Vanguard Blog

Tomorrow, Vanguard is moving offices from here in Hollywood to a lot in downtown Los Angeles.  Like other lots, this one has a lot of security and badges and so forth.  Where we are now is a little less informal, with a double garage door that rolls up to admit light and air on warmer days, such as today.  It’s also, as I’ve alluded, in a pretty vivid part of Hollywood in terms of street action.   I think I’ve also mentioned that back in 2001, a block away, Laura Ling and I shot an hour episode of the “Breaking It Down with Serena,” series that we produced for MTV called “A Week on the Streets.”

But the first time I shot a story here was in December of 2001.  My friend and former colleague Anderson Cooper, then an ABC News correspondent, had gotten the news division to agree to do a story on the male street hustlers who stood out on Santa Monica Boulevard, and my employer of the time, Channel One News, agreed to loan me out to help produce it.

Anderson and I were happy to be working together again, and, so, one rainy and cold—for LA—night in early December, there we were on Santa Monica Boulevard.  Anderson had a small format camera.  I had a small format camera.  There was a two person union crew with a beta cam to make things meet the union requirements then in place at ABC News.  The only thing there wasn’t at the end of the evening were any male street hustlers on camera.

We all came back the following night, and initially, had no better luck.

It turned out that simply by standing there with all of our cameras, looking friendly, we couldn’t get them to walk up to us and spontaneously start telling us their stories.  It was kind of discouraging.

But that’s because had lost sight of an important point in this business: You can’t be sure if people will talk to you unless you ask them.  So I was obliged to start walking up to people and saying: “Excuse me, sir, I couldn’t help notice that you’re standing here on this curb, looking into the cars that drive past.  Are you perhaps a male sex worker?  If so, would like to be on ABC News?”  After approaching no more than two or three people, I got one to agree.  Then it was easy to find more.   Pretty soon, there’s a street hustler who’s also selling methamphetamine, standing next to Anderson on the corner of Highland and Santa Monica near midnight on a Saturday, talking about what he looks for in the passing cars.

No one in Vanguard seems to have ever done a follow-up with these guys, to see how their business is serving the toughest economic times since the 1930s.  On the one hand, you might expect that there are more of them out there now—the LAPD and LA Sheriff’s Department permitting.  On the other hand, it could be the johns have less money to spend too.  And now we won’t know, unless someone else does the story, because we’re moving out of the neighborhood and going downtown.

Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- Eating on the run with Vanguard – Joanne Shen
- What Came Through the Wall – Mitch Koss
- Does porn have the answer? – Christof Putzel
- What world have we entered? – Mitch Koss
- Hey Electronic Arts, when you going to do a pirate video game? – Kaj Larsen
- Christof’s Doc, the Porn Community, and Obscenity… – Mitch Koss

Adam Yamaguchi and I are making a presentation next week to a group of public information officers for large institutions on the topic of why Vanguard is great and worth co-operating with. Which, as we prepare for it, forces us to confront the question: Are we?

One of our ambitions for being in the Vanguard is to tell you about important stuff that you ideally didn’t know too much about, if at all. Think of the new episodes that we’ve put up this season, and the worlds that Mariana and Adam and Adrian have entered to show you things that you should know. We sometimes like to think of ourselves as sometimes serving as an early warning for issues that later will become prominent—hence our name. But for you to heed what we’re telling you, you have to trust that we know what we’re talking about, that we’re not exaggerating, or misunderstanding, or misrepresenting the situation at hand.

Why should you trust us?

The same question pervades what we do in producing Vanguard. A lot of what we do behind the scenes involves talking with various individuals and institutions and asking them to cooperate for free with us in putting together one of our documentaries. Imagine that you’re minding your own business and I call you up, say my name and the name of this network, name some subject or another that I’m researching, and launch into a series of questions. If I were calling on behalf of some more recognizable entity—such as MTV or the Newshour on PBS, which I have—it still requires a leap of faith for you to engage me. What if I’m lying? I could be: 1) a prankster; 2) an identity thief; 3) a salesperson; or 4) a nut. When you add to that dynamic the fact that I work for a new series, Vanguard, on a new network, Current, that average person might not yet know about, then it’s even more amazing how the vast majority of people respond cooperatively. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed by how nice people can be and feel like blurting out into the phone: “Thank you sir/madam for not hanging up on me!” But that would probably make the person on the other end of the line suddenly wonder if I was 4) a nut.

Anyway, what we hope persuades the subjects who agree to help with or be in our documentaries, is the same thing that persuades you to trust our work when you watch it: As much as possible, we approach our stories without a particular angle. We’re not trying to prove a particular point, we’re trying to illuminate a situation so that you can make your own mind up about it. If, for example, Laura makes a Vanguard documentary in which there are both cops and criminals, which she has, then we like to think that she could show the result to both an audience or cops and an audience of criminals, and both groups would feel fairly represented. Ideally, if you cooperate with us when we’re shooting a story, we portray you as you are, without us filtering the information or telling the viewer how to feel about it. And similarly, if you watch one of Vanguard’s documentaries, you shouldn’t get the feeling that we’re manipulating you to react in a particular way. The human spirit rebels when it senses that it is being pressured to abandon independent judgment. Oscar Wilde put it most famously: “It would take a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” Three quarters of a century later, Andy Warhol used a more laconic version of the same thought: “But that’s what I like about it.” We try our best to bring you compelling stories with important information. We leave it up to you how to react. And we like to think that this makes us trustworthy.

Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- My Second Tour of Sri Lanka – Mariana van Zeller
- Chinese Mobsters and Megacities – Joanne Shen
- The world: A dangerous place for do-gooders – Kaj Larsen
- The world: A dangerous place for reporters – Darren Foster
- Sometimes that which seemed impossible actually comes to pass – Mitch Koss
- Doctors Wanted: no experience necessary! – Cerissa Tanner

Yesterday my colleague Darren wrote about how the world is becoming increasingly dangerous for journalists. While the recent high profile events that Darren mentioned (Roxana Saberi, Laura Ling) have put a spotlight on the perils of journalism, there is an interesting corollary trend that has largely escaped mainstream attention. Slowly but steadily the world is becoming a more dangerous place for humanitarian organizations.

Non-profits, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), aid agencies all used to be afforded a larger degree of protection in the countries and conflicts in which they operated. It’s difficult to define when the trend started occurring, but there has been a rapid escalation in the last two decades of violence against aid organizations. Perhaps the most notable example is the withdrawal of Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF, or known commonly as Doctors Without Borders in the US) from Afghanistan in 2004. Doctors Without Borders had been providing medical services in Afghanistan since 1980. They fearlessly worked throughout the bloody confrontation with the Soviets, the brutal civil war that followed, and the repressive regime of the Taliban in the 1990s. But, after 24 years of operating in one of the most difficult places on earth, coupled with an incident in which five of their staff members were killed, MSF decided that it was too dangerous to operate in the country. This left a major void and a population without access to basic medical treatment at a time it was desperately needed.

Similarly, last year in Somalia, MSF was forced to halt all operations and withdraw 87 staff members after three of its people were killed in a roadside bomb. This was on the heels of an incident in which two staff members were kidnapped. I was in Somalia in 2006 and could see the rampant escalation of violence against what used to be perceived as neutral actors. When I was in Mogadishu, the UN had pulled out all international staff, using only local Somalis as proxies to conduct their activities.

These are but a few examples. The general trend line is that more and more aid organizations are being targeted in conflict zones. The humanitarian space is rapidly shrinking. Even in places where NGOs can still operate, they have to devote a larger and larger portion of their resources to security, thereby diminishing the care they are able to give to the local population, which in turn makes them perceived less as allies and more as foreigners, which makes the aid organizations more vulnerable. It’s a vicious cycle.

Its reasonable to ask why the humanitarian space is rapidly disintegrating. There is a combination of factors. One component is that in both Iraq and Afghanistan the insurgency style conflict has blurred the lines between combatant and non-combatant. This has had spill-over effect to the NGO community. The UN peacekeeping branding has lost some of its perception as a strict peacekeeping force as well. Blue Helmets with .50 cals don’t exactly scream peace, and it is likely that the NGO community as a whole has been impacted by the changing perception of the UN. Finally there is a more worrisome reason that has been whispered about in the aid community. It has been suggested that the military itself is blurring the line between military action and humanitarian action. In an effort to win hearts and minds, the military is engaging in many of the same types of missions that have traditionally been the domain of humanitarian organizations. Detractors say that when the missions are the same, it makes it less important for combatants to distinguish between the motivations of different organizations. For example when I was in Afghanistan in 2005, I was embedded with the US military when they went on a mission called a MedCap. The purpose was to provide medical care in rural Afghanistan. Some in the humanitarian world claim this is exactly the kind of thing that pollutes the line between aid and military action, and puts providers at risk.

The military disagrees with this analysis and believes it is critical to their efforts to engender good will among the civilian populace. Its difficult to know the answer, but it is troubling that an organization like MSF which survived the Russians, a Civil War, and the Taliban in Afghanistan, couldn’t survive the American occupation.

What is clear though is that what (and who) were once considered safe in some of the most difficult areas in the world are no longer so. Aid workers joke with the gallows style humor that the famous red cross plus sign, used to act a bullet proof vest. A vehicle emblazoned with it on the side could drive through the middle of a fire fight and the shooting would stop. Now its considered a bulls-eye.

Whatever the reasons, the shrinking humanitarian space is a reality with fairly severe consequences. In many places organizations like MSF are the only people operating there. Without them, the populations, become less healthy, more impoverished, and increasingly isolated from the outside world; exactly the root conditions that make them ripe to become conflict zones in the first place.

Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- The world: A dangerous place for reporters – Darren Foster
- Sometimes that which seemed impossible actually comes to pass – Mitch Koss
- Doctors Wanted: no experience necessary! – Cerissa Tanner
- All you ever needed to know about Vanguard, and then some. – Mariana van Zeller
- Kentucky Targets “The OxyContin Express” – Mariana van Zeller

There’s a lot of soul searching going on in the field of journalism these days. It’s been a tough year. And I don’t just mean for the declining newspaper industry.

It’s a little early to be doing end-of-year accounting, but it relates to Vanguard’s story this week, so bear with me.

Looking back, 2009 was a year that saw perhaps more high profile cases of journalists in jeopardy than in a long while: freelance reporter Roxana Saberi, New York Times reporters David Rohde and Stephen Farrell, Newsweek’s Maziar Bahari and of course our colleagues Laura Ling and Euna Lee, just to name a few.

Reporting, especially in conflict zones and repressive environments, has always been and will always be a risky endeavor. Our president of programming likes to quote “The Godfather” when we talk here about the risks that reporters often assume: “This is the business that we have chosen.”

And while it’s true that many of us often choose to parachute in and out of risky places in order to tell stories that we believe need to be told, there is also the understanding that we have a safe place to retreat when things get too dodgy.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case for local reporters.

While reporting this week’s episode of Vanguard, “Sri Lanka: Notes from A War on Terror”, Mariana van Zeller and I encountered one of the toughest media crackdowns we’ve ever experienced. Like all independent reporters, we were shut out of the war zone, refused entry into hospitals where the sick and wounded were being taken, and banned from refugee camps. But worst of all, in Sri Lanka’s War on Terror the government had drawn an eerily familiar line: “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.” And few people felt comfortable speaking openly or challenging the government’s prosecution of the war out of fear that they would be labeled a traitor or worse, a supporter of terrorism.

Much of the risk reporters take on is when trying to navigate around the barriers that are put up to block them from getting information, information that is often vital to drawing a true picture of events. Needless to say, Sri Lanka’s media crackdown was frustrating for us. But the struggles we faced were put into perspective when we visited the office of The Sunday Leader newspaper. There we found the empty office of Lasantha Wickramatunge, a prominent Sri Lankan journalist and editor of the Sunday Leader. Lasantha was a dogged reporter who spent his career exposing corruption and misdeeds in government. He was also a vocal critic of Sri Lanka’s War on Terror. It was a stance that would cost him his life.

In January, just months before the war officially came to an end, Lasantha was shot in the head and killed by unknown gunmen while on his way to work. But knowing that he was a target, just days before he was killed, Lasantha wrote an editorial that on his instructions was only to be published upon his death.

“When finally I am killed,” he wrote. “It will be the government that kills me.“

Lasantha’s letter from the grave received worldwide attention. But he was not alone. According to Amnesty International, at least 14 Sri Lankan journalists and media workers have been killed since 2006. And many others have been assaulted, arrested or fled the country. Unfortunately, Sri Lanka is also not alone. All over the world, there are journalists who daily suffer repression and intimidation, risk imprisonment and sometimes their lives in pursuit of truth.

This is the business we have chosen.

***

Within the journalism community there is a healthy debate now taking place about how we can better look after ourselves and members of our community, and still cover important stories. A few weeks ago, Mariana van Zeller and I were invited to New York by PBS’s FRONTLINE/World to participate in a small gathering of journalists and media representatives to discuss the challenges of covering conflicts and working in repressive environments.

The participants ranged from New York Times reporters to freelancers, established media organizations to fairly new upstarts like ourselves.

The idea is to eventually create a resource for journalists of all stripes when it comes to covering difficult stories. For more info go here.

Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- Sometimes that which seemed impossible actually comes to pass – Mitch Koss
- Doctors Wanted: no experience necessary! – Cerissa Tanner
- All you ever needed to know about Vanguard, and then some. – Mariana van Zeller
- Kentucky Targets “The OxyContin Express” – Mariana van Zeller
- A Shout-Out to Interns Everywhere – Tracey Chang

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.

Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- Doctors Wanted: no experience necessary! – Cerissa Tanner
- All you ever needed to know about Vanguard, and then some. – Mariana van Zeller
- Kentucky Targets “The OxyContin Express” – Mariana van Zeller
- A Shout-Out to Interns Everywhere – Tracey Chang
- The economy is growing again. Where does that leave you? – Mitch Koss

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.

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.

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.

You might think the Vanguard team is so serious, and we are. We take our work very seriously, and we cover some really serious subjects. But you can’t cover too much death, drugs, conflict, and destruction without a lot of levity to go around. So we are constantly joking around and giving each other a hard time.

I would like to say that overall the Vanguard team has a pretty good sense of humor. Case in point: An incident chronicled in this op-ed I wrote recently for the Huffington post.

I don’t want to give the impression that Vanguard is in the habit of stealing and tagging, more that we like to leave our mark from time to time.

I’m off to Mariana’s house to watch the new episode.  Yup, we are actually all friends in this department; it’s a pretty rare phenomena. The LA Times had an article this morning that talked about how we all get together and go to Laura’s house to play Rock Band.  That’s embarrassing, a ‘lil nerdy, and totally true.  I bet Hannity and O’Reilly don’t get together and workout with the Wii.  (I’m actually not entirely sure they work out at all, but that’s beside the point.)

The point is that Vanguard is a unique place to be, because it’s a tight-knit team.  We think this helps our journalism, but at the very least we know we have a lot of fun doing our job.

–Kaj

Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to piece it all together. I’m reading today’s LA Times story about Vanguard and even though I sat down for an interview with Matea Gold to talk about what it was like to work here while our friends Laura and Euna were being detained in North Korea, it didn’t really come together until just now.

We’ve all been swept up in preparation for the season that premieres tonight, and for the months during Laura and Euna’s absence, keeping busy was one way we all dealt with the grief and anxiety.

Darren and I were in Sri Lanka in March, reporting on the end of the war there when we got the call. It was four in morning. It was surreal, but we thought it would be only a matter of days before they were released and we completed our assignment.

Mariana Van Zeller with Sheriff Keith Cooper (photo by Cerissa Tanner)

In May, we were driving through Kentucky to interview the Lt. Governor Daniel Mongiardo with Cerissa Tanner, our co-producer on “The OxyContin Express”, when word came that Laura and Euna were going to be sentenced. We pulled over to the side of the highway and even though none of us are particularly religious, we prayed. The whole making of this season was filled with moments like this. But to know how much Laura had put into building Vanguard, we felt there was nothing better we could do than to keep it going.

For me, tonight’s premiere is an emotional one, not just because of the powerful subject, but because I remember the cloud under which it was produced. Of course, most of that cloud was lifted on Aug. 4th when the team gathered around the TV to watch Laura and Euna boarding a plane in North Korea.

The rest will lift as we dedicate this season to them.