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

As we head into the season of indulging on favorite foods surrounded by family and friends, I’ve begun reflecting on meals I’ve shared with our team in Vanguard. As I’ve gotten to know my colleagues over the years, I’ve fondly begun to associate certain flavors and foods with certain people. I know correspondent Laura Ling digs spicy food and packs beef jerky for every shoot. Producer Lauren Cerre fantasizes about the ultimate savory granola bar. Correspondent Mariana Van Zeller makes a mean omelet and Editor Yasu Tsuji comes to every meeting well armed with Pocky.

Of course, no blog posting about food would be complete without mentioning correspondent Adam Yamaguchi, famous for his intrepid appetite. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Adam on several stories including the infamous Penis Restaurant pod. Adam’s poise under pressure is made even more remarkable if you know the backstory. He wasn’t actually supposed to be the only diner at the table sampling the house specialty. Our field producer had arranged for other men to join Adam so they could discuss the supposed Viagra-esque properties as they sampled the meal. But, at the last minute, those eating companions failed to materialize. As they say, the show must go on and, boy, did it. Adam bravely feasted alone and ended up giving a culinary critique that would have given Anthony Bourdain a run for his money.

There usually isn’t a lot of time to for proper meals when we’re out in the field. Lunch is often a handful of gorp and a sad, melted Cliff Bar. Dinner is whatever bland offerings you scrounge up back at the hotel when you roll in exhausted after a long day of shooting. But, a wonderful exception to the typical shoot fare happened this summer when I went to Italy to produce the upcoming “Cocaine Mafia” with Christof Putzel. I hate to stereotype but it’s absolutely true that Italians take their food very seriously. I remember being in the car when a heated discussion broke out between members of our Italian production crew. Christof and I looked at each other, wondering if something had gone wrong. Did an interview fall through? Were we being threatened? No, it was a matter far more urgent. There was a big controversy over where to get the best pizza in town.

It was a real treat working with Christof, not least of all because he’s a gourmand who loves to share his discoveries of all things good to eat. The afternoon before we left Italy, we tracked down some fresh burrata, a mozzarella cheese with cream inside. I never had it before but I took his recommendation and decided this was one souvenir I’d take back with me. The shopowner warned us, “It must be eaten within 24 hours or else.” Or else, what? I wasn’t quite sure but I took his words seriously. I secured the cheese in a cold-insulated bag and asked stewardesses to stow it in the fridge. Delays upon reaching Dulles made me nervous—it was like traveling with a time-sensitive organ waiting to be transplanted. A close call: a beagle at customs came towards me but then found something more interesting to investigate. I made it to San Francisco but truthfully it took a little bit more than 24 hours. My husband and I decided to risk it and devoured the round of cheese with a nice bottle of red at 2AM. It was an absolutely wonderful way to cap off a successful summer of Vanguard production.

Last week was the 20th anniversary of the breaching of the Berlin Wall. It also found President Barack Obama still deliberating about what to do with the US Commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McCrystal’s request for 40,000 more American troops. If you think about the kind of world that we began to enter 20 years ago, perhaps the two events of last week are somehow related.

As I mentioned briefly last Thursday, in March of 1989 in Budapest, Hungary, I covered the first breach of what used to be called the Iron Curtain—the physical, coercive, and legal barriers keeping the people in Communist eastern Europe from entering western Europe. Back then, I didn’t know the significance of what I was seeing in Budapest. But when the Wall fell in November of 1989, it was assumed, via Cold War logic, that the East Germans pouring through the wall were joining us, that we had won and they had lost. Because that’s how the zero sum logic of the era worked.

Coincidentally, in October of 1989, the month before the Berlin Wall began to fall, I was working in Afghanistan, where under an agreement between the US and the Soviet Union, Soviet troops had recently withdrawn after a decade of futilely struggling against Afghan insurgents who had been supplied with hundreds of millions of dollars a year in weaponry by the Reagan Administration. Part of the agreement leading to the Soviet troop pull-out was that the US would stop funding the insurgents.

And that made sense under the logic of the Cold War, where you had to either be in the Soviet camp or the American camp. Once the Soviets left Afghanistan, the insurgents were in our camp, and would do our bidding, regardless if we continued to pay them or not.

But maybe when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later, we didn’t assume control of the whole world. Maybe we entered a different world.

In May of 1994, I went to Afghanistan with Lisa Ling, and we found it far from US control, or anyone’s control. After the Soviet pull-out, the insurgents fought on, first driving out the Soviet installed government, and then, turning their US supplied weapons on one another. In speaking engagements, Lisa sometimes mentions our visit, because while I was rolling on Lisa doing a stand-up in the midst of some insurgents, one of them, an adolescent who didn’t know how old he was, pointed his weapon at us and threatened to kill us—or at least pointed his weapon at us and made me jump, and it’s tough to jump with a 22 pound betacam on your shoulder but you can check the footage and see that I did.

A few years later, in January of 1997, Lisa and I drove from Peshawar, Pakistan, to Kabul, Afghanistan, a few weeks after a new group called the Taliban had captured the Afghan capital. By then, it was impossible to imagine that the anyone every had control of this place. Ten years to the week of that visit, I was back in Kabul with Kaj Larsen. In the intervening decade, the Taliban had been defeated by the US, after a brief post-9/11 bombing campaign, and then re-vitalized.

And now we have the dilemma that President Obama is facing, and thanks to the events of 20 years ago last week, facing it in a world that might not be zero sum game, where one side loses and the other wins, but something more uncontrolled, where all sides might be able to win, if Thomas Friedman and his “race to the top” theory is correct—albeit tough to believe in during this year of terrible economic decline—but it might also be a world where all sides can lose, because there might be no entity enforcing the rules.

Fear of Spring (Video)

Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- 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
- You Have a College Degree: So What? – Tracey Chang
- What Transformers 2 has to do with Japan’s falling population – Adam Yamaguchi

From music to movies to newspapers, the media industries are struggling to figure out how to use the Internet without losing their shirts. With some combination of envy and disgust, they’ve watched from the sidelines as the pornography industry seized every opportunity to get before the wider audience all of them sought. But today, the technology that once pushed the adult industry forward is stripping away its profits.

The 14-billion-dollar-a-year industry is facing its most serious economic slump in decades. Porn producers led the way in technological innovation and media distribution in the ’80s and ’90s. They were often credited with ensuring the domination of VHS over Betamax in the costly war for control of the format used on home video tapes. They boosted cable subscriptions, popularized the DVD as the successor to tape and leapt onto the Internet as the obvious new vehicle to give people access to porn in the privacy offered by their personal computer screens. Secure online payment systems and streaming video, not to mention nuisances such as spyware and spam, advanced with the increasing popularity of porn and the public’s apparently insatiable appetite for watching online sex.

When I proposed to my bosses at Current TV that I look at the porn industry for answers to the quandary of other popular media, eyebrows shot up around the office. Was this just an excuse to look at porn at the office and hang out with naked women all day? As I ventured behind the scenes, what I saw surprised me in ways I never expected. The business people and techies I met were young professionals with credentials as impressive as those from some of the hot Silicon Valley startups. And contrary to their image as Internet pioneers with an ever-increasing market, I found porn producers just as perplexed as other media as piracy and the plummeting costs of production sucked away the sizable profits they used to enjoy. Even the sex has changed in the race to keep a step ahead of copyright thieves and amateur porn pushers. It’s never been clearer that if the industry wants to survive in this day of age, it needs to adapt to a changing marketplace.

Editing “Porn 2.0″ for Vanguard’s documentary series was a challenge because the subject matter we were covering could not be shown on television. At the same time, we couldn’t just show the talking heads of industry executives bemoaning the downturn. On the first day of work for our new crop of interns, I handed out a boxful of hardcore adult DVDs and told them to look for some “tasteful” clips we could use on the air. I knew the assignment would either get me called on the carpet for offending the newbies or go down in Current history as the coolest internship assignment ever. Luckily, it was the latter.

Vanguard: Porn 2.0 (Video)

Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- 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
- You Have a College Degree: So What? – Tracey Chang
- What Transformers 2 has to do with Japan’s falling population – Adam Yamaguchi
- Why Should You Trust Us? – Mitch Koss

Monday marked the 20th anniversary of the breaching of the Berlin Wall, an occasion of many reminiscences, but some questions. I’d like to write about some of those questions—questions which impact the role of Vanguard. But I’m in transit today, so before my flight boards, I’m going to cheat and link to a Los Angeles Times Op-ed that I did this past Monday.

I didn’t see the wall come down, but I was in Hungary eight months earlier for what was in retrospect the beginning of the end of the Soviet system. At the time, we didn’t know what we were seeing, but on March 15, 1989, I was part of a team from the “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS, filming a crowd of demonstrators estimated at 100,000 who had flooded into the square that housed Magyar Televizio, Hungarian state television in Budapest. The people were carrying Hungarian flags and were there to deliver a petition demanding democratic rights.

Read more

I’ll follow up with more next Monday.

Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- Hey Electronic Arts, when you going to do a pirate video game? – Kaj Larsen
- Christof’s Doc, the Porn Community, and Obscenity… – Mitch Koss
- You Have a College Degree: So What? – Tracey Chang
- What Transformers 2 has to do with Japan’s falling population – Adam Yamaguchi
- Why Should You Trust Us? – Mitch Koss
- My Second Tour of Sri Lanka – Mariana van Zeller

My next Vanguard special due out Dec 2, is called Remote Control Warfare. Without giving too much away the premise is simple. As warfare evolves its becoming increasingly sophisticated, and now technology is allowing us to conduct over the horizon warfare in a way we never could before. One of the technologies we look at is the Predator drone. The Predator is becoming an increasingly famous player on the battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But one of the interesting things I found when I was researching this story, with producer Lauren Cerre, is that the Predator is actually being employed in over a dozen countries right now. And sure enough it related to two of my old stories, Pirates and Mogadishu. They are using the predator to patrol over 2.1 million square miles of ocean in the Gulf of Aden which has become a hotbed of maritime piracy.

What Lauren and I found on our journey around the country looking at the changing face of warfare, was that war is rapidly is starting to more and more resemble a video game. In one scene we even go to a military recruiting center that uses video games to solicit tech savvy gamers into the Army to fight future wars. Since the Predator is kind of the mother of all remote control technologies, and they are actually employing it against pirates right now, I couldn’t help but think that the gaming industry cant be far behind. There is actually a blurring of the line between actual war, and video games that depict it. Although I’m not a gamer at all (as is very obvious in the story as I crash about everything they have me play), I am pretty sure that a counter-piracy video game would be pretty cool, and realistic too. So, pirates, video, games, remote control warfare; that’s got to be a winning combination. Thank you EA, you know where to send the commission check to.

Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- Christof’s Doc, the Porn Community, and Obscenity… – Mitch Koss
- You Have a College Degree: So What? – Tracey Chang
- What Transformers 2 has to do with Japan’s falling population – Adam Yamaguchi
- Why Should You Trust Us? – Mitch Koss
- My Second Tour of Sri Lanka – Mariana van Zeller
- Chinese Mobsters and Megacities – Joanne Shen

Since today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was going to blog today about the sometimes baffling era that we’ve entered since the end of the Cold War—and how trying to figure it out is one of Vanguard’s missions.

But since this is my last blog before Christof’s doc Porn 2.0 premieres on Wednesday, I’m going to write instead about the ramifications of the Big Bang in American jurisprudence that led to the creation of the modern porn industry, mainly in the San Fernando Valley, just over the ridge from Hollywood, where we in Vanguard have our offices.

First, you have to understand that while many varieties of porn are legal, obscenity is still not considered protected speech under the First Amendment. If it’s obscene, it can, and often still is, banned.

The trick is how you define obscenity. Throughout much of the 20th Century, the standard that judges used was “I know it when I see it.” Under this standard, where a few judges could impose their personal standards on the behalf of all citizens in our republic, a lot of stuff was banned.

But then, starting in 1973, with a US Supreme Court decision called Miller versus California, the standard for what’s obscene shifted from “I know it when I see it” to “contemporary community standards.” That is, if a particular community tolerated something, it was okay. That’s why the first places modern porn was available in the early ‘70s was in seedy theaters in collapsed commercial districts. The idea being that since the community in these blighted districts contained a number drug users and sellers, prostitutes, homeless people, etc., the addition of a theater showing pornos wasn’t going to see like that much of a burden—maybe the theater even paid some taxes.

But then technology expanded the community. With video tape and home videotape players, it became possible for porn consumers to go into an adult store, leave with porn on tape, and watch it at home. Suddenly the community where porn was consumed had broadened. With DVDs, and the Internet, the community broadened further—now it’s a cyber community. Just as the Internet made it possible for extremists—who might otherwise be marginalized in the communities where they reside—to find each others and make communities, so too with porn. So now, attorneys who defend porn producers in an obscenity cases are considering the option of trying to subpoena marketing data from Internet search companies—if it turns out that lots of Americans are on-line searching for the particular activity that is accused of being obscene, then, under the community standards provision, maybe it’s not. Partly, it depends on how big a community has to be.

But, as you watch Christof’s doc this Wednesday, you’ll see that prosecutors are not what’s threatening the porn business today. But I won’t give the plot away: Watch on Wednesday.

This Week On Vanguard: Porn 2.0 (Video)

Porn 2.0 airs this Wednesday on Current TV at 10pm ET/10pm PT.

Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- You Have a College Degree: So What? – Tracey Chang
- What Transformers 2 has to do with Japan’s falling population – Adam Yamaguchi
- Why Should You Trust Us? – Mitch Koss
- 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

As I was looking through a friend’s pictures from last weekend’s Halloween festivities, I came across a photo of a guy dressed in a cap and gown with a cardboard sign around his neck that just read: “F*cked”. How very apropos. If the past couple of years have taught us anything, it’s that the value of a college degree has diminished, and having one certainly doesn’t guarantee finding a job.

But it’s not just the lack of jobs and heavy competition that contribute to the dire state of our economy. Our spending habits and how we manage our finances also have a lot to do with this crisis. Last year, I produced a show with Vanguard producer/editor Sean Puglisi about how people in our generation are living in these current financial times:

Maxed Out (Video)

And this past spring, fellow Vanguard producer Lauren Cerre and I went to Argentina to see how the country came out of its own financial crisis not too long ago:

Thank You, Recession

It’s now November 2009, and just a couple days ago we hit the one-year mark since Barack Obama was elected President. I still have the newspaper that Vanguard producer/editor Yasu Tsuji and I bought at the corner store near our office the day after he won the election:

President Obama just signed a measure that provides aid to the unemployed and expands a home buyer tax credit to stimulate economic growth. But at the rate things are going, we’re going to need much more than that: the country’s unemployment rate hit 10.2 percent in October–reaching double digits for the first time in 26 years. In the last month alone, employers dropped 190,000 workers from their payrolls. With numbers like that, it’s no wonder we’re applying for unconventional jobs that are very far from what we studied for in school. Every week, Christian Science Monitor contributor David Grant compiles a list of the week’s top jobs, and below is last week’s collection. My favorite is #1: I wonder if there will ever end up being a course for THAT in college:

1. E-mail Czar
Employer: Village Voice Media.
Wages/salary: Not listed.
Details: Needs a candidate who will “eat, sleep and drink email” and
increase Internet subscriptions from 750,000 to 2 million. Ideal candidate
will be a “goal driver, possess strong creativity and revenue producing
marketing ideas and the strongest of communication skills.”
Location: Phoenix, Dallas, Denver.

2. Entry Level Sales – Master Cutlery
Employer: Master Cutlery.
Wages/salary: $40,000-$50,000
Details: Salesperson will be challenged to identify new accounts, reactivate
inactive accounts and grow existing business for a company best known as a
manufacturer and distributor of “top quality swords, tactical and hunting
knives.”
Location: Secaucus, N.J., (pop. 15,931, median family income $72,568) hosted
the 2009 WNBA draft in April.

3. Deputy Columbia/Snake Salmon Recovery Program Manager
Employer: Bureau of Reclamation
Wages/salary: $80,402-$104,525
Details: Responsible for assisting in “administering and implementing the
Pacific Northwest region’s endangered species activities.” The position’s
primary responsibility is to “oversee implementation of actions required by
Biological Opinions and related documents for Endangered Species Act listed
species, particularly anadromous salmonids
Location: Boise, Idaho, (pop. 203,818, median family income $64,519) is home
to the Basque Museum, the only one of its kind in North America.

4. Animal Food Preparer
Employer: San Diego Zoo
Wages/salary: $11.42-$12.93 per hour
Details: Essential functions of this position include the preparation of
food for the bird collection, chopping various fruits and vegetables,
handling insects, fish and other food items as well as washing bird trays.
Selected applicant will be required to maintain live forage items such as
mice, lizards and insects.
Location: San Diego (pop. 1,264,263, median family income $72,407) is home
to the University of California – San Diego, whose mascot is the “Triton.”

5. Auto Dismantler
Employer: Tolpa’s Auto Parts
Wages/salary: Not listed.
Details: After the “cash for clunkers” program, auto parts store needs
immediate assistance to meet government required mandate of 180 days to
crush all vehicles.
Location: Remsen, N.Y, (pop. 1,958, median family income $41,042) is the
home of world-class luger Erin Hamlin, who won the 2009 World Luge
Championship, the first American to have done so in 16 years.

6. Brain Trainer
Employer: Learning Rx
Wages/salary: $15-$20 per hour.
Details: Are you sharp, smart and quicker than your peers? Need trainers to
work with adults and kids 4-5 days a week during afternoons and evenings.
Location: Chester, N.J., (pop. 7,282, median family income $133,586) was
once known as “Black River,” although the Chester Historical Society attests
that no one knows when the name was changed.

7. Professional Superhero
Employer: 7 Promotions Inc.
Wages/salary: Not listed.
Details: Looking for an Account Manager to add to an “illustrious team of
overachievers” at one of the “fastest growing privately owned sales and
marketing firms in Westchester County,” Conn.
Location: Danbury, Conn., (pop. 78,575, median family income $76,492) was
where singer Tracy Chapman spent her youth and graduated from high school.

If any of these jobs pique your interest, here’s the Monitor page with full links, as well as links to past weeks’ lists.

This week on The Real Recovery – a Current News investigation into unemployment and the end of the recession – the focus is on college graduates. If you have a story to tell – come get involved.

Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- What Transformers 2 has to do with Japan’s falling population – Adam Yamaguchi
- Why Should You Trust Us? – Mitch Koss
- 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

On my long transatlantic flight this week, I managed to catch up on a movie I’d been meaning to see for some time. It usually takes flying to force me to commit to watching anything on the screen for more than 20 minutes. So between a couple short naps I finally watched Transformers 2. Though the movie was lame, I’d been reminded of how much I loved the Transformers as a kid. I grew up wanting to be an evil Decepticon who wreaked havoc on humankind. (Just seemed more fun than to be a friendly Autobot.)

So I guess it was my childhood fascination with cartoon robots that fueled my interest in the idea of a robot takeover of Japan. And while that is far from being an even exaggerated reality, we’re surely seeing a growing number of them pop up in Japan. For a number of reasons Japan’s population is in decline: xenophobia, women are choosing to pursue careers and saying no to marriage, the Japanese aren’t having sex (no explanation).

And so, robots seem to be the solution — in a very odd Japanese way — to the shrinking workforce that’s threatening Japan’s economic vitality.

Since I did my story in Japan there’s been a slew of new robots, including a robot fashion model, scary horror movie child robots, jumping robots, even a sex robot (you can google that one on your own). How these robots –except perhaps the last one — address population decline, I’m not sure. But they’re fun distractions I suppose. Perhaps they’re not alone, though…because now, we’re starting to see robots invade other nations. This just might be the oddest one yet. Enter the shopping mall robot guide in the UAE.

Japan: Robot Nation (Video)

Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- Why Should You Trust Us? – Mitch Koss
- 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

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