. That happened without my consultation. It’s
never gotten to that point, because again, most of the people that
I work with on the row are real journalists, and they’ll say, “Gosh,
the lawyers are really gonna be pissed, but we’re going to
go with it.”
Younger: What
I’d like to do is go ahead and get Phil started because if
Jon comes later or something, we’ll have a little space to
put him in there.
Palmer
Analysis
by
Danny Yahav-Brown
Brian
Palmer’s work as a journalist is located at the “heart
of the consensus”. Palmer joined CNN US and International in
2000 after spending time as the Beijing bureau chief for US News. Before
that, Palmer served as an assistant editor and frequent contributor
to the Village Voice, mostly covering issues of race and politics.
Palmer
explained that his role as correspondent in a major cable network
like CNN could sometimes be problematic. As
a news organization supported by advertisers, CNN is in a constant
race for ratings. Palmer’s job tends to suffer from objective
limitations, stemming from a lack of airtime and frequent dictated
assignments by the executive producer. Working under these limitations
can undermine the quality of the product, as it leaves little room
for criticism and reflection. This pattern seems to be part of a
growing phenomenon within the three major networks and competing
cable networks.
Palmer’s
talk suggests that although in most cases it seems like correspondents
tend to follow the cable networks guidelines, there is always a way
out of this loop--a subtle mechanism that will make room for reflection.
This can be seen in Palmer’s piece about a support rally for
Israel, which took place in New York City. In
such a case, bringing people with different points of view into the
picture, Palmer has inadvertently succeeded in giving a voice to
the Palestinian agenda as well as revealing the militant Israeli
face. Palmer managed
to bring to the surface an ongoing cultural phenomenon of racism
toward the supposed “other”. And
in less than five minutes, Palmer gave CNN’s viewers a sneak
peek into the Israeli and Palestinian conflict and a synopsis of
the level of hate and antagonism that exists between the two people.
Operating
within the establishment, but being very aware of its nature at the
same time, Brian Palmer is practicing a level of subversive journalism,
by opening a crack to better news packaging but all of this still
generates many questions on the nature of distributing and consuming
news. How far can a reporter go with personal views while working
on a political piece, such as one about a pro-Israeli rally, while
maintaining a diversity of opinions at the same time? But
most importantly, how can the reporter keep a critical distance from
the medium itself?