1999: The Insider
From Chapter Seven: Case Study Analysis: The Insider (Michael Mann, 1999)
“We come to The Insider (1999) with a reverential respect due to Michael Mann and his established position as one of America’s foremost auteur directors (and fellow graduate of the London Film School). In addition, the film boasts the combined efforts of Al Pacino - as 60 Minutes CBS ‘Ace’ Producer Lowell Bergman and Russell Crowe - as Jeffrey Wigand, successful research scientist now turning corporate tobacco industry whistleblower. All three artists - established Hollywood ‘A’ List names - are brought together to tell a cutting-edge drama of real contemporary social significance - the kind, it was assumed, that Hollywood never made anymore.
The film is based on the Vanity Fair article The Man Who Knew Too Much by Marie Brenner which itself was based on the true life account of the events surrounding Jeffrey Wigand’s torturous experiences with the giant tobacco firm Brown & Williamson in which he worked as a “research scientist” and from which he was fired - as the film notes with due irony - for “poor communication skills”. In fact he had openly disagreed with their policy of spiking their cigarette products with highly concentrated nicotine to enhance addiction, a practice shared with other tobacco companies.
Twinned Destinies
The story begins by juxtaposing the dramatic contrast between the commitment of the crusading producer/journalist Bergman in Lebanon and the fatherly concerns of Jeffrey Wigand, corporate executive. While Bergman successfully secures a story exclusive on the Hezbollah in the dangerously armed Middle East (filmed in Israel), Wigand works effectively to save his daughter from another dangerous asthma attack. Furthermore, as Bergman and his ace interviewer Mike Wallace/Christopher Plummer tangle with the Sheikh/Clifford Curtis and his pushy gunmen, Wigand eventually admits to his distraught wife that he has indeed been fired from Brown & Williamson for disagreeing with his bosses, thus putting the family livelihood - health insurance and education - in jeopardy.
Thereafter, Wigand becomes proudly angered by the corporation’s move to extend the established confidentiality agreement that he has signed and, despite earlier misunderstandings of Bergman’s intent, the narrative arc thereafter brings the suspicious Wigand within range of Bergman’s interest in reporting the story that, at its centre, would crucially incorporate a recorded interview on 60 Minutes with celebrated anchor-investigator Mike Wallace (Chapters Three and Five).
On the way to what would result in America’s real-life biggest court settlement, Bergman and Wigand undertake their own form of self-scrutiny. In one of their preliminary meetings in a Japanese restaurant, Wigand reverses their allotted roles by questioning and undermining Lowell’s status and journalist ethic - he was, he points out, a student of Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s and has carried the critical Left-Wing agenda since then:
WIGAND
I’m just a commodity to you, aren’t I? I could be anything. Right? Anything worth putting on between commercials.
LOWELL
To a network, probably, we’re all commodities. To me? You are not a commodity. What you are is important. You go public and thirty million people hear what you got to say, nothing, I mean nothing, will ever be the same again.
The duel of words that ensues serves to bring both men towards a greater understanding about personal commitment:
LOWELL
You believe that?
WIGAND
No.
The confrontation - a tough exchange of accusation, counter attack and justification - foregrounds contemporary skepticism of the news broadcasting system of journalism and provides Lowell his opportunity in riposte to justify his personal commitment and belief in his chosen profession,
LOWELL
You should. Because when you’re done, a judgment is going to go down in the court of public opinion, my friend. And that’s the power you have.
WIGAND
You believe that?
LOWELL
I believe that? Yes, I believe that.
WIGAND
You believe that because you get information out to people…something happens?
LOWELL
Yes.
WIGAND
Maybe that’s just what you’ve been telling yourself all these years to justify having a good job? Having status? And maybe for the audience, it’s just voyeurism? Something to do on a Sunday night. And maybe it won’t change a fucking thing. And people like myself and my family are left hung out to dry. Used up! Broke, alone!
LOWELL
Are you talking to me or did somebody else just walk in here?! I never abandoned a source!
In familiar screenwriting terms, the course of the narrative proceeds to ‘throw stones at the hero’. As Lowell persuades Wigand to break his confidentiality agreement - ominous threats to Lowell’s family welfare paradoxically lead to the growing determination on Wigand’s part to undertake the interview that once aired would make the executives of the tobacco companies publicly accountable to those millions who have suffered and died as a result of the induced levels of nicotine in the cigarettes. With the story set-up determined, and the moral stakes at risk, act two covers the media frenzy that makes victims of both men - Wigand’s wife leaves him and Bergman’s principles must come to terms with the harsh corporate reality that determines news business.
So while the first half of the narrative, then, belongs to Wigand, where he exposes in court and on television the inside politics and dubious methods of ‘research’ within Brown & Williamson and which led to his dismissal, the second part turns with sweet irony towards the inside dealings of CBS itself wherein we engage with Lowell’s similar struggles against CBS corporate to get the full interview aired once it has been gainfully filmed.
With apparent success in his hand, Lowell - with Wallace and their executive producer Don Hewitt/Philip Baker Hall - is forced to face the reality of the new corporate news ethic in the cool and polished intervention of lawyer Helen Caperelli/Gina Gershon, CBS General Counsel (real name Ellen Kaden). Considering their scoop, she explains how:
HELEN CAPERELLI
If two people have an agreement, like a confidentiality agreement, and one of them breaks it because they are induced to do so by a 3rd party, the 3rd party can be sued for damages for interfering, hence, “tortious interference”.
The three professionals, confident in the secure handling of their profession, then politely rebut her:
DON HEWITT
Interfering? That’s what we do.
LOWELL
I think what we’re trying to tell you is that it happens all the time. This is a news organization. People are always telling us things they shouldn’t. We have to verify if it’s true and in the public interest. And if it is, we air it.
But Caperelli remains resolute, leading to a deepening of the intrigue, and a sense that the outcomes of events at CBS are no longer determined by front-row news people:
HELEN CAPERELLI
And “60 Minutes’” verification is exact. And precise.
And I don’t think it would hurt to make sure you’re right…on this one.
At which point the angle of attack comes explicitly towards Lowell and his programme that question the viability of his source - Wigand:
HELEN CAPERELLI
I’m told there are questions as to our star witness’s veracity.
LOWELL
His veracity was good enough for the State of Mississippi.
HELEN CAPERELLI
Our standards have to be higher than anyone else’s, because we are the standard…for everyone else.
LOWELL
Well, as a standard I’ll hang with “is the guy telling the truth?”
HELEN CAPERELLI
Well, with tortious interference, I’m afraid, the greater the truth, the greater the damage.
LOWELL
Come again?
HELEN CAPERELLI
They own the information he’s disclosing. The truer it is, the greater the damage to them. If he lied, he didn’t disclose their information. And the damages are smaller.
LOWELL
Is this Alice in Wonderland?
After some prodding from Wallace, Caperelli plays her final and more devastating card:
HELEN CAPERELLI
Well, at the end of the day…because of your segment…the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company…could own CBS.
Insider News at CBS
It’s at this plot juncture that Lowell’s investigative skills are put to the test. An elegant ironic plot turn requires that he must investigate the inside operations of his own corporation CBS - only to reveal how editorial decisions that determine news content turn ultimately not on the public right to know but on the veiled interests of controlling corporations whose market positions depend on the shadowed maneuverings of their stocks and shares.
As events appear to speed by him, he makes his grandstand counterstroke against the film’s new enemy, Eric Kluster/Stephen Tobolowsky, President of CBS News (real name, Eric Ober). It is Kluster who, in support of Caperelli, now shifts against Lowell by heavily suggesting after much “soul searching” that Hewitt’s team should quickly cut an alternative version of their show, but without the crucial Wigand interview. The rising conflict now centres on the right of the programme producer to author his version of his programme:
ERIC KLUSTER
We’re doing this with or without you, Lowell. If you like, I can assign another producer to edit your show.
It is at this point - with the corporate position explicit and with Hewitt moving against him - that Bergman makes his grandstand play against Kluster and exposes the backroom corporate dealings that are truly driving the news agenda at CBS.
To begin the attack, Mann holds on a close-up of Bergman readying his thoughts, then turning to face the departing Kluster:
LOWELL
Before you go…I discovered this SEC filing. For the sale of the CBS Corporation to Westinghouse Corporation.
MIKE WALLACE
What?
DON HEWITT
Yeah, I heard rumors.
LOWELL
It’s not a rumor. It’s a sale. If Tisch can unload CBS for $81 a share to Westinghouse and then is suddenly threatened with a multibillion-dollar lawsuit from Brown & Williamson, that could screw up the sale, could it not?
ERIC KLUSTER
And what are you implying?
LOWELL
I’m not implying. I’m quoting. More vested interests…“Persons Who Will Profit From This Merger…Ms. Helen Caperelli, General Counsel of CBS News, 3.9 million. Mr. Eric Kluster, President of CBS News, 1.4 million”
DON HEWITT
Are you suggesting that she and Eric are influenced by money?
LOWELL
Oh, no, of course they’re not influenced by money.
They work for free. And you are a Volunteer Executive Producer.
DON HEWITT
CBS does not do that. And, you’re questioning our journalistic integrity?!
Whereupon the script requires that Bergman makes explicit the awkward facts:
LOWELL
No, I’m questioning your hearing! You hear “reasonable” and “tortious interference”. I hear, “Potential Brown & Williamson lawsuit jeopardizing the sale of CBS to Westinghouse”. I hear, “Shut the segment down. Cut Wigand loose. Obey orders. And fuck off…!” That’s what I hear.
DON HEWITT
You’re exaggerating!
Bergman rises against Hewitt’s offended manager’s pride by helpfully contextualising the broader scope of the film narrative:
LOWELL
I am? You pay me to go get guys like Wigand, to draw him out. To get him to trust us, to get him to go on television. I do. I deliver him. He sits. He talks. He violates his own fucking confidentiality agreement. And he’s only the key witness in the biggest public health reform issue, maybe the biggest, most-expensive corporate-malfeasance case in U.S. history. And Jeffrey Wigand, who’s out on a limb, does he go on television and tell the truth? Yes. Is it newsworthy? Yes. Are we gonna air it? Of course not. Why? Because he’s not telling the truth? No. Because he is telling the truth. That’s why we’re not going to air it. And the more truth he tells, the worse it gets!
DON HEWITT
You are a fanatic. An anarchist. You know that? If we can’t have a whole show, then I want half a show rather than no show. But oh, no, not you. You won’t be satisfied unless you’re putting the company at risk!
In keeping with genre conventions, the central issue becomes explicit - on which side of the ‘wall’ between journalism and commercialism should they stand. For Bergman, at the vanguard of broadly Liberal politics since his student days under Herbert Marcuse, the issue is clear:
LOWELL
“Put the corporation at risk?” Give me a fucking break!
MIKE WALLACE
Lowell.
LOWELL
These people are putting our whole reason for doing what we do…on the line!
MIKE WALLACE
Lowell!
LOWELL
What?
MIKE WALLACE
I’m with Don on this.
Bergman stands stunned by the sudden turn in his career colleague and without such backing from the lead anchor Wallace he departs the office in silent disgust, his appeals to journalist freedom and the public good now rendered void.
Not since Network (1976) has a Hollywood film come so close to damning the contemporary American broadcast system - and the impact of its corporate ownership on its working methods - so explicitly.
Staging Reality - The News Producer as Social Constructivist
Thereafter, while Wigand struggles with both his divorce and new job as a chemistry teacher (where he seems at first awkward in speaking so freely to the students), Bergman stays firm to his principles as producer of 60 minutes, and works more determinedly to secure the interview airing on two main fronts.
Firstly, he must establish the positive social persona of Jeffrey Wigand who, it transpires has a more awkward past history of minor fabrications that could be exposed and thus discredit him before the interview could be aired. Bergman therefore works to counter a smear campaign that is building against Wigand through the Wall Street Journal. Secondly, Bergman must secure the news space for the evening programme by arranging with the FBI to delay their impending capture of the Unobomber in Montana. Both aims draw explicit attention to the constuctedness of news organisation - in casting necessary and acceptable social personae of interviewees and in stage-managing social events that then become, as if by coincidence, media events.
This particular aspect of the news producer’s power and influence on the real events that are objectively reported now bear greater critical consideration. The force of Hollywood star power allows Pacino’s character to orchestrate and align such events - including the Kentucky deposition in the first instance - without critical comment by the film. In addition, the real event, in this instance the FBI capture of a backwoods Homeland terrorist, is orchestrated and timed to conform to Bergman’s broader agenda - to secure an exclusive story of his prime-time show. The uncomfortable collusion here between television producer, police forces and internal security is one feature of contemporary news journalism that the film seems to take for granted. It exposes, by default, how the reality that is recorded - the capture of a terrorist - is itself a staged incident timed and performed for the benefit of prime-time scheduling needs which make a local story in the western backwoods into a shared nationwide media event in which the broadcasters - and all parties that includes the police and FBI, have a vested interest in airing (see also Mad City, 1997, Chapter Six).
Indeed, as an uncomfortable extension, we could argue that the Unabomber terrorist threat is itself a manifestation of network news delivery since its genre strapline makes local news a natural national concern that garners wider viewer numbers. In this respect, the ‘terrorist’ threat takes on a more sinister dramaturgical significance that can weave a relatively minor discrete criminal item into the recognisable terrorist genre formulae of immediate wider national security relevance.
At the last resort, Lowell hires private investigators to undermine the Wall Street smear campaign that attempts to portray Wigand as an unworthy witness and, with time running out, approaches fellow journalists at The New York Times who are prepared to run a story on the inward dealings at CBS News. At this point he himself becomes the prime whistleblower. What started as a story about the internal operations of the tobacco industry turns inward and becomes an investigation into the corporate dealings of the industry paragon, CBS itself, with both men holding out against corporate America from their respective isolated hotel rooms.
With CBS itself headline news, Wallace confronts Lowell in his hotel room and the two friends and colleagues trade uncomfortable accusations and high principles that cut to the bone of contemporary issues of journalistic integrity and professionalism as it struggles to be heard in the corporate universe. For Bergman, the issue is clear:
LOWELL
No, you give me a break! I never left a source hung out to dry, ever. Abandoned. Not ’til right fucking now! When I came on this job, I came with my word intact. I’m gonna leave with my word intact.
For respected CBS anchor Wallace, the issue takes greater historical weight since:
MIKE WALLACE
I’m not talking celebrity, vanity, CBS. I’m talking about when you’re nearer the end of your life than the beginning. No. What you think is: how will I be regarded in the end? After I’m gone.
His account reminds the audience of the network’s influential role in weaving the nation’s recent history:
MIKE WALLACE
Now, along the way I suppose I made some minor impact. Did Iran-Gate and the Ayatollah, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Saddam, Sadat, etcetera, etcetera. I showed them thieves in suits. I’ve spent a lifetime building all that. But history only remembers most what you did last. And should that be fronting a segment that allowed a tobacco giant to crash this network? Does it give someone at my time of life pause? Yeah.
And in the scene’s culmination, he towers over the sitting Bergman and gives him that morning’s copy of The New York Times:
MIKE WALLACE
In it is the whole sordid story of what went on inside our shop. And in the editorial it accuses us…PAUSE….of betraying the legacy of Edward E. Murrow.
His final resigned turning from Bergman, in a shabby nondescript hotel, signals the deep loss of reputation that he and by extension CBS must suffer in the public forum.
However, with Wallace’s final support against Hewitt secured, Lowell ensures that the full interview is finally aired, though only after their internal dispute has been covered extensively in the press and the smear campaign against Wigand has been successfully confounded.
Facing Realities
The final showdown between the three men turns the tables on Hewitt as Bergman helpfully summarises last-minute plot points and Wallace nods and agrees in final support:
DON HEWITT
The news division has been vilified in The New York Times, in print, on television, for caving to corporate interests! The New York Times ran a blow by blow of what we talked about behind closed doors!. You fucked us!
LOWELL
No, you fucked you! Don’t invert stuff! Big tobacco tried to smear Wigand; you bought it. The Wall Street Journal, here, not exactly a bastion of anti-capitalist sentiment, refutes big tobacco’s smear campaign as the lowest form of character assassination! And now, even now, when every word of what Wigand has said on our show is printed the entire deposition of his testimony in a court of law in the State of Mississippi, the cat totally out of the bag, you’re still standing here debating! Don, what the hell else do you need?
DON HEWITT
Mike, you tell him…
MIKE WALLACE
You fucked up, Don.
DON HEWITT
Hey, it’s old news! Stick with me. Like always, we’ll be okay. These things have a half-life of fifteen minutes.
MIKE WALLACE
No, that’s fame. Fame has a fifteen-minute half-life. Infamy…lasts a little longer We caved. It’s foolish. It’s simply dead wrong. Now, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going over to Black Rock…
The final airing, though, works to justify Lowell’s earlier claims to Wigand in the restaurant that such testimonies on public record make a difference. In support, as the end credits of the film confirm,
-
SUBSEQUENT TO THE EVENTS DRAMATIZED HERE, THE TOBACCO
-
INDUSTRY IN 1998 SETTLED THE LAWSUITS FILED AGAINST IT BY
-
MISSISSIPPI AND 49 OTHER STATES FOR $246 BILLION.
Despite the upbeat ending, however, there is a qualified coda. At the point of his greatest success - Lowell soon gets the plaudits for the exclusive coverage of the Unobomber’s arrest - he decides to cease his employment with CBS. The final exchange with Wallace underscores his realistic appraisal of the new corporate order that determines news broadcasting and a reluctant admittance of his own limited scope within that order:
LOWELL
I quit, Mike.
MIKE WALLACE
Bullshit. Come on, it all worked out. You came out okay in the end.
LOWELL
I did? What do I tell a source on the next tough story? Hang in with us. You’ll be fine…maybe? What got broken here doesn’t go back together again.
Lowell’s silent departure through revolving glass doors of CBS neatly mirrors Wigand’s own walk into the unknown from the Brown & Williamson building at the beginning of the film, both men turning away from corporate America and towards, as it turned out, the noble venture of education. Bergman went to Berkeley to a position on the Faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism, and Wigand succeeded in tertiary education - securing the honour of 1996 Kentucky teacher of the year. On 31st March 2003, Dr. Wigand attended the 13th Annual Kenneth Owler Smith Symposium at the University of Southern California that discussed the FCC regulatory changes then in deliberation (Chapter Nine). The title of the symposium was “Media, Marketing and Morality”.
The Film Text as Corporate Weapon
We now turn a more critical eye on the film’s stated representation of broadcast working conditions, and particularly, its uncertain status as investigative prober of real-life events. This is particularly of significance in a film that goes to great stylistic lengths in terms of pacing and chosen aesthetic palette to invest the drama with powerful psychological truths.
For example, despite its ghostly moves against CBS as suggested above, the film nevertheless represents as worthy and legitimate the form of news interview which Wallace and Hewitt’s 60 Minutes has come to typify for all broadcasters. It is a form of “evocative interview” (Altheide, 1976, p. 115) that engineers and then maximises emotional resonances by foregrounding both star reporter and interviewer within an intense para-social exchange of powerful internal drama that stages character over social context, limited truth over understanding. The real-life interview sequence is reproduced to support the film’s own intended dramatic scenario, with Crowe as Wigand in exchange with the inquiring Wallace/Plummer. The film audience is interpellated at these points as the original television audience and is expected to accept the working practices and delivery techniques that the original 60 Minutes sets as the Gold Standard in investigative reporting. As Stein’s (2001) qualifier to the 60 Minutes reputation points out, it is a news magazine format that,
“…the other news magazines adopted in virtually every detail. They utilized the same visual rhetoric of tight camera framing of subjects and the medium shot of the correspondents, and again also gave more screen time to the reporters than the subjects. The only differentiation they made from each other and 60 Minutes was in choosing ever more highly sensationalistic, tabloid-style stories.” (Stein, 2001, p. 256)
Oddly enough, Stein’s (2001) description chimes uncannily with Mann’s own chosen film aesthetic and its patina of prying close-ups of the shifting Crowe/Wigand character that, under pressure, reveals more ambiguous character traits and background histories as the film proceeds. Hence, the viewer is invited to scrutinise the Wigand persona as presented by Russell Crowe in just the same way that a 60 Minutes television viewer would be interpellated to probe the characters brought to bear by Mike Wallace. In addition, the highly fabricated nature of the scripted and rehearsed 60 Minute interview format, whereby the reporter is variously portrayed as ‘Investigator’, ‘Analyst’ or even ‘Tourist’, seems to go unnoticed by the filmmakers (Campbell, 1987).
In support, the film’s production notes provide elaborate details that confirm the extensive efforts made by Mann and his team to duplicate the circumstances of the real-life case. Filming took place, for example, at the suburban neighbourhoods of Hurstbourne and Seneca Park where Wigand lived while at Brown & Williamson and in the Du Pont Manual High School where he first taught after leaving that company. Similarly, cameras were also set up in Berkeley California at a location not far from Lowell’s home and in the south of the country where cast and crew assembled to recreate Wigand’s decision to testify. This took place at the real location of coastal home of Richard Scruggs who, as a member of Attorney General Michael Moore’s legal team, got his name on the cast list as an assistant to the actor who played him. Indeed, the film featured Moore himself as himself (named the Most Outstanding Attorney General in America in 1997) and even The New York Times reporter Pete Hamill secured a part, as a reporter. With these points in mind that platform the film’s claims on its own authenticity, we refocus attention on the most potent dramatic turn in the film which occurs with Pacino’s grandstand counterstroke flourish in which he details to his Managing News Editor the impending takeover of CBS by Westinghouse - a company which, as noted in earlier chapters, had an instrumental role in the development of the U.S. national radio and television networks in the early 1920s.
Touchstone Enquiries
Taking this as a lead, one key contextual element in our consideration of the film’s claims to accuracy will include an account of those series of mergers and acquisitions during the 1980s and 1990s that, it will be argued, have a direct bearing on the film’s dubious narrative agenda. Like The Truman Show (1998), it too has emerged as a corporate text from Touchstone Pictures, a division of Disney, owner of ABC news.
More notably we will consider not what the film narrative includes about the political intrigues behind the operations of CBS news, but, more significantly, what it chooses to deftly exclude about the more questionable recent history at ABC itself, prior to the Disney takeover. In other words, what has been edited from a film account/docu-drama that supposedly exposes such ambivalent practices in news broadcasting - and why. For this, we can probe briefly into Dennis Mazzocco’s history of ABC, Networks of Power (1994), and refer again to Foerstel (2001).
The ABC Corporate Backstory - from Cap Cities to Disney
The $3.5 billion purchase of ABC in 1985 by Cap Cities, was a takeover paved by the deregulation drive of the Reagan era (Chapter Five). While networks could previously own only seven stations, under Reagan that number was raised to 12 thus allowing Cap Cities to combine the ABC affiliates it owned with ABC’s owned-and-operated stations. In a scenario already familiar to viewers of Network (1976), ABC, now under Cap Cities, came under heavy pressure to cut costs and make its news operations profitable, like NBC and CBS which also changed corporate hands in the 1980s. By 1987, the same year as Broadcast News (1987), about 300 news staffers (one-fifth of all employees) had lost their jobs (Auletta, 1991). In such straightened commercial circumstances, the issue turned once again on how television news networks were and remain constrained in their news coverage as a direct result of operating in the more exposed commercialised environment of the 1980s and 1990s. The Insider (1999), clearly foregrounds such invasive nature of corporate interests on television news content, for sure. And in this respect, its outspoken censure via Pacino would earn it some credit from those who see the film as a powerful Hollywood indictment of corporate America. Further, this open exposure would be in keeping with contemporary academic accounts elsewhere. For example, Sparrow (1999) confirms how in the 1970s advertisers withheld commitment from what they saw as undesirable programming. For instance,
“…when NBC ran a news special on the conditions of migrant workers who picked citrus crops for Minute Maid, Coca Cola (the parent company) pulled its mulit-million dollar account. For at least eight years thereafter, NBC did not produce a documentary on a controversial domestic issue involving an important advertiser.”
(Sparrow, 1999, p. 79)
Similarly, Woodward (1997) details a number of corporate coercions that had determined 1970s network news and drama output. In one open secret, for example,
“General Foods Vice President Kent Mitchell indicated that in the 1970s his corporation was regularly withdrawing its advertising from roughly 100 television programmes a year because the content did not match the views the company held. General Foods is the second largest purchaser of television advertising in the United States. In one instance the company withdrew their sponsorship of an episode of a TV drama with a plot built around a poorly run nursing home. “It wasn’t as balanced as we would have wished”, he noted.” (Woodward, 1997, p. 37)
Within this constellation, and echoing Semali’s (2000) contention in Chapter One, the networks first audience is the ‘silent’ third-party advertiser whose on-going $ multibillion accounts with the networks effectively fund the public system.
More significantly, however, for our present account of Disney’s interests, Sparrow (1999) also makes detailed reference to the similar and more pronounced intrigues between the news networks and the tobacco industry during the 1990s (see also Woodward, 1997, p. 61-64). Investigating these sources reveals an interesting blind spot in the film’s narrative that exposes its rhetorical function as a corporate text.
Amongst the most notable instances of explicit an unabashed corporate censorship, for example, took place in early 1995 when Capital Cities/ABC itself took a major risk in airing a prime-time documentary on the secretive operations of the tobacco industry. That documentary went so far as to accuse market-leader Phillip Morris of injecting additives into its own cigarettes. As with the case in Brown & Williamson, this was to encourage addiction and therefore increase greater sales profits, all at the knowing risk of causing cancer (Philip Morris is also owner of Kraft Foods and so is a major television advertiser/benefactor to the commercial broadcasters).
However, in anticipation of the broadcast, the Philip Morris corporation responded immediately with a $10 billion libel suit that then precipitated a very public retraction from the humbled network broadcaster and - further - a formal on-air apology (during the popular Monday Night Football telecast) in August 1995. The background corporate intrigues that prompted such public contrition have been wryly observed by Foerstel (2001):
“Attorneys who followed the suit said the overriding factor in ABC’s capitulation was the immediacy of the takeover of ABC by Disney. Just three weeks before the settlement of the lawsuit, Capital Cities/ABC Inc and Disney announced their $19 billion merger.” (Foerstel, 2001, p. 27)
A vital public issue was therefore prevented from being aired by the controlling power of the corporate sector wielding significant power in the form of a major advertising budget.
The earlier scenario at ABC mirrors almost too exactly the events as depicted in The Insider (1999) - but only as they had a bearing on the tortured history at the rival CBS corporation. The uncomfortable and direct parallel with Cap Cities/ABC is not mentioned in any available references to the film, certainly not on the extensive Touchstone Production Notes that go to great lengths in detailing the real-life accuracies of the film’s chosen locations and those minor characters who appear “as themselves” in the drama. Indeed, this telling gap that draws attention to the corporate author is oddly absent from all other criticisms and commentaries of the film that emphasise its claims to documented truths. This is peculiarly significant in the case of a film which, over its 160 minutes length, draws clear critical attention of its own to the pervasive influence of corporate bodies on public discourse in the first instance.
Adding to this grand narrative elision that carefully buries the ABC/Philip Morris history, are the range of reviews which attended to the accuracy of the film’s narrative - but only in terms of its veracity to the chosen limited perspective - how, for example, it was a fair account of the Vanity Fair article in the first instance, or how close was the film to the real life beyond, but only as far as its representation of the threats on Jeffrey Wigan’s own experience were concerned or how it bruised the egos of Wallace and Hewitt. Indeed, the film itself helps shape this limited agenda at its close, where,
ALTHOUGH BASED ON A TRUE STORY, CERTAIN EVENTS IN THIS MOTION PICTURE HAVE BEEN FICTIONALIZED FOR DRAMATIC EFFECT. THE SOURCE OF THE DEATH THREATS AGAINST THE WIGANDS NEVER WAS IDENTIFIED AND NO ONE WAS EVER CHARGED OF PROSECUTED.
In the light of other corporate truths not covered in the film, this would stand as a neat rhetorical deflection. Veracity to truth in this instance only includes elements of narrative that deftly eschews reference to ABC’s own questionable history with the tobacco giants just a few years before. Instead of such wider exposure, the narrative thrust of the Disney/ABC film focuses neatly and squarely on the alternative and equally troubled and dubious history of its network competitor, CBS, for the entire world to see. To put the issue in some historical context, the 60 Minutes programme was, at the time of the film’s release, in its 30th year of transmission, having been created in 1968 by Don Hewitt who had been with CBS since the late 1940s (Chapter Three). During that time when he took charge in the late 1960s it had become the most popular magazine news show in television history, setting a record of twenty-two consecutive seasons in the top ten Nielsen ratings, and the only broadcast programme to finish the season in three different decades as number one. In terms of its news agenda, 60 Minutes set itself standards of journalist integrity and objective reporting as a champion of the individual against bureaucratic and corporate interests that judiciously appropriated the legacy of Edward E. Murrow. At the time of its 25th anniversary, it led the standard over rivals Dateline NBC, 20/20 at ABC and Front Page at Fox. In the season 1998-9, the show averaged nineteen million viewers, indeed,
“…watching the show has taken on an aura of a cultural tradition through which television is valorized as a medium of depth.” (Stein, 2001, p. 252)
In this light, the second-half critique in The Insider (1999) by a corporate rival is all the more telling. It is the reputable CBS which suffers the humiliation of breaking the commitment to air issues of public importance, it is CBS which concedes to the demands of the commercial imperative, and it is the status of the CBS news network - in the form of Mike Wallace, ace anchor, which is ultimately humbled. Wallace’s own critiques of how he had been represented as an individual should not at this point go without comment. In an interview with The New York Times journalist Applebaum, Wallace was reported as questioning the intentions of Michael Mann:
“…why does he use my name and have words come out of my mouth that I never would have said.? There was never any doubt in anyone’s mind at all one where I stood on this. And to be portrayed as having lost my moral compass and caved in. To whom? For what?” (Stein, 2001, p. 250)
Wallace’s singular concerns about his representation and how it seemed framed by the director’s narrative shaping neatly deflects away from the main issues raised by the film and stands typically, for Stein (2001), as,
“…a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that exactly mirrors the journalistic and narrative practices of 60 minutes itself.” (Stein, 2001, p. 251)
An element missing in all accounts of the film, however, is the crucial factor of corporate authoring which we have raised. In “betraying the legacy of Edward E. Murrow”, CBS is well and truly bowed and broken in a film produced by a main corporate competitor, Disney, owner of news rival ABC. In this respect, the film itself is one further extension of negative advertising that serves to undermine the reputation of CBS and, by inference, raise the standing of its rivals at ABC.
In this context, and in consideration of the film’s overall chosen style, it would appear that the intense close narrative emphasis on Wigand and Lowell as driven by Mann’s accompanying celebrated interior visual strategy that expands primarily on the personal inner conflicts of the lead characters, brilliantly deflects any potential and valid criticism that may touch on the awkward ABC/Philip Morris saga that lurks menacingly on the story perimeter. As argued here, and considering issues of political economy as they have a bearing on the news industries, such an associative link would provide ample reason why Disney/ABC would find this exposure of its main competitor in news delivery so appealing to produce in the first instance. As will be further explored below, it is a chosen narrative that in its standard mainstream focus on personal histories uncannily recounts Stein’s (2001) separate critique of the 60 Minutes formula that by the 1980s had developed “the convention of the impartial,
“…professional journalist employing a scientific, objective methodology to uncover issues of public interest…now joined to narrative reconstructions of experience featuring dramatic characters.” (Stein, 2001, p. 254)
The Insider (1999), then, functions to both open and reveal certain (known) public truths while working assiduously to conceal or at least deflect certain corporate truths, while presenting as valid a news broadcast show that was founded on the very principles of Hollywood dramatic construction in the first place (Campbell, 1987).
The film is an explicit auteurial presence that speaks more directly than most of contemporary political and media concerns but in a way that resists full condemnation by meeting mainstream criteria that tip the balance from social critique to psychological concern for the main male protagonists as victims. This ambiguity was perhaps mirrored in the round of award conventions that year where it earned distinct moral approval in the form of seven Golden Globe nominations and no less than eight Oscar nominations but left both events with none.
Lastly, we close this chapter with a return to wider social contextual issues that consider the role of corporate news broadcasting in America and its determining impact on the scope and content of public discourse, a key theme that will lead our focus in the closing two chapters.
The Insider (1999) as Corporate Free Speech
As we have established, the theme of discourse and free speech is central to the film since, at its dramaturgical core, it draws critical attention to the powers of corporate America and its powerful ability to curtail open disclosure of vital social importance by private individuals. In this respect it speaks for prevailing contemporary concerns, (Boggs, 2000). However, its uncritical portrayal of Bergman’s own manipulation of events remains dangerously suspect since it is only through these corporate moves on behalf of CBS that such public spaces - in law courts and on the public airwaves - can seem to exist in the first instance. The vital casting of underdog Pacino as Liberal Bergman assists in covering this ideological dodge. His actions throughout the film are wholly devoted to constructing spaces where Wigand can exercise his right to speech free of corporate litigation. The success that is celebrated in the airing of the damning interview is, therefore, a suspect one. Equally open to critical concern is his noble retreat into the commercial-free zone of academia which, we are led to believe, exists beyond the corporate hold. It is an uncomfortable ironic coda indeed that a film that ostensibly engineers public concern about the diminishing scope for free speech in America should itself emerge from that same dominant corporate stage which it seems so eager to subversively censure.The final retreat into academia by both Bergman and Wigand provides a less-than satisfactory coda that suggests that, given their proven academic credentials anyway, this is perhaps the natural environment in which they can more fruitfully explore and share their skills, and where, by suggestive subtext, they should have perhaps remained in the first instance.
It is a final argument that the fictive reconstructing of events that Disney has created attempts to refigure and put to rest the historical account and close the gaps thereby that other possibly alternative accounts of the kind provided above might open. In this respect we return to the fiction film’s more enabling status as an influential rhetorical text in contest with other texts circulating in the public domain.
It is a public domain dominated by corporate institutions such as Disney/ABC. Through the appropriation of closely linked discourses such as film and broadcast news a dominant hegemony is legitimised through the narratives they weave and the entertaining myths that they share about themselves. Together, they work assiduously, like Bergman/Pacino, to leave their own words “intact”.”
CODA
2007 Update
Jeffrey Wigand’s orignial testimony against Brown and Williamson is here:-
Where to Now?
How About Berlin, the Summer 2007 Course on US Film & Media:-
END
