The Non-Conformist is Beautiful: Two Italian Films

Though looking at just two films is hardly enough to discern a pattern, it is still interesting to see that a theme running through two very different Italian films made almost three decades apart is in both cases an elevation of non-conformism in a sick society. Both award-winners, the 1970 film The Conformist and the 1997 film Life is Beautiful both chronicle World War II-era fascism in Italy and examine the moral responsibilities of the individual in the midst of an immoral and anti-individualistic system. 

Both films spend a significant amount of narrative emphasis on the rise of fascism in Italy. The Conformist, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and based on the novel by Alberto Moravia, shows the career of its anti-hero Marcello beginning in 1938 in Rome; Life is Beautiful, written and directed by Roberto Benigni, shows the career of its hero Guido beginning in 1939 in Arezzo, Tuscany. Though Marcello marries a woman he does not truly love, Guido marries a woman he adores – for the tone of these two movies are in striking contrast, as too are their levels of realism. The main characters are also at opposite poles: the latter is brave, the former cowardly, or perhaps more precisely the latter is generous, the former selfish. And so the cautionary tale The Conformist is a melancholic and damning drama about selling your soul, while the comedy-drama Life is Beautiful aims to be a kind of fable about the power of the little guy and of faith.

The Conformist and Life is Beautiful both have the same central, compelling, dramatic premise: will the protagonist save the lives of the people he cares about? In The Conformist, he is smitten with Anna Quadri, and he also has respect and affection for her husband, his old philosophy professor. Yet he knows (since he works for the secret police) that they are targets for assassination for their subversive activities. Thus, the main thrust of the film is suspense over whether he will allow them to be killed. In Life is Beautiful, Guido devotes himself in the second half of the movie to trying to keep his wife and son alive despite the whole family’s internment in a Nazi camp. Despite Guido’s tactic of pretending to his young son Joshua that it is all a game, the film has tremendous suspense, because of course the audience knows what the true horror of the situation is and how fraught with peril at every moment.

Propaganda is accepted in the Italian cities in both movies, for instance: near the start of The Conformist, the protagonist’s friend Italo records a speech on radio about how wonderful it is that Italy and Germany are uniting forces, and one of the ways Guido courts Dora early on in Life is Beautiful is to impersonate an inspector who otherwise would have given the schoolchildren a straight lecture about their inherent racial superiority. We also see how the fascist bureaucracy controls the economic success of the citizenry in both films. Marcello and Guido each enter the huge, impersonal, cavernous offices of their city governments to assure their livelihoods. 

Marcello has some arrogance and cruelty that makes him a good fit with the intolerant and bullying side of fascism – he despises what he calls his mother’s “decadence”, for instance, and has her Japanese chauffeur beaten up and sent away;  he torments his father when he visits him in an asylum. But he tends to resist the fascist bent of his country in only small gestures: he leans away from his fascist friend Italo, he tries to wave away Agent Manganiello who pursues him about the mission. 

By contrast, Guido is cleanly opposed to fascism, and his whole personality is the antithesis of it. He is fundamentally egalitarian in spirit – from a lower class than Marcello, he is also without disdain or pomposity. We initially meet him driving through the countryside in a run-down car with failing brakes alongside a working-class friend. When they arrive in Arezzo, they share a bed for the savings. From the start of his family, Guido paints a kind of fairy tale atmosphere. He dotes on both his wife and son and upholds togetherness. Whereas Marcello was always dissatisfied, Guido makes his own happiness even in the face of nightmarish oppression.

In The Conformist, Marcello does seem to have a conscience, but he lacks actual principles. He knows an assassination of someone who doesn’t deserve it is pending, and he spends a lot of the movie moping about it. At one he tries to give the gun back to the Agent -- but his attempts to refuse to participate are half-hearted.

In Life is Beautiful, Guido is the exact opposite: he’s all principles and self-sacrifice in the second half of the movie, which is full of daring actions he undertakes at the death camp just to keep his son and wife Dora’s spirits up. In the more comedic first half, he does break rules – and eggs – but he does not do it out of spitefulness. Sometimes it is just accidental, Chaplinesque slapstick – taking someone else’s hat, for instance – but the butts of the jokes are, like in Chaplin’s films, members of a mean-spirited and snobbish over-class. And the clowing is gracefully executed by Roberto Benigni, a highly-skilled physical comedian.

The screenplay for The Conformist is shrewd because in it Marcello’s obsession with conformity precedes his political compromises. He talks about normality quite often, from his conversation with his friend about impending marriage (and how he wants it to make him normal) to his reluctant confession in church, when he tells the priest that he intends to “construct” his “normality” by paying a debt to society. Because the fascists now rule Italy, he thinks he can hide what he feels is his abnormality by making a firm commitment to the dominant ideology in joining OVRA, the Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism. For almost two decades, he has felt intense guilt and shame around the accidental murder of a chauffeur when he was 13 (which he has kept secret), and he believes that “blood atones for blood,” as if two wrongs can somehow magically make a right. 

In opposition, Guido fully embraces being abnormal in Life is Beautiful. He is a kind of innocent Pierrot who sees everything from a fresh and imaginative perspective -- which may be why he is able to commit to viewing even the darkest and most dysfunctional environment through the eyes of a hopeful child. He does not spend time worrying about where he fits into society -- when he is a poor waiter trying to romance Dora, a schoolteacher whose current fiancé has much more money, it does not discourage him. He still does what he can. When, as fascism starts growing in his town, he starts observing the vile graffiti all over that vilifies his people, he takes an uncle’s white horse that has been painted bile-green and covered in anti-Semitic graffiti, and rides that horse into a hotel ballroom gala and chivalrously spirits the willing Dora away.

The helpless, sulking Marcello, a passive protagonist, has already lost himself well before the harrowing climax of The Conformist. (At dinner, two women discuss whether he ever smiles and decide he doesn’t, but that is “his nature.” Petulantly, Marcello disagrees: “That’s not my nature!” This suggests that he feels at odds with what he projects, that he would like, perhaps, to be less tormented.) By contrast, in Life is Beautiful, the very active protagonist Guido seems to be exactly who he wants to be, and stays true to his independence and inner resilience despite ordeals much worse than Marcello’s.

Marcello is so passive that he does not even drive himself to the assassination ambush, Agent Manganiello drives him and he sits in the back, where he dozes off. Awaking, he shares a dream that he was blind and that Manganiello drove him to Switzerland for an operation by Professor Quadri, who restored him to sight. This is evidently inspired by the conversation Marcello had at the professor’s about Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which the professor links the takeover of Italy by fascist ideology to the inability of the prisoners in the cave to see reality or even to recognize unreality. Marcello has internalized the idea that the anti-fascist professor could help him to see again, and this shows that Marcello doesn’t really believe in fascism. (Switzerland is also important in the dream because it was ostensibly neutral in both world wars.) At the end of the dream, Marcello found true love -- a soothing wish fulfillment for him. But he never does anything to make it happen in real life. In fact, he merely allows the antithesis to come true.

Ultimately, the only active things Marcello does are all soul-denying gestures to “construct” his “normality”, and when in the end of the film politics have done an about-face, he turns former friends over to the mob and denounces them as fascists – only because suddenly the safest thing to be anti-fascist. He is still imprisoned in himself and unsure of his identity; and we can see that in the closing image as he turns to look at us through a gate’s iron bars. He is still a conformist.

There is also some philosophy in Life is Beautiful, and it goes right to the core of the difference between being passive and active. While trying to get some sleep one night, Guido’s pal explains to him that he uses willpower to fall asleep, and cites the philosopher Schopenhaeur’s ideas as the inspiration. Thereafter, Guido consciously uses willpower to try to make things happen in the external world that he desires, starting with a visit to the opera where he wills Dora to turn from her expensive box seat (where she is on a date) to look at him below in the cheap seats. This all lays the groundwork for the bold coup that Guido pulls off over the course of the family’s internment in the camp. He uses willpower to convince his son Joshua to stay hidden by day in the barracks every day at the camp, and to prevent Joshua from despairing. Guido’s very active approach is a tremendous gift of love.

Though they take vastly different approaches, The Conformist and Life is Beautiful both show the value of resistance against depraved authority. They uphold the individual as the seat of morality, and portray the importance to an individual of seeing clearly and of having the will to follow one’s conscience. Ultimately, each of these movies revolves around the rejection of conformity for its own sake, and the elevation of non-conformity as a muscle to train and prepare. Both movies illustrate that the non-conformist is beautiful.

12 Years a Slave and the Oscars

This article was originally published on OpEdNews on January 12, 2014.

 I normally hate to make Oscar predictions. It usually depresses me. By the time the predictions start proliferating, it’s a cold matter of analysis of the awards already given out by the guilds, BAFTA, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and (to a certain extent) the critics’ associations, like predicting presidential nominees by counting poll numbers and delegates before the conventions. You wouldn’t even need to have seen the movies first, because it tends to be a simple numbers game. I don’t much like thinking along those lines; I’d rather keep my mind on what should win.
 

This year is different. I actually think that, rather miraculously, 12 Years a Slave is going to win the Oscar for Best Picture. This may be the one time in Oscar history when the film which so unquestionably deserves to win actually does win.

Moreover, the selection of 12 Years a Slave brings a great many other precedents with it. It is the most uncompromising of the movies likely to be on the list of Best Picture nominees. It is not comfort food. It is not the kind of film which requires nothing of the audience, or reassures them about their own complacencies. Although the performances are amazing, they can’t be separated from the crystal-clear relevance of the film — unlike for instance, the striking, masterful, 8-category nominee There Will Be Blood (2007), when everyone talked about Daniel Day-Lewis’ fearless performance but overlooked the damning psychological portrait of an American oil baron. The directing, acting, screenplay, cinematography, editing, and music of 12 Years a Slave are all astonishing, but none of them let the viewer forget that this is a true story — an adaptation of a first-person slave narrative published in 1853 — and that it is a history churning with urgency about politics, race, and justice in America.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that director Steve McQueen would be the first black director to helm a film that receives the Oscar for Best Picture.

I won’t go into whether he will automatically win the Oscar for Best Director too, since we know very well from last year that the two categories are not necessarily in lockstep, but he should. He would be the first black director to do that as well: John Singleton and Lee Daniels are the only two to ever even be nominated in that category. (It’s hard to believe, but Spike Lee has never been nominated for an Oscar for Best Director — only for Screenplay and Documentary — though he did get a well-deserved Golden Globe directing nom for Do the Right Thing.) No black director has won the Golden Globe for film directing before either. If McQueen wins the top Directors Guild prize leading up to the Oscars, he would also be the first black director to achieve that honor.

It’s certainly a year with an abundance of talented, thoughtful, and fiercely independent directors. (Alfonso Cuarón’s technical skill, graceful style, and boldness of vision in his gorgeous Gravity are especially impressive. Even more notable is the degree to which he turned a potentially “Hollywood-ized’ sci-fi actioner into a compelling meditation on space, our dependence on Mother Earth, and the insignificance and significance of a human life.) I feel rather sorry for Steve McQueen’s competitors, in fact, simply because they might have had better chances another year.

The director, who is about as far removed in attitude and appearance from the cocksure 1960′s movie star Steve McQueen, has actually only made 3 feature films. (Although he has directed an incredible number of shorts.) Yet this British filmmaker’s first feature clearly showed him to be an extraordinary artist, idiosyncratic and visionary. Hunger (2008), a biographical drama like no other, was jaw-dropping. He has simply continued to get better with each feature, single-mindedly carving out his own path with utterly unique projects on rock-serious subjects that few would touch. Hunger is about the 1980′s IRA prisoners’ hunger strike led by Bobby Sands: McQueen makes the concept completely visceral by boldly showing us what it looks like for a person to starve to death. His second film, Shame, mercilessly examines sex addiction, incest, and psychic pain with a minimum of dialogue and a shortage of easy answers.

McQueen’s latest, 12 Years a Slave, is a searing period drama adapted by John Ridley from Solomon Northrup’s memoir. It’s a story that, as McQueen himself has said, was crying out to be made into a film. Northrup was a free, educated, black father and husband; a prominent member of an upstate New York community; an engineer and respected violinist. Then he was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the south.

By focusing on a protagonist who has grown up free, the film is able to expose slavery anew: we can feel the horrors of it more vividly and acutely because the victim is so confident, so used to self-determination. He goes through enormous suffering, his faith and hope are destroyed, and he finds himself unable to philosophically reconcile the horrendous crime against him — yet in this way he’s a kind of witness for all slaves. Though Northrup’s kidnapping is part of an illicit commerce between the states (the process of abolition in the Northern states gave slave owners ample time to divest from their slave holdings, thereby leading many to just sell their slaves to the south), the 12 million Africans who were kidnapped and brought to the Americas before Northrup’s story even began were themselves ripped from their homes, loved ones, and sense of their own humanity in very much the same way.

Actor Chiwetel Ejiofor’s face, no matter how devastated, always reveals the free man inside. And McQueen makes clear the inner dignity of those born into slavery as well, in a variety of scenes with black supporting players — the fact that some are used to this mistreatment certainly doesn’t make it any easier on them than it is on him.

Black men on the boat traveling south try their best to overcome their terrible situation, but the odds are against them. The price of rebellion is death. Another angle is presented by Alfre Woodard, in a cameo as a privileged apple of a white man’s eye; though she plays house rather like a society matron, she bears no illusions about her status or the meaning of the slavery project as a whole — unlike the cartoonish Candyland toadies which Quentin Tarantino had so little sympathy for in Django Unchained.

It is Lupita Nyong’o, however, in a truthful and heartfelt performance as the charming, spirited, much-tormented slave Patsey, who deeply enriches the moral significance and complexity of the world Northrup encounters — and whose continued captivity when Northrup is finally freed helps ensure that we don’t regard it as an unalloyed happy ending. McQueen doesn’t let the audience off the hook.

The movie lays bare in chilling detail a great many of the mechanics of slavery, and even familiar tropes like the masters’ rapes, the wives’ jealousy, and the backbreaking toil are brought home in ways that seem fresh. McQueen’s special ability to invoke the audience’s empathy in Hunger and Shame are even stronger here, where Ejiofor’s raw emotion and spiritual pain lend a depth to his suffering that is almost Shakespearean.

Indeed, the acting is tremendous with the exception of Brad Pitt, and the visiting Canadian he plays too close to the vest (though Pitt should be commended for his vision in producing the film — getting it made in the first place.) Paul Giamatti is first-rate as the slave trader who slaps and shoves his “merchandise’ around and makes domination his business. Paul Dano is quite brave as an overseer who seethes with resentment over Northrup’s intelligence — Dano’s willingness to dig into the ugliness of such a mentality is profound . Sarah Paulson is intense as a brooding, tightly-coiled, wronged wife, full of perhaps the most virulent race-hatred in the movie. And Michael Fassbender (in his third collaboration with McQueen) is wonderful — as he always is — in a colorful, eccentric role as a depressed, alcoholic, hands-on master; his villainy is also Shakespearean, by turns red-hot and soft-spoken, powerful and needy. (In the interests of full disclosure, I must mention that his character’s last name is Epps. Since this is based on a memoir and that might be the real slave master’s name, I pray that there’s no relation.)

There’s such a subtle, wide-ranging understanding of racism in the film, it really is provocative in the way it challenges viewers on issues of personal accountability for social wrongs. The versatile Benedict Cumberbatch is Ford, Northrup’s first master after the kidnapping. Ford is an intelligent and feeling man who admires the special musical and engineering skills of his slave — but he still gives him a violin instead of freedom. Ford’s complicity in the injustice against Northrup is one of the finer points made by the film; Ford sees how much suffering the slave market creates, but he makes only the merest peep and then drops his complaint. (The agony caused by separating parents from their children is an extended topic of the film.) Ford is also impressed, and takes advantage of for the benefits to his business, Northrup’s exceptional levels of education. But when Northrup tries to tell him that he’s a free man, Ford exclaims “I cannot hear that!”



The question of “what did they know and when did they know it?” is a strong ethical refrain of the movie — since everyone that Northrup meets, like the cast of characters in a Dickens novel, ends up skewing either cruel or kind, trustworthy or treacherous. 12 Years a Slave answers that question, implicitly as: they all knew, everything, and they knew it early. They knew that slaves weren’t really happy, that slavery was earth-shatteringly unjust, that their workers were intelligent and soulful fellow humans rather than property (Fassbender keeps repeating the word “property” as if needing to convince himself). Numerous instances speak to this knowing: characters can quite plainly see Northrup was born free, yet they go ahead and deprive him of his human rights; Patsy’s master believes he has a special regard for her, but treats her brutally; a distraught enslaved mother is told she will soon get over the separation from her children, but when she doesn’t, her grief — and the powerful evidence it thrusts on the white folk that she is, actually, just like them — makes her expendable.

Some long-standing contradictions of slavery are enumerated in the film: if slaves were naturally subservient, why would their spirits need to be broken; if blacks were so intellectually inferior, why would literacy among slaves be such a threat; if all God’s children were equal, how could Christianity be applied so differently to whites and blacks; and so on. (Fassbender even formally preaches scripture to his slaves, explaining to them that he is the “Lord” referred to in the text.)
We are also frequently reminded that this whole enterprise was very much a business. This story reveals a little-known activity within the U.S. slave trade that seems particularly striking in its outrageousness: kidnapping free black northerners and selling them into slavery down south. The kidnappers are so perniciously, smoothly evil — they win Northrup’s confidence by complimenting him, deceiving him into believing that they respect his education and sophistication — that the shamelessness of the way they make their profit is even more horrifying. They know, more than anyone else in the entire film, what they are putting Northrup and others through.

Most of the film is very naturalistic, but an early visual uses computer-generated imagery to make an ironic social comment. After Northrup has been drugged and kidnapped, he is held in a cell and beaten. When finally left alone, he cries out desperately for help. McQueen carries us outside to the rooftops of the 19 ^th century Washington, D.C. skyline. At the very top of the skyline is the Capitol building. Though a potent symbol of democracy, Northrup receives no protection from it.

The movie poster shows Northrup running, but this is not a movie about a fugitive slave — he doesn’t get that chance. He’s always stuck on a plantation, and the movie reveals how fully white society conspired to keep slaves stuck there. Even the abolitionists or friendly whites in the film seem to be scared of that powerful system. (David Blight, a Yale expert on the history of slavery, describes that system as “a police state.”) The poster’s image actually comes from a revealing moment in the film when Northrup is sent on an errand alone, and it occurs to him that now he might escape. He’s wrong, however; he soon comes upon some white men hanging blacks from trees, and he quickly realizes that not only is he powerless to help his brethren, but without the note from his mistress, his own life would have been of no worth.

Yet a couple of scenes later, McQueen teases us again over our Hollywood-reared naïveté . He cuts to Northrup running through the woods once more. We’ve just seen how deadly it would be for him to run away, how impenetrable the barriers are. Yet we still hope that he’s broken free; we’ve been spoon-fed so many popcorn movies of heroes triumphing over gigantic obstacles. Though of course Northrup is resilient and courageous, and that’s how he survived, he’s only a human being. He happens to be running simply to reach the place he has been sent to faster; to summon Patsey back to their master.

That one moment encapsulates how eloquently McQueen reminds us of how much we have forgotten — how much we have averted our gaze from so as to avoid the pain of remembering that shameful legacy. 12 Years a Slave deserves to win the Oscar for Best Picture not just because of its artistic excellence or the ground-breaking precedents it will set, but also because it preserves for posterity a crucially significant part of world history. It’s a history we ignore at our own peril.

Awards Update: 
12 Years a Slave is now the winner of the Golden Globe Award for Best Picture — Drama. (It was also nominated at the Golden Globes for three of its performances and for Directing, Screenplay, and Original Score – tying with American Hustle for the most Golden Globe nominations this year at 7 apiece.)

12 Years a Slave has already won Best Film trophies from the American Film Institute and from numerous local critics associations around the country.

It also has 13 Critics Choice Awards nominations, 10 BAFTA nominations, 10 Satellite Awards nominations, 9 London Critics Circle nominations, and 7 Independent Spirit Award nominations.
Director Steve McQueen’s first two films won numerous international awards as well, including the Venice Film Festival’s FIPRESCI prize.  

Secrecy and Surveillance in “Closed Circuit”

by Jennifer Epps

Every so often, British filmmakers come out with some pretty daring statements about their government. In 1990, the politically-committed movie director Ken Loach made Hidden Agenda, a pessimistic conspiracy thriller which speculated not only that state forces had themselves committed acts of terror in Northern Ireland, but that conservative politicians knowingly colluded with such tactics so as to usher in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her iron fist. In 2010, joint British, French and German financing helped renegade auteur Roman Polanski  film English novelist Robert Harris’ book The Ghost Writer -- another pessimistic conspiracy thriller, but this one timed to trail P.M. Tony Blair’s exit from Downing Street with a fictitious story of a British P.M. under scrutiny for war crimes and entanglements with the U.S. and C.I.A.

Now the Brits are at it again, with a new pessimistic conspiracy thriller, Closed Circuit, and it should appeal to a much more diverse base than just BBC America fans. The subject of this savvy and contemporary courtroom/espionage mystery is quite different from the Cold War spy vs. spy machinations of the producers’ elegant Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy of 2011. It takes on nothing less than the modern national security state, and its findings are as bleak as the 1974 classic The Parallax View, or Oliver Stone’s JFK.

Though Closed Circuit is now playing in U.S. multiplexes thanks to the visionary boldness of Focus Features and Working Title films (a London subsidiary of Universal), it is not scheduled to open in the U.K. until Nov. 1^st. Reaction there may be heated, since to British viewers, the vicious terror attack at the center of Closed Circuit’s made-up story – an invented, highly lethal incident at a busy open-air market across from a subway (aka “Tube”) station – will almost certainly evoke the notorious suicide bombings of July 7, 2005. The real-life coordinated terrorist attack of 7/7 rocked London with three nearly simultaneous explosions on the Tube and, soon after, another on a double-decker bus -- 52 people were killed and 700 injured. Two weeks later, an almost identical terrorist plot was attempted again on London’s public transport, though this time all the bombs failed to explode. Like 9/11 in the U.S., 7/7 provoked accusations and criticism in the U.K. and put the authorities, particularly Britain’s MI-5, on the defensive. Blair sure didn’t still the outrage by refusing to launch an inquiry --- his claim was that to do so would undermine support for the security services.

Surveillance, secrecy, and the appropriation of great powers in the name of national security began to be put in place in Britain post- 9/11, and civil libertarians over there began to object within the first few months. But 7/7 revealed even scarier ramifications. Among the disturbing practices were ‘shoot-to-kill’ policies like that in evidence in the incident on July 22^nd of that year, when plain-clothes police tailed a Brazilian man, chased him into the Tube, tussled him to the ground, and shot him 7 times, point-blank, in the head. They believed the man, Jean Charles de Menezes, to be a terror suspect. He was, however, unarmed and completely innocent.

It is this atmosphere which seems to have been the genesis  for the Orwellian world of Closed Circuit, a compelling counter-narrative about lack of transparency and an antidote to the lowest-common-denominator exploitation of ‘the war on terror’ by far-right entertainment like 24. The detective drama Closed Circuit engages in the debate on a similar playing field, with a slick, entertaining, twisty thriller that follows several standard tropes of the genre and immerses in-demand romantic leads Eric Bana and Rebecca Hall into huge life-or-death stakes. But instead of identifying terrorist plots by enemies of the state as the only serious threat to democracy, Closed Circuit is a movie that would be on Edward Snowden’s side. MI-5, the British intelligence agency which handles counter-terrorism, becomes the devouring behemoth that the hero and heroine – a pair of defense attorneys – must flee. Unlike the way sister agency MI-6 has been presented in endless James Bond movies – with any ethical transgressions excused by their excellent judgment and patriotic motivations -- MI-5’s conduct in Closed Circuit is unambiguously wrong. The movie makes a convincing case that things in Britain may have already crossed the line into a combination of security surveillance and government secrecy, a combo so unhealthy the door is left wide open to abuse, cover-up, and the endangerment of the very citizenry these institutions are allegedly protecting.

Footage from security cameras is interspersed throughout the film, subtly reminding us of the eyes of Big Brother upon our protagonists, a Big Brother who is anonymous but seemingly omnipresent. As the tension mounts, the protagonists can’t seem to walk across a courtyard or into a lobby without some guard observing them on a monitor. The technique begins in the very first sequence, during the quiet before the storm at Borough Market; the shoppers and commuters passing through are seen via an array of monitors, the movie screen subdividing into smaller and smaller screens as the tension mounts. It’s an effective suspense-builder, but it also illustrates the movie’s themes. These Londoners go about their business unaware of being watched, yet they can barely make a move in private. The multiplicity of angles on the same event also hints that what we think we know might shift, that recording the ‘facts’ of a case may not in themselves bring the truth into focus.  And furthermore, the watching doesn’t bring safety. On the contrary, surveillance and vulnerability to attack actually merge visually in that opening.

Screenwriter Steven Knight and director John Crowley go about this project very cleverly. It is not about an actual historic incident, nor is a real Prime Minister named. It feels current, but no date is supplied. This frees the filmmakers to write a speculative scenario rather than be tied to a factual record – and it may help them avoid quarrels with those who might take offense at the movie’s point-of-view. Nor does  Knight’s script go into real-life examples of MI-5’s overreach. The British audience may remember numerous instances which came to light over the decades: MI5’s secret file on a Labour Party Member of Parliament, Harold Wilson, before he became Prime Minister; the file on another Labour MP, Jack Straw, before he was Home Secretary; the surveillance of Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, when he was an environmental activist; and as recently as 2006, the revelation that the MI-5 was at that very moment holding secret dossiers on 272,000 individual Brits as well as 53,000 files on British organizations. (Like its American cousins, the agency has a history of finding the left suspicious – it spied on trade unions, and a senior MI-5 officer even labeled the Archbishop of Canterbury a subversive because he campaigned against Thatcher’s devastating policies.) Knight doesn’t bring up the historical fact of the MI-5’s collusion in the 1989 death of Irish attorney Patrick Finucane, nor the 2006 report which found that state agencies had colluded widely with Loyalists during the Irish ‘Troubles’ – a report accepted by David Cameron, the current, Conservative party Prime Minister, when he made an official apology on behalf of the British government. Knight and Crowley are right to leave all this out, not just for the sake of dramatic economy, but because it gives viewers some responsibility: to do their own research to determine whether the MI-5’s behavior in the film is credible or not. It gives the film an after-life.

Though the fictitious characters who commit grievous wrongs in Closed Circuit are very highly placed, and though our protagonists must go up against an overarching, all-powerful system which extends its tentacles far and wide, the conspiracy at the story’s core is ultimately perpetrated by a few very bad apples. The film thus targets human nature as much, or even more, than it targets an institution. But in doing so, it allows viewers to infer that since an institution like Britain’s spy agency MI-5, featured so prominently in the film, is run by people whose human nature means they can be and often are fallible, corruptible, vain, and self-deluding, safeguards are very much needed -- that because of their flawed human nature, there is no rationale that justifies trusting them to operate in total darkness.

The title of Closed Circuit refers eloquently to both surveillance technology and the secrecy of a closed loop of a legislative, judiciary, and national security apparatus – a Star Chamber of mutually-supportive decision-makers who hold the power of life and death over everyone outside their circle. In the movie, darkly inscrutable Attorney General (Jim Broadbent) warns Martin (Eric Bana) off of digging too deeply, hinting at the un-scalable walls of the closed system when he describes “powers at play that neither you nor I nor the Prime Minister can control.”

At the very center of the story is the notion of secret evidence in post-9/11 prosecutions: the evidence against terrorists that is supposed to be so vital to the nation’s safety that neither the accused nor his personal defense attorney can see it; only a third party ‘special advocate’ can peruse it and decide. In the particular case that is presented, that security argument is clearly and unequivocally bogus, and the institutionalized secrecy merely a convenient way to cover up complicity, yet the deception is so effective we see it could easily bypass the checks and balances set up to prevent it.

 

Closed Circuit implies that the very act of keeping the security apparatus outside the bounds of accountability invites those inside the circle to view themselves differently, to believe that normal ethical standards do not apply to them. Claudia (Rebecca Hall) is able to identify an undercover MI-5 agent the moment she meets him, in fact, simply because his level of hubris gives him away. Power corrupts. And as we shall see later, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

At the same time, the movie is about more than spying. (Without nearly as labyrinthine a plot as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, it can manage it.) For one thing, Closed Circuit plays around with expectations and prejudices about its Middle Eastern characters, about what it means to be Westernized, about good guys and bad guys. This is sometimes achieved quite concisely: the accused terrorist’s teenage son Amir plays the all-American military videogame “Medal of Honor” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_of_Honor_%28series%29) with great devotion and skill. And the opening sequence captures on security cams a Muslim woman walking through Borough Market, the monitors zooming in on her suspiciously as soon as her ethnicity is recognized. Yet in a few moments she’ll be one of the victims. Knight and Crowley already have politically-left highlights on their filmography -- Knight penned the period drama about Britain’s abolition of slavery, Amazing Grace; Crowley directed the truthful, humanitarian, character study Boy A – so it may be consistent with long-held principles that they are scrupulous here in making sure they do not equate Muslims with terrorism, nor equate terrorism with Muslims. And after all, principles and ethics are part of this film’s subject.

Jurisprudence becomes another key focus the moment Claudia and Martin are assigned to the case of the man accused of terrorist conspiracy for the fictitious market bombing that kills 120 Londoners. The judge and legal team wear those ancient grey wigs and walk around in black robes under the impressive high ceilings of the Old Bailey -- solemnly observing centuries of rituals from the world of criminal law -- but it seems likely that the filmmakers  find the layers of custom and ceremony ironic.

Unlike cookie-cutter Hollywood fare where active protagonists can defeat fire-breathing villains through resourcefulness and perseverance, the stakes in Closed Circuit are too huge and the hydra too multi-headed for a simple fix. The protagonists are active, but even with their diligence and self-sacrifice, even with a news media following what is billed as “the trial of the century”, the film poses the serious question: is justice even possible in the system that’s been created to fight the ‘war on terror’? If the film holds out any hope, it seems to reside with the ordinary individual: the pre-pubescent kid who refuses to obey, the journalist (Julia Stiles) who doesn’t laugh when a woman at a party jokes that she’s happy to be “searched by a handsome policeman.” And especially with the movie’s central duo, the lovebird lawyers whose affair has compromised them but who still worry about legal ethics and protecting their undeserving client’s interests despite the overwhelming odds.

Sorkin's Simplistic Take on Operation Tailwind: Special Report on 'The Newsroom'

by Jennifer Epps

Originally published on OpEdNews.com on August 17, 2013.



In June of 1998, CNN/Time premiered a new joint venture, a weekly program called "News Stand'. Their first segment had revelations about a "Valley of Death' (as one of the veterans interviewed called it) during the Vietnam War. The news story of this 1970 U.S. military black operation known as Operation Tailwind aired nationally over two consecutive Sundays. It quoted members of the military who alleged that commandos from the U.S. Special Operations Group (SOG) had been dispatched to a village base camp in Laos with sarin gas, a toxic nerve agent that causes a painful death. (It's the same gas that was used by a Japanese religious cult in the 1995 terror attack in the Tokyo subway.)100 people in the Laotian village reportedly died as a result of Operation Tailwind. Moreover, the story purported that U.S. military defectors living in the village were the primary target.

News of the secret attack, named "Operation Tailwind', shocked the nation and also created a firestorm of protest directed at the news organization from the Pentagon, veterans, and high-placed figures like Henry Kissinger (who had been National Security Advisor at the time of the black op). It was not long before CNN was issuing apologies and firing the story's producers, reassuring the nation that the story was untrue and the whole thing was a mistake. Consequently, "Tailwind' has gone down in the annals of broadcast journalism as a cautionary tale about accuracy.

Fifteen years later, it is back in the public consciousness thanks to the award-winning scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin, who has spun his own creation off of the idea of the Tailwind journalistic scandal. In the current season of his HBO fiction series The Newsroom, the hour-long drama about a fictitious cable news program ("News Night') on a network known as the Atlantic Cable Network , Sorkin has been exploring leaks about an alleged war crime reminiscent of the Tailwind episode as CNN initially presented it. This time, the incident is more current than Tailwind was when CNN/Time ran its story; a military source reveals to Jerry, a News Night guest producer (played by Hamish Linklater), that U.S. forces used sarin gas on civilians in Pakistan during an "Operation Genoa.' (Sorkin invented the story and the codename.) Through a multi-episode flashback structure, Sorkin makes clear from the outset that the big scoop is false, and that getting sucked in by it will prove disastrous for the characters. That's certainly a rich plotline for a dramatist to mine. However, in seizing on it, Sorkin may be doing a disservice to the original producers of CNN's "Tailwind' expose, reporters who stood by their story throughout the ensuing fracas and who accused CNN of a cowardly retreat in the face of Pentagon opposition to it. And Sorkin may also be betraying the Quixotic principles the characters on his show so passionately espouse; in this case siding, not with the underdogs his dialogue so often champions, but with the powerful.

The Daily Show

Sorkin considered it no spoiler to tell the public before Season 2 premiered last month that the core of this season revolves around a Tailwind-inspired plotline: a News Night "mistake" in running a shocking story that ultimately turns out to be untrue. "Hopefully, the mistake is understandable," Sorkin told John Oliver (who was filling in for Jon Stewart on The Daily Show) on July 15^th.  News Night guest producer Jerry is scoffed at by his higher-ups (The Newsroom's series regulars) over the extreme claims a source makes regarding Operation Genoa -- they find them much too outrageous to believe. However, as the season progresses, switching back and forth between present-tense legal deposition scenes and flashbacks to how they got into this mess (a structure similar to The Social Network), various factors start to convince the News Night executives the Genoa tip has validity. For instance, ACN news division president Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston) comes to believe the story is true in episode 2.5 because a federal agent   (or someone passing for one) snoops around the newsroom asking about the story -- it makes the government seem as if it really is worried about a secret getting out.

Now, when Sorkin went on Comedy Central to plug The Newsroom's Season 2 premiere, he could have been vague about the real news story that gave him the idea. After all, he has every right to dramatic license -- Operation Genoa and the ACN network are clearly fictional, so he can stray from what happened with CNN around its reporting of the Tailwind saga as much as he likes. But instead, he stated up front in the interview that CNN's 1998 broadcast on Operation Tailwind was his inspiration, and then he went on to describe where CNN went wrong with it. Sadly, the whole description was full of inaccuracies, beginning as soon as he broached the subject.


Sarin Gas

It's true that CNN retracted the news story after it aired, and fired the segment's producers, Jack Smith and April Oliver. But the pair filed wrongful termination lawsuits, and apparently Smith and Oliver had a pretty good case: one of them reportedly received $1 million from CNN, and the other settled for an undisclosed sum.

Moreover, the wrongful termination suit obviously entailed examining the accuracy of the producers' reporting on Tailwind. Far from proving incompetence on Smith and Oliver's part, the case apparently validated them. In the book Me and Ted Against the World: The Unauthorized Story of the Founding of CNN (excerpted here), the network's co-founder and its first president, Reese Schonfeld, relates that when the Tailwind story's key witness Admiral Thomas Moorer was confronted at the deposition by Oliver's notes from their conversation, the Admiral affirmed that he had made the statements the producer he'd met with claimed he had: "His answers indicated that Oliver had quoted him correctly about Operation Tailwind. Moorer admitted that sometimes defectors were killed and that he had been told by Singlaub [ former SOG commander ] that killing defectors was a priority. When asked about the use of sarin, the poison gas, Moorer said, "If the weapon could save American lives, I would never hesitate to use it.'" After Moorer's deposition, it was apparent that CNN's retraction was premature, cowardly and dead wrong." This is certainly not the way Sorkin presented CNN's Tailwind saga to Jon Stewart's left-leaning fan base .
But even more specifically, Sorkin told The Daily Show that what went wrong with the reporting on Tailwind in 1998 was that a producer, frustrated at being unable to get the source for the story to state on camera that sarin gas was used in Operation Tailwind, altered videotape of the interview in the editing room. Sorkin claimed that the CNN producer had changed the military expert's response from "If we used sarin gas, it would've been wrong" to sound as if the source was saying they had used sarin gas and it was wrong.

Even if it was 15 years ago, this is quite a claim to make against an individual journalist. It's especially extreme considering that an extensive internal investigation was conducted by CNN and authored by two of the company's high-powered attorneys, Floyd Abrams and David Kohler -- and this report contains no such allegation. In the text of that official 1998 'AK Report' currently posted on CNN's own site, Abrams and Kohler criticize a host of specific flaws in the reporting on Tailwind, cite some instances where sound bites from sources were cut off before an important follow-up statement, and conclude that CNN should issue a retraction -- but they also state categorically: "we have found no credible evidence at all of any falsification of an intentional nature at any point in the journalistic process." The report stressed that "the report was rooted in extensive research done over an eight-month period and reflects the honestly held conclusions of CNN's journalists," and affirmed: "we do not believe it can reasonably be suggested that any of the information on which the broadcast was based was fabricated or nonexistent."

 

Their chief complaint about the investigative reporters' handling of the story is not about tampering but about vague interview questions and premature extrapolations from inadequate responses. The attorneys explained: "when one reviews, in their entirety, the underlying transcripts, outtakes, notes, and other available information, much of the most important data said to support the broadcast offers far less support than had been suspected." If true (more on that later), this is obviously a big problem with the methodology behind the Tailwind news story, but it's quite different from the impression Sorkin gave.

Additionally, the Tailwind segment did not ignore contradictions between pre-show interviews and on-camera statements, as Sorkin appears to believe. The source Sorkin was referring to was probably Admiral Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1970 -- who, as mentioned above, later confirmed his off-camera statements in a legal setting, though he had disputed them immediately after the broadcast. But another military source, Captain Eugene McCarley, was the leader of the SOG Operation in Laos, and the "Valley of Death' piece quotes him thus in the transcript (with narration by Peter Arnett):

"ARNETT: Captain McCarley told CNN off camera the use of nerve gas on Tailwind was quote "very possible.' Later on-camera he said:

MCCARLEY: I never, ever considered the use of lethal gas, not on any of my operations."

For the record, the "AK Report' pronounces that the segment should have given McCarley's perspective more attention, since it provided a balancing counterpoint. The producers, however, protest that they found him to be an unreliable witness, since he wasn't directly in charge of the Tailwind operation; he contradicted himself a few times (at one point stating on-camera what sounded like support for the allegations: "as I understand it, these gases -- these CBU lethal gases -- are an Air Force ordinance and are in their arsenal"),   and because he made no bones about a willingness to lie if necessary: "if operating across border [into Laos] is considered unethical or deniable, then I reckon I'm denying it."

Sourcing

Despite the fact Sorkin's entire appearance on The Daily Show was just over six minutes long, there's more in his statement to refute. Sorkin implied that the producers of the "Valley of Death' segment relied on just one source -- the military expert who wouldn't say on-camera what the producer needed to get the scoop. But the transcript of the "News Stand' broadcast quotes multiple sources just within its opening seconds. A montage of four low-ranking veterans of Operation Tailwind and of the Special Operations Group speak about Tailwind as the segment starts -- and that's just the first of two broadcasts. A handful more came forward for the second night.

Furthermore, in the transcript for part 1, host Arnett states that more than two-hundred veterans were consulted. Again, in the transcript for part 2, "News Stand' co-host Bernard Shaw begins the show by asserting: "In the course of eight months of reporting we contacted over 200 people, from the men on the ground, to the pilots above, to those in the military chain of command."

Moreover, the segment's producers refer, in their later defenses of their reporting, to their lead source, someone who could not be identified because he spoke to them on condition of complete anonymity (he could only be used "on background)." They say he read and approved the transcript of the intended broadcast, " giving the "thumbs up' signal a number of times as he read it, including in particular with respect to the use of CBU-15 [sarin gas] on Operation Tailwind." This source was, the CNN internal investigation acknowledged, a military official who had "been highly placed for years", and who was "particularly knowledgeable about chemical weaponry, [and] intimately familiar with nerve agents."

Of another confidential source, described by the "AK Report' as "a highly placed intelligence source" who provided validation "through a third party" that sarin gas was used in the operation, CNN's lawyers actually did conclude that "the statements of the source were properly viewed by CNN as lending considerable support to the broadcast."

The producers also seem to have found themselves in an awkward position wherein career military personnel told them one thing in private, yet felt the need to come out against the story in public. "I have revealed in court papers," April Oliver wrote in response to one attack on the Tailwind allegations in the press, "that a leading critic of the broadcast, retired Gen. John Singlaub, was a prime source for our story."
Finally, despite what seems to have been a quite powerful Pentagon backlash after the story aired, the producers maintain that sources continued to come forward to corroborate the allegations about Operation Tailwind a year after the broadcast.

U.S. Defectors 

However, what is most baffling of all about Sorkin's summary on The Daily Show is that he described the claims of the Tailwind story as being about a U.S. sarin gas attack on civilians. This isn't to do with behind-the-scenes information, this isn't about complicated details of process, this is the basic headline that the CNN/Time show presented to the public: central to their scoop was the claim that Operation Tailwind targeted soldiers. U.S. soldiers who had defected to Laos.

The "Valley of Death' story provided a variety of support for this allegation. There are on-camera quotes in the transcript from Robert Van Buskirk, Operation Tailwind veteran, and Jim Cathey, former Air Force Resupply for SOG Commandos. Arnett told the TV audience that Cathey recalled spending five hours, as ordered, observing the village base camp through binoculars, during which time "he spotted 10 to 15 long shadows, Caucasians, much taller than Laotians and Vietnamese." Cathey stated on-camera: "I believe there were American defectors in that group of people in that village, because there was no sign of any kind of restraint. In retrospect, I believe that mission was to wipe out those long shadows." Van Buskirk also states that after the U.S. had dropped gas on that Laotian village from the air, the bodies of 15 -- 20 Caucasians were found.

Admiral Moorer also stated on-camera in the transcript: "I'm sure that there were some defectors. There are always defectors." (This, in spite of the Pentagon's public statement to CNN that there were "only two known military defectors" during the entire Vietnam War.) And in Oliver and Smith's later rehash of Oliver's original interview with Admiral Moorer, the Admiral was asked if killing U.S. defectors was the mission in Operation Tailwind, and he is said to have replied: "I have no doubt about that."

The CNN attorneys' report suggested that the producers should have been more careful in checking out whether the Caucasians could have been Russians rather than Americans. But the producers included a source explaining why targeting U.S. defectors was considered important strategy by the military. Arnett's voice-over in the part 1 transcript declares that "former SOG commander John Singlaub told CNN: "It may be more important to your survival to kill the defector than to kill a Vietnamese or Russian.'  American defectors' knowledge of communications and tactics can be damaging, Singlaub argued, "it's better to kill defectors than to risk lives trying to capture them.'" The segment also quoted Van Buskirk's recollection of speaking in English to one of the Caucasians he sighted before the raid, urging him to come back to join them; he said the soldier told him to "F-off." (Van Buskirk claimed he then killed the defector with a white phosphorus grenade.) CNN's attorneys discredited Van Buskirk in their report for mental health and credibility reasons; the producers objected. Reasonable people can debate the entire issue and argue for or against various of the witnesses who were interviewed. But in his Daily Show appearance Sorkin didn't even mention the allegation that defectors had been targeted. That's a significant omission.

The Purpose of Media

The concept that the U.S. military could possibly have ever used biochemical warfare on its own members, even turncoats, may be completely beyond the pale for some people -- and it wouldn't be surprising if the thought alone provokes too much cognitive dissonance for Sorkin, ever a sentimentalist about several of the tropes of "patriotism'.   But other investigative reporters have uncovered glimpses of a military program which tested   biochemical weapons on U.S. forces -- and not defectors but loyal, active-duty troops. The Pentagon, naturally, denied the program for as long as they could: eventually, as the press discovered more, the Department of Defense admitted more, in increments. An article by Jon Mitchell posted on Truthout summarizes the Pentagon's admissions thus far: that it ran a highly classified testing program for biochemical agents, code-named Project 112 or Project SHAD, between 1962 and 1974, and that U.S. forces stationed in Okinawa, Hawaii, Panama, and on ships in the Pacific Ocean were experimental subjects for it. But that's alright, the DOD affirms, because "to date, there is no clear evidence of specific, long-term health problems associated with participation in Project SHAD."



It's pretty clear that the DOD didn't start to admit this testing program of its own volition, but because of a dogged media -- in this instance, CBS News. This is exactly the kind of journalism that Sorkin's Newsroom philosophy is meant to celebrate and encourage. Over and over again, the characters on the HBO show declare a passionate commitment to telling the truth even if it's unpopular, to reporting important stories even when powerful enemies try to keep them quiet. In the pilot, which takes place on April 20, 2010, much drama is built up around early bits of information emerging about the Gulf oil spill. An early lead that Halliburton was negligent is brought to the attention of senior producer Jim (John Gallagher Jr.), and he and Neal (Dev Patel) want to tell the world. However, Don (Thomas Sadoski), the executive producer of the 10pm show, tries to block them: "You're wrong about Halliburton? And that will be the first sentence of your bio, forever. They will own you... They will have their own record label. They will have their own theme park." Yet the pilot revolves around News Night anchor Will (Jeff Daniels) committing to reform the news and quit pandering, so of course they go up against Halliburton. Because an informed electorate is essential to democracy, as executive producer Mackenzie (Emily Mortimer) reminds Will. In later episodes, they take on the Koch Brothers, voter ID laws, and the Tea Party -- in defiance of explicit instructions from network owner Leona Lansing (Jane Fonda).

Sorkin even seems to hold that it was corporate pressure, not journalistic standards, which forced Dan Rather to vacate the once-hallowed anchor's chair on CBS News after his infamous report that a young George Bush didn't fulfill his required service commitment at the Texas National Air Guard. At one point, worrying that someone might be trying to bait Will with an incendiary tip just so he can be disgraced, Mackenzie wonders if he is "being Dan-Rathered." Elsewhere in Season 1, Charlie informs Will: "Dan got it right." (Dan Rather happens to agree: "I am not at CBS now because I and my team reported a true story," he stated in April 2012, a few years after his exit. "Nobody has ever proven that the documents were not what they purported to be.")

But Sorkin did not decide to write about the career costs of reporting true stories in today's media climate. His takeaway from the scandal over CNN's story on Tailwind is very different: he seems to have focused chiefly on how difficult journalism can be, how an error in judgment can ruin your career and threaten an entire organization. It doesn't seem to occur to him that the U.S. government might have tried to cover up an embarrassing story, or that the corporate media might have been complicit. In contrast to the support he expressed for Rather's position, Sorkin's view of the Tailwind aftermath seems completely oblivious to the objections raised by the reporters themselves.

He Said, She Said

Producers Smith and Oliver's lengthy rebuttal to CNN states: "In a June 18 meeting, [CNN President] Rick Kaplan said this was a public-relations problem, not a journalism problem, and that he did not want this controversy to progress to congressional hearings with "3,000' members of the establishment on one side of the room and CNN and members of the Special Forces on the other. During that same meeting, Kaplan and [CNN CEO Tom] Johnson expressed their concern about the pressure they were receiving from Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell and the threat of a cable boycott by veterans groups." If that quote is accurate, it suggests that the executives were not concerned primarily with whether the reporting was factual, but with the size of the opposition to it.

Oliver and Smith further alleged that at the height of the hubbub, "Kaplan and Johnson gagged us from publicly defending the broadcast, and pulled Pamela Hill and Jack Smith from a scheduled appearance on CNN's Reliable Sources program. Nevertheless, CNN continued to air unopposed criticism about the broadcast without any fairness or balance on the Reliable Sources program and with a news report from the Special Forces convention."

Smith and Oliver did try to salvage the story and keep it alive. CNN's former military adviser, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Perry Smith, criticized Tailwind's producers in print as misguided conspiracy theorists: "If nerve gas had been used in the Vietnam War, thousands of people would have known--commanders, pilots, soldiers, load crew members, munitions storage people, intelligence officers, supply officials, transportation officials, database managers, historians, enemy soldiers." But in a 1999 piece Oliver penned about the controversy in the American Journalism Review, she quipped that the Maj. Gen. might be "relieved to hear that some of the people he describes have in fact volunteered statements corroborating the use of nerve gas and the killing of defectors. We continue to receive calls." Moreover, she added: "It appears Tailwind was not an isolated incident."

Reading through a range of material about the "Valley of Death' coverage -- the transcripts from the two broadcasts, the AK Report generated by CNN, and Smith and Oliver's rebuttals -- it is not readily apparent which side is right. For instance, some of the reporters' questions and follow-ups do seem like they might have confused the 87-year old Admiral Moorer, who was interviewed in an assisted-living home. He may also not have understood the full weight of the reporters' intentions for the story. Also rather troubling is the finding in the AK Report that "Information that was inconsistent with the underlying conclusions reached by CNN was ignored or minimized. The views of some of the individuals best placed to know what happened -- the two A-1 pilots who dropped the gas, the officer who commanded the operation, and the medic on the ground -- were unduly discounted." None of this necessarily means that the story was untrue, but it could mean that Moorer did not quite realize what he was saying or confirming, and it might also be the case that viewers didn't get the chance to weigh both sides and draw their own conclusions. On the other hand, the producers complained in their rebuttal that several conclusive exchanges with sources, documented in their research, were not addressed by the AK Report at all.
 
In any case, even Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein made mistakes in chasing down Watergate secrets, as was made forever memorable when Jason Robards chewed Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford out in the middle of the night. (The "If you screw up again, I'm going to get mad" scene was memorable for Sorkin too, as he made two allusions to it in The Newsroom's Season 1 dialogue.) Tracking down high crimes and misdemeanors is surely not easy. Supervision, guidance, the checks and balances that are normally part of the journalistic process anyway, these are especially important in an explosive story like Tailwind. Yet Sorkin appears not to consider that the AK Report did not condemn the "Valley of Death' segment outright, that it noted that "this was not a broadcast that was lacking in substantial supportive materials", and that it conceded there was enough evidence to be taken as "justifying serious continued investigation". Perhaps Oliver and Smith's supervisors could have been more careful, or held off on the story until it was airtight. Or perhaps the network could have allowed for corrections and adjustments as they went along, like the Watergate reporting was able to do. But at the first sign of trouble, the entire investigation was dumped. "It is sad how the CNN executives caved," Oliver told interviewer Barry Grey almost a year after her "Valley of Death' report had been disowned by the network.
 
Winning

The Newsroom's Operation Genoa storyline has only partly unfurled, but we're already half-way through the season, and considering the statements Sorkin has made in promotional interviews, it seems as if he has chosen to build his fictional spin-off of Tailwind around the angle of a "mistake' made at the bottom of the food chain, rather than looking into top-tier corporate cowardice. And this may in part be the result of who Sorkin had advising him about Tailwind in the first place: in last month's Daily Show interview, Sorkin disclosed that his consultants Rick Kaplan and Jeff Greenfield are the ones who told him about the 1998 CNN/Time "Operation Tailwind' saga. Both Kaplan and Greenfield were at CNN during that time: Greenfield was a senior analyst at CNN (1998-2007), and co-hosted the "News Stand' show that aired the "Valley of Death' segment -- he introduced it. Kaplan was president of the network 1997-2000 -- Oliver and Smith's complaints against him have already been mentioned. Both Kaplan and Greenfield weathered the Tailwind scandal while the journalists on the frontlines did not. (A year after the firing of the producers Oliver and Smith, there was also the dismissal of prominent broadcaster Peter Arnett, the on-camera narrator of the segment. Oliver has claimed his firing was Tailwind-related, that CNN planned it but delayed it deliberately in order to hide the connection.)

Despite a long-standing concern for social justice, Sorkin does not seem to consider that he's only listening to the management side regarding that Tailwind affair, that he's not hearing out the employees who maintain: "We were tried, convicted, and sentenced in a closed proceeding that failed any test of fairness or due process." They claimed that the report issued by CNN evaluating their journalism "suggests that it is designed to absolve CNN management, including Mr. Kohler, of any responsibility." The long-term ramifications of this are not, of course, just the unfairness of shutting out the labor side in a labor-management conflict. "The military and veterans' groups not only determine what CNN covers, but who covers it," Oliver complained to interviewer Barry Grey in 1999. "That the military should have veto power over the employment policy of the networks is alarming. The message is: fall in line, otherwise, you're history. Above all, don't mess around with national security issues."

What is most striking is that in ignoring this angle, Sorkin is also passing up the very themes he has cared so much about in The Newsroom: the pernicious influence of the profit motive on the news, the damage done to society when news caters to what the public wants to hear, and the shamelessness of masquerading entertainment as news. This may or may not underlie the way CNN handled the aftermath of Tailwind, but Oliver encapsulates her experience this way: "It is absolutely chilling. I see the fallout from CNN's capitulation on Tailwind continuing." If Sorkin wonders whether human error or corporate spinelessness is a more urgent tale, all he has to do is look at the Dan Rather scandal, the instances of censorship and cover-up described in the book Into the Buzzsaw, and the tragedy of Gary Webb, who authored the much-attacked, ground-breaking San Jose Mercury News series about the CIA taking money from crack-cocaine sales to fund the Contras. (Webb's career was ruined by the attacks on his professionalism, and ultimately so was his life -- he committed suicide after his employers left him out to dry. Thankfully, Jeremy Renner's production company is shooting a biopic of Webb, based on the book Kill the Messenger, to be released in 2014 with Renner in the lead.)

Blackout

Near the end of last year's season, The Newsroom episode "The Blackout, Part 1: Tragedy Porn" climaxed with Mackenzie just about to begin a broadcast she's ashamed of   -- it's full of Casey Anthony filler and an interview with one of the young women listed in Anthony Weiner's smartphone. Mackenzie has been struggling with her bosses all episode and is thoroughly disgusted by the depths to which the program has sunk, bumping crucial coverage of the debt ceiling crisis for these sexier tabloid headlines. So just before they roll tape, she half-seriously prays aloud: "God, please give me a sign that I'm not doing a big thing badly." A split-second later, all the power goes out in the studio.

Ironically, just before Sorkin's July 15^th Daily Show interview in which he misrepresented basic facts about the Tailwind story and how it was reported, all the power went out in the Comedy Central studio. Was it a sign?