WEDU Interview; David Fanning

This. You special presentation was produced in partnership with St. Petersburg college as well for more than 25 years public television's Frontline series is covered the stories that many media outlets shy away from tackling complex and often controversial subjects and earning a unique place in American journalist combining unflinching investigative reporting with compelling narratives frontline explores the range of human experience called for independent documentary Voices. It all began with one independent voice. Please join me for a conversation with Frontline founder and executive producer David Phania. Coming up next. Hello I'm. Rob life as a trial in South Africa. David Fanning grew up in a time when books were banned and the government did not allow television. His first films as a young journalist dealt with issues in his troubled homeland. 1973 he came to the US and began producing documentaries for PBS. He started development for

frontline in 1982 and has since led the program to win every major award for broadcast journalism including thirty nine Emmys and the 2007 Edward R. Murrow Award for communications excellence. David Fanning welcome to WTU. Great to have you. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. You grew up in South Africa without television. Well you know the government in its wisdom decided that television was far too pernicious of force to allow into the country. They literally didn't allow television until 1976. And in fact I'd left before the television so I grew up without it. I did spend a year in America on something called EFIS American field service and I came in 1964 to flew in to New York. I'll never forget being driven into New York on a Saturday afternoon and going to the dormitory hostel we were going to stay overnight and I've walked into the living area that sort of main lounge and as I walked in there was a black and white television set with a boxing match on it. I remember

being so vividly taken by other I never actually watched television during my year in America much my family in California wouldn't let me that we had to get outside. So I grew up without it. And when I first started making films I pretty much had to invent them myself in South Africa I didn't quite know what the documentary was. It was probably a very good influence. So that exposed you I imagine to the power of television the influence that is still fascinated by it. My wife still accuses me of sitting up very late at night and what are you really bad television because I'm sort of intrigued by it all. On somehow and I do have a kind of gee whiz sense about television but because I grew up with books and because I grew up in fact my mother who was a great reader and a great devourer of non-fiction biographies and travel I always had them around the house. And so I grew up with stories that came to me in that great oral tradition. And I still I think see the television has as the fire in the hearth around which

we gather. And when somebody can tell a really good story and that's what I hope I'm trying to do. Frontline did you use any of the documentary filmmakers of the day of the 60s or 70s as your role models as your ideals. Well you know not having seen any really I came to the United States and I started to and to work first and at first I started in South Africa filming myself and editing myself and making my first few films. I went to the BBC and sold my film to the BBC surprisingly. I sat with a really good at it to help me to to edit it and I pretty much had a potential career track at the BBC. I was going to sit for a board which was the chance to get other stuff. And I remember a particularly rainy October day in London. I was in Kensington house in Shepherd's Bush London in the BBC club and it was pouring rain outside. There were all these people sitting around shouting really loudly at each other about what they would do for the weekend and something and I looked around and this could be the rest of my life and I was trying to think

how I was going to get to the tube station and not get soaking wet. I thought I said that sort of rather loudly. I think I'll go to California and somebody would really I did literally the next day and I went to California and I fell into a little public television station in California and I started really started my career in Huntington Beach California doing documentaries making making pieces for a program for local public television station where we filmed segments and you know stories about Orange County in the 1970s. And I did. I learnt a lot. I learned the craft. I actually had to go out and shoot at it and make those pieces. And in the course of it I began to put some of them together and make a slightly longer piece I worked several weekends and cut together a lot of my pieces and came in and gave the program director and said Here he a documentary which I made in my spare time so I kind of was I was self taught in that sense. And I when I was finally lucky enough having made a few more films and being

surprised to find that people in Washington wanted to put them on the air I was invited to come to WGBH in Boston which is an extraordinary institution. And I was invited to start an international documentary series in 1977 which was called world and that series was a fantastic ticket to the world of documentaries because the first thing we did was together with someone who's been working with me ever since Louis Wiley who is my executive editor at Frontline and who was assigned to help me find my office and I said don't go anyway. Stay right here. We put the call out and gathered the best documentaries we could find. And it was this fantastic education often looking at wonderful documentaries and saying I wonder how he did that or how she did that and and then actually calling him up and say How did you do that. And to this day I have a great belief in that idea that if you really like this media and if you really want to learn about it you do what the great

artist did or their lives you go to the loo and you copy the painting and put your canvas up next to it and you try to understand the brushstrokes. If you look hard at a documentary and try to understand how it was made and what its grammar is and what its syntax is you can learn from that and if you look at enough of them you can begin to find the ones that resonate for you. Because my experience is that all filmmakers or producers have one film in them they tend to make the same film again and again and in the end they find their voice. It's like authors. And then there are the rare authors who dabble in lots of forms. Most authors tend to work in a certain kind of way certain language and if you find that language and you can you get close to it then you can learn it. In the 1950s 60s and 70s on our network television commercial television in this country there was a bounty of were about documentaries are Murrow see it now for CBS right. And so

many great from groundbreaking documentaries. Now the networks are doing fewer and fewer of those documentaries. PBS is one of the last havens for for your kind of documentary. Well you know interestingly somebody wrote an article at the time in 1973 83 when we started frontline and said the last best hope for the TV documentary and by that stage it was really going the traditional network documentary which was a particular creature you know the CBS reports NBC White Papers had a certain style and formality to them. They they stuck with it a certain kind of grammar. What we proposed to do was to marry filmmaking and journalism and to do something that was more vital that we would look for the stories that were dramatic and that we would find that a good story will told to takes you into important and interesting territory. So that was a very much a change it wasn't quite the if you will the self-indulgence of the independent documentary. There was supposed to be a rigor to it that

we were going to definitely make something that was journalistic that would have the old fashioned values of a hierarchy of responsibility to say look we're going to be fair with the people we talk to we're going to of course draw some conclusions from the work we do but we're also going to be transparent as possible about the way in which we lay out the facts and that that was a fundamental idea behind front line. At the same time as we were trying to do that the networks were embracing this different form which was the magazine show and of course the brilliance of our fire. Here it's 60 Minutes was the fact that he could tell the stories between the commercials because an hour long documentary on commercial television is broken up by the commercials. In the end you ended up doing you know four cities four different stories around the same subject or something and he just saw the opportunity to tell a different set of stories within those those spaces that

that that was successful became of course the you know the seduction or the rest of the networks and they copied that. And then we saw that great proliferation of ABC News 20 20 and out of that came. Dateline came in Day 1 of West 57 Street in all of that efflorescence of our magazine shows which which only lasted a certain length of time. And my theory about that is that as the technology of measuring viewers got more and more sophisticated they were able to go from watching the ratings shift over the quarter hours to the ratings shifting minute by minute. And once you could read the audience minute by minute and you knew that they were watching the celebrity profile that much more and less on the on the more earnest story about the environment they were able to say well let's do another one of those celebrity profiles. Let's do another hidden camera of that certain sort. And they

became a kind of self fulfilling prophecy about about the clique and now they're following the numbers. They're not they're not all of the numbers. The other great contract that you make I think between the viewer and you as an editor is to say we think this is important we think you probably don't know this and if you watch this I think we think you really enjoy it. On the other hand if you start to say I wonder what the audience wants is a kind of madness in the pursuit of that because they don't know what they want or the audience knows is what they saw yesterday. Well give me some more of what I saw yesterday. That was OK. And so will will that's the feedback loop that was in a sense the the undoing of network of network news. How do you choose what topics you're going to do at Frontline and what was the method to sort of throw the darts serendipity. You know there's a lot of different ways in which you do it. One is that you always hope that the producer will come in and say I've got this great story I really want to do well. The trouble with the best producers is they had that idea 20 years ago.

Now they're not sure what they want to do so. Your problem is to get them off six or nine months of really hard work and the last part of making a very sophisticated documentary requires you to spend day and night obsessively working the very fine joinery and embroidery of getting that film finished. And you can you surface out of that and someone like me says well what do you do next. I want to get to the beach. Leave me alone. I'm out as anything but television. And so my job is to then kind of try to lead them towards another story. So we do that in conversations around the office and said look these are important areas we should be thinking about. And he has a producer who has in him or her that particular kind of craft that does this kind of thing. This is somebody who does films about the justice system. He is somebody who tends to get drawn back to you know places like Iraq or Afghanistan. And so what are we

know what can we do to sort of send them there without actually putting them back in danger again. But but how do we tap their interests in the service of a story that we think is going to be useful to people going back to Edward R. Murrow I think and see now some of his documentaries. I think he intended to have a public policy impact. And when I think of the Harvest Of Shame about farm workers or when he did his documentaries on journalism he was crusade is that the same kind of journalism that you practice on Frontline you do look to have an outcome do you look to have an impact or have you inadvertently without trying had an impact on public policy. No I think it was a mistake to say that we want to try to change the law in some ways. I mean there are certain sort of high moral issues that you say about Rwanda that we will report this and we did the first film in Rwanda that we did was called Valentino's night where it was a very small and utterly moving story about a young girl who survives a dreadful massacre in the church. She's the only survivor.

Very powerful. And we were not content with that story. So we actually went back and did a second film called The triumph of evil and that dealt with the failure of the West and the United States in particular to really come in afterwards not just before at the time but even afterwards in the aftermath. And and I remember thinking that that was a pretty good film. And then I. Every now and then I go to PBS to tell them about the upcoming season. I said well we've got a film about you know American pornography for the film but the price that's going to give them an audience or we do a film about this. Oh by the way are we going to do another two hour film on Rwanda. And there's a sort of silence in the room I said because we must because we have to because we haven't done it right yet. And so we go back and do a two hour film called The ghosts of Rwanda which is an epic powerful testament to what happened. Still the best film I believe on Rwanda. You do that because you feel like there's there's a great moral cause there. And when it

comes to things like health care policy or issues that really matter I think our job is to be as fair to the arguments as you possibly can as fair to the debaters. Well let me ask you about health care because recently you did a series on health care and then the T.R. Reid was the reporter traveled all over the world. He came to the U.S. did it work for you for a while on the U.S. side. Here he is now disaffected from front line because I think he thought it I don't mean to put words in his mouth but I think single payer was in an angle that he wanted brought up in this in the story. You parted ways over that wife. Well it was I mean the specifics are. I think it's all laid out in the PBS Web site and the ombudsman column and I would suggest rather than to go through the tangled history and also not to be to be fair to TR to Tom in this story I was actually absent through the kind of latter part of this I was in China and I was on the phone to him saying don't pull out of this. Let me come back and sit down with you and together figure out the differences here. And he chose instead to pull out

to make an announcement. Instead he had come to conclusions about health care himself. There was in in in in in. He we were we were asking him to to do an analysis of the Massachusetts model at the back end of the film the Mitt Romney model Mitt Romney model which we thought there was a serious critique because it actually raises some serious questions about about controlling health care costs. And his position was that we shouldn't even discuss it. They're just raising the Massachusetts model. So I didn't want to do and I was not there in those discussions but with my senior editorial staff. But he just didn't want to do it at all. And he he he really said that he wanted the film to come to the same conclusion that his own book had come to which is the single payer model. I think that's his right. But he had he did seem to have crossed a line

from being a reporter to becoming an dad. So your job at Frontline is to lay out all the angles and let the audience decide is that essentially what you're saying. And I do think so right. Which Which isn't to say that you don't actually in the course of analyzing something come to some conclusions that you know that a war is being prosecuted badly or that policies may seem to be have some some some bad results. They do report that the of war that's going badly. About a year ago maybe a little bit longer you did a report on the resurgence of the Taliban and in Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan sent reporters and that has to be incredibly dangerous to send your camera crew your reporters in to cover the story. It is dangerous. It's very hard. I mean all the way through the Iraq war we had to make very hard decisions about sending people there. The insurance costs were very heavy. We couldn't always give them the kind of protection that our network correspondents had and others.

They were all people who were doing this with their eyes wide open experienced professionals who wanted to report and we gave them as much support as we could. I would say to them the last thing before they left look it's only television. You don't really you really have to be careful about this. And I don't care if the story falls apart and if you know you come back with 15 minutes and not 15 minutes that's fine. Don't put yourself into dangerous positions. But it is hard. It hasn't ever been injured or covering for Frontline. Now you know we've had some awful consequences not not to do with necessarily our reporting but we have worked with reporters in Pakistan and also with some people in Iraq where there were consequences we're having you know being part of a team. They were later targeted by buy by the other side you know by insurgents that's very tough.

We talked a moment ago about the decline of documentary filmmaking on network television. What role does the documentary play in a healthy democracy. Well you know there is so much information out there and we know right now we live in this time of atomized information where it's coming at us with so many different shapes and forms in many ways a really good documentary takes a journey through difficult territory and helps to attach to. To give context and to those difficult issues. They tend it in its best sense it gives a kind of geography that you create a kind of map of the territory in an old fashioned sense when you actually do go to war zone. You go to Afghanistan or the tribal areas or you do travel from Iraq to Basel. You actually do give them real geography so you can understand the kind of landscape we're dealing with here. And if you do it really well and if you do the road shot or the traveling shot in any and the reporter

becomes the surrogate for you the traveler. You you give people a kind of matrix into which they can then read any story about the car and Val Valley or the tribal areas and see it in that in that special way that television can do in the other sense of it you also take people and I think that was the strength of what I was really sorry that Tom Reed walked away from the film that the journey through the American healthcare system the insurance system as you traveled through it was a very useful journey a kind of map of our broken system. And and so that's what documentaries do that I don't think any other part of our media landscape any other media outlets do very well or media and the landscape is shrinking. Newspapers are cutting back staff as we know. Television is much more involved with celebrity coverage there is in kind of an issue an issue where any coverage. And I'm wondering about the future of documentary series on public television because if you're sending reporters all over the world to cover stories to

Rwanda to Pakistan there's got to be incredibly expensive. What do you think the future is in public television. That's my first question I've got for well there's also a tremendous technological shift it's revolution that's happened and the and the new cameras and the new gear that's happened that's that's come it's so different from when I picked up a camera and picked up a roll of film loaded into the magazine and hesitated before I put that I pulled the trigger and sort of shot that little bit of film that I knew I had to go off and get processed and bring back and go through a long process to get to anywhere close to television. Now with these new tools more and more available to us with nothing but our own enterprise to take us to places where I can sit down with you in a in a room almost anywhere and with the with the light from the window from the side pull a small camera out and that can sit on my knee and get a really good high definition interview with the digital

sound. And if I can travel around and get those pieces and I can take those in the evening drop them straight into my laptop and and edit those two pieces together or I can go on a journey through through the world in the ways which once upon a time only a print reporter could do. So actually if we can re-educate and if we can pass on the knowledge about this form and the ways in which we tell stories to a generation of reporters who will if they'll if they'll sit around and look at those really good documentaries just like the old artist did in the lose and figure out what's good about them and what's smart about them and how long should the pieces be in. And when I upload them onto the Web site and perhaps later join them together and turn them into a bigger documentary. There's a fantastic opportunity there and I'm very hopeful about that. And I think that actually if we use the tools we have and the skills we know and if public television uses the fantastic bandwidth we

have which is the network of stations the individual channels within those stations the digital channels the Allied Radio stations and this fantastic new platform the web and if you really think hard about it and attract the best talent I don't think we've had the best talent in public television they've been elsewhere. I think this is the time to now recruit them not to public television but to public media. Bring them together give them these tools. We could do better than any of the old networks ever did. The one thing of public television public radio faces all the time is funding. What do you think about the model for funding of public broadcasting rather than it's broken why do you say it's broken. Well I think there was never any attention to let it be properly funded. Interestingly the United States in the wake of the Second World War made sure that both Japan and Germany had very strong public television public broadcasting entities NHK and ZDF but they didn't it wasn't allowed in the United States because of the interests of the commercial broadcasters

who were worried that public broadcasting would take their audience. And unlike Britain say where of course there was a funding mechanism put in place based on the licence fee for them television and which provided under a real budget that could support the greatest public media enterprise in the world. The BBC unlike public television was left with a very broken system inadequately funded with Congress having far too strongly. And on the on the appropriation which means that a year in and year out it was able to use of have public television come begging bowl in hand to Congress and then a while I think that actually the appeals to membership's two members is a powerful part of the culture. And I think a valuable part of the Democratic base to public television its lead also

to the fact that you've got these endless funding drives and you know and and auctions and things which are really sad for for the for the programming itself. David we only have 30 seconds left but newspapers are are shrinking. Commercial television is pulling back from that role that it once did. Does that mean. I mean should we look for a new model for public television ENCEL to enhance the kind of work that if ever there was a moment when we should look at a new ad that other people should do this rather than me. But but on the hill there should be an effort to go back at the funding and the governance of public television and to rebuild this whole new public media space. David Fanning thank you very much. So many questions I want to ask you about. This was great. Thanks very much. Thank you. Well this program may be viewed in its entirety on our Web site at WDW dot org. I'm Rob Lowe. And from all of us here we need you thank you for watching. Our.

Special Presentation was produced in partnership with St. Petersburg colics