| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Martin Smith Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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You started out at CBS on the commercial side, and a lot of your work has continued there. You've done documentaries with Peter Jennings. But a lot of it now has been with public television's Frontline series, and also with your own independent production. I'm curious about the differences between working in these two very different worlds. Or are they that different -- the commercial versus public broadcasting?
The worlds are different, but perhaps not as different as people would imagine. I know, like anyone else, I have a certain set of skills and that's what I do. So when I produce something for Peter Jennings or I produce something for Frontline, I apply the same [skills]. I only can do what I know how to do.
There's something pretty disconcerting about watching your documentary cut up with commercials in four places. I find that very difficult.
I've also sought out the most rigorous editors -- not film editors, in this case, or tape editors. I mean, people -- executive directors, executive producers, who push me to do better than I've done. And that's what I've found in public television. Specifically, Frontline has a commitment to serious work that is not as evident in some of the network shops. So that's maybe the biggest difference.
You produced a very well-known documentary on bin Laden, which was ahead of its time. Is this something that could have happened on a commercial network? I know that it involved interviews that an ABC reporter had conducted. But the best documentary was the one you were involved in at public television, I think.
Well, I don't think that the interview that he did even showed up in a long-form documentary.
Oh, it didn't? Okay.
It was on a short piece; perhaps it was ... I'm not sure if it was Nightline or 20/20, [where] you can do something like that.
An interesting story is that when the Oklahoma City bombings happened, I was a senior producer for Peter Jennings. Of course, a lot of people ran out to do the victim stories in Oklahoma City, people who had lost loved ones. But I was immediately interested in what had caused these guys to do this, and became very interested that, here, these guys had gone into the service at the same time, were in the same platoon -- Terry Nichols and Tim McVeigh. So I suggested that they do a program on what made these guys do what they did. I mean, where are they from? What is the social pathology, together with the personal pathology, that created these bombers? And they said, "You want to do a story about those guys?!"
This is ABC now?
This is ABC executives. I remember being on the phone in my hotel room. I was up in Buffalo where I just spent an afternoon with Tim McVeigh's father, who's a fascinating man. They said, "Well, I just don't see why anybody would be interested in knowing him." I mean, it's beyond me why somebody would say that.
I think the same might have been true of bin Laden, had I been at ABC at the time that bin Laden and his people bombed the African embassies. At that time, I was freelance. I had set up my own company. I called David Fanning, the executive producer at Frontline, and he was immediately interested, and off we went.
So we did finally do the program on Terry Nichols and Tim McVeigh for ABC. But I remember them saying to me, sort of in a begrudging manner, "Okay, go do your story. We'll see." They ended up liking it very much. But there isn't that kind of interest in reaching back and doing the harder stories, it seems to me.
Now, let's get at what the difference here is. In public television, is there a greater interest in understanding what lies behind the story? Or is it the different marketplaces that they operate, in the sense that commercial television is worried about what will sell in a way that maybe public television isn't?
That's true, they are worried about ratings. They do a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with good reporting, and nothing to do with what students learn when they're in journalism school. You know, stories about somebody who falls in a hole and they work to get them out. I mean, they're human-interest stories, and they're fine, as far as they go. But to have those be the bread-and-butter staple of news programs is a pretty ludicrous situation for a culture that has the resources that we have. The strategy of the network is that there are tons of people inside. There are many people inside who have a very good education and have great curiosity about the world and how it works. But the commercial pressures demand more. You know, a "little girl falls in a hole" story -- nothing against little girls and rescuing them, but understanding some larger sociological phenomenon. There are a lot of stories that are interesting to a wide audience, and they still don't pursue them, because they're more difficult, take more resources. It's a bit of a mystery.
Is there a conventional wisdom in this? That is, that commercial television needs something confirmed as being important and is less able to be part of the process that makes it important?
That's not always true. Ted Koppel takes a leading role on Nightline, bringing stuff to air that other people have looked away from. There was the case at CBS where, if you found a compelling story and brought it to your executive producer -- and this happened to me a number of times -- and they hadn't heard about it or you couldn't produce a New York Times front-page article dealing with it, or a New York Times fifth-page article dealing with it, it wasn't a story. So there was that problem of insecurity if the story wasn't already being reported. I think much of what you get on television news has already been in the paper.
Especially in The New York Times, it seems.
Well, The New York Times, yes. That's the paper that everyone in the business reads, and a lot of people rip those articles out and take them up to the executive producers, and those become the stories.
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