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

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.

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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