Vanguard Blog

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

The first time I visited Sri Lanka was in 2001. I was working as a correspondent for a travel show in Portugal, my home country, and had three days to tour around this small Island nation and put together a 5-minute piece about the wonderful sights and scenery.

Before traveling there, I was handed a folder with all the hotels I’d be staying at and monuments I’d be visiting. But what really caught my attention was a little footnote with an intriguing name – the Tamil Tigers. Having majored in International Relations in Lisbon, I had heard about the group and knew they’d been waging a war against the Sri Lankan government since the early 80’s to establish an independent state for the country’s Tamil minority. But that was pretty much it. So instead of leafing through travel brochures and pictures of resort pools and marble lobbies, I spent much of my research learning more about the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, better know as the Tamil Tigers. And what I found out was fascinating.

Here are some facts about the group that if you didn’t know are bound to leave you amazed too:

1. They were the only non-state organization with its own army, air force and navy.

2. They were early pioneers in the use of suicide bombings as a tactic, creating a commando unit called “the Black Tigers” just for this purpose.

3. They invented the suicide vest, and conducted more suicide attacks than Hamas and Hezbollah combined.

4. They were the first group to use women in suicide attacks.

5. They assassinated two world leaders, one of which was Rajiv Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India.

6. They were notorious for their recruitment of child soldiers.

Pretty good resume, right? So, as soon as I set foot in the country it became apparent to my cameraman and our driver that I was far more interested in hearing about the powerful Tigers than I was about the pristine beaches or the ancient temples. But since I was a travel reporter, I was steered as far away as possible from any sign of the war and instead was whisked around from tour site to tour site, asking questions such as, “Is this your idea of paradise?” to honeymooning couples who were having a relaxing day at the beach, at least until I came along.

But earlier this year I finally got to pursue the itinerary I was really interested in, when I returned to Sri Lanka to witness a historic moment: The defeat of the Tamil Tigers and with that the end of Asia’s longest-running civil war. In “Sri Lanka: Notes from a War on Terror”, which airs tonight at 10pm EST/PST we look at what led to the downfall of one of the most powerful militant groups the world has ever known, and what lessons, if any, can be learned from the Sri Lankan government’s War on Terror.

This Week on Vanguard: Sri Lanka: Notes from a War on Terror (Video)

Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- 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
- All you ever needed to know about Vanguard, and then some. – Mariana van Zeller

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

With the launch of our season, we’ve given a number of presentations and have received a lot of questions from our viewers about how this “Vanguard” thing works.  So today, I thought that I would address some of the most common questions.

Q: How many people go out on a story and which cameras/equipment do you use?

We usually go out in teams of two. A correspondent/producer and a producer/cameraperson.  We’re a small team here at Vanguard,  so most of us know how to do a little bit of everything — shoot, produce, edit, and make coffee.  It’s all very DIY and roles often overlap.

The equipment we use all fits into a backpack.  Our “big” camera is the Sony V1U, which is still really small by comparison.  We also use the A1U as a second camera and sometimes as the primary camera in sensitive areas.  We’re actually exploring some new options as well.

Having a small footprint is definitely part of our ethos.  We don’t want to overwhelm people with our presence. The more it feels like we’re a film crew, the more things are going to feel staged.  We really want to capture things in as authentic a way as possible.

Q: Do you already have an idea of what your piece is going to look like before you go out on the field?
(more…)

First Big Brother and now Clark Kent’s best friend! What is up with all these D-List celebrities dealing Oxy? Today’s news is that “Smallville” actor Sam Jones III was snagged by the DEA for possessing with the intent to sell more than 10,000 pills of the potent narcotic. That is a crazy number of pills! Yesterday, we did the math on Big Brother winner Adam Jasinski’s pills, and found that he stood to make $55,000 by selling the pills he was allegedly caught with. Well, if we apply the same logic to Jones, he puts Jasinski’s potential profits to shame. By selling his pills Jones could have pocketed $275,000.

But what I find most interesting about his arrest is the fact that in documents filed in federal court, the DEA claims that Jones was the “Hollywood connection” in the illegal distribution of oxycodone. As we reported in “The OxyContin Express”, more people are now abusing prescription drugs than heroin, cocaine and ecstasy combined. But unfortunately, we only seem to hear about it when the drug goes Hollywood.

To those of you who haven’t seen our film, here it is:

The Oxycontin Express (Video)

Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- Hearing the voices in Afghanistan – by Kaj Larsen
- Running the Math on Big Brother’s Pills – by Darren Foster
- An overview of Cuba: Past, Present and Future – by Adrian Baschuk

It was a big night Wednesday when the new season of Vanguard premiered with “The OxyContin Express” and Embedded premiered with Mos Def in Japan.

The teams that worked on these two awesome shows celebrated at Little Bar a few miles from the office with Mediterranean grub and Current playing on about 5 or 6 TVs. The observations from around the bar appeared to be that the premieres went off without a hitch.

The bartender even made a special martini for us — the Vanbedded.

I’m not sure what was in it, but Vanguard PA Tania Rashid had one!

I didn’t even have to buy myself a drink. I tried, but Infomania’s Conor Knighton and later Vanguard’s Darren Foster had me covered. Thanks dudes!

“The OxyContin Express”, Vanguard’s first of the new 8-episode season, is a must-see. But so are the exclusive web extras.

You can check out an extended interview and follow up with Todd, who says he’s been sober for nearly 100 days. Good for him!

As well, you get to see some footage from the cutting room floor that didn’t quite make it into the doc. A jailed addict scares a group of school children straight and Todd’s mom confronts Todd about his addiction.

While this is the third official season of Vanguard, to many just discovering us, it’s their first. [Side note: if you need to check out previous seasons, they're available here and here]

In case you haven’t figured it out, Vanguard’s mission is to cover stories that no one else is covering. While many news organizations attempt to do this, the young correspondents at Vanguard aren’t afraid to get their feet and hands dirty.

As Vanguarder Mitch Koss put it yesterday, the 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” what’s going on around us.

So to introduce myself, I’m Vanguard’s one and only intern. I’ve yet to fetch coffee and I haven’t even bought my own drinks. So the situation could be much, much worse.

Instead, I get to transcribe interviews from upcoming documentaries. That means sneak peeks at what is to come.

I also do lots of research on potential upcoming stories, like the kidnapping industry (yes, industry) in Mexico and how tourism is starting to pick up in Iraq. Sometimes, I even watch porn in the office to make sure correspondent Christof Putzel is including the best examples of amateur or professional pornography scenes for the upcoming episode “Porn 2.0.”

Now I come from a newspaper and web journalism background, but know my way around a videocamera, a voice over and radio. But the question I get all the time is what kind of journalism do you want to do?

That seems like an unfair question: every good journalist knows he or she must be well versed in all mediums. I’m too new to decide on a favorite.

The answer to why I’m here; however, is simple: I really like what Vanguard does, and see a real value in journalism. So many people these days question the existence of true journalism, but when a younger generation is reporting for a younger audience, it’s different. Vanguard is one team hoping to make a difference. So here’s to us.

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

I‘m not sure if there‘s an official Vanguard birthday, but today feels like a birthday of sorts. Why? Because we have a brand spanking new season of Vanguard launching tonight and we’ve been waiting weeks and weeks for this day!

You can always tell when we are launching a new season by the look of our office. The garbage bins are filled to the brim with take-away boxes and Yasu (Vanguard editor) has about a handful of empty coffee cups on his desk.

Yasu's Coffee Cup Graveyard (photo by Mariana Van Zeller)

Despite the look (and smell) of our office, It’s an exciting time in the Vanguard and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on. Our season launches with an amazing show on the Oxycontin epidemic. It’s a fantastic piece and you’ll be shocked to learn how prevalent prescription drug abuse is in this country. In fact, Dr. Phil just did a show on the topic and invited our very own Mariana van Zeller to discuss the issue.

You can watch the show here.

Tonight we all gather for a little celebration of the launch and tomorrow we’re right back to polishing, tweaking and editing the remainder of our shows set to air in the coming weeks.

Happy season launch day Vanguard!

Some previous episodes of Vanguard if you want to get caught up!

• – 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 Greenland
• – From Russia With Hate: Vanguard’s award-winning look at the rise of neo-Nazis in Russia
• – China’s Wild West: Laura Ling covers the Uighurs in Xinjiang Province, China

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.

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 Greenland