Martin Smith Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

Page 4 of 8

Eclectic Filmmaking

You've done a lot of different stories, and mainly we're going to focus on your work on the Muslim world and events since 9/11, and foreign policy. But I would like to touch briefly on the broad range of work that you've done. Recently, you've done pieces on dot-coms. You've done something on children and the drugs they're given, I believe.

"Medicating Kids," about Ritalin, and ...

Yes, Ritalin and so on -- very eclectic, but all of them seem to be driven by an interest in, "Well, what's going on here? What caused this?" Seeing a problem that society generally doesn't recognize, or if it does recognize it as a problem, doesn't want to go behind the superficial story. Talk a little about that.

Well, some stories happen because I propose them to Frontline, or to ABC. And some stories happen the other way around: they come to me. "Medicating Kids" happened because my own children were coming under increasing pressure to take corrective medications, and I became more curious about the whole business of medicating children, and so I proposed that to Frontline. It is a widespread issue. It's an issue that affects a lot of people, and so they were very interested in pursuing that.

Like everybody else, I lost a little bit of money in the collapse of the dot-coms, and I proposed that we look at the banks, the fiduciaries, the ones that were responsible for all this. And so that story ["Dot Con"] got launched.

I like it to be eclectic. Nothing scares me more than becoming a "terrorism expert." I have been fortunate to be able to report as much as I have on al Qaeda because we all have curiosity about this, and I've been in a position to pursue this with the resources. But I'm afraid of becoming pigeonholed.

I did a story for Peter Jennings on a season of a Little League baseball team ["The American Game"]. I wanted to look at the American family in relation [to it.] And in that film on Little League baseball, we got into child abuse, we got into racism, we got into sexism. We opened a window on a whole complex world in this one little town and their Little League baseball team. So, I really like storytelling. I like good reporting, and it would frighten me to not be eclectic.

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