rant whine 'splain espouse: This is beginning to look more like Critic's Corner

Monday, May 24, 2004

This is beginning to look more like Critic's Corner

"The Insider" shoots to the top of my list of Required Renting/Viewing.

Al Pacino plays Lowel Bergman, the CBS News producer who broke the story for "60 Minutes." Russell Crowe plays Dr. Jeffrey Wigand, the ex-Big Tobacco VP who decided to turn state's evidence against the smoking industry and brought the bastards down.

The film recounts an epic saga, a true story so much in the vein of "All the President's Men" that it could possibly restore my faith that there may yet be some honor among (some of) the Third Estate. In the face of an ever-rising tide of Fox "News" and MSNBS Kens and Barbies, I've found it depressing in the past couple years to even watch TV news. Journalism has never been so distasteful to me. This film has reinvigorated the feelings of altruism that bit me when I was 18 and made me choose journalism as a craeer path (albeit only for a few years).

"The Insider" portrays the power plays made by the bully corporation against the whisteblower. We see the equally monolithic CBS network cave in the face of a legal threat, and we watch the whistelblower hung out to dry, the cracks in his armor begin to get bigger, the steel of his resolved shudder and shake, and it looks like it all might end in disaster.

"60 Minutes" producer Bergman can't let it go. He's never let a source be left out in the cold in the face of a power play by a giant run amok or anybody else, and he ain't gonna let it happen this time either, even if they fire him.

By now we all know the outcome. It has become world history. Big Tobacco lied. They were dragged out by one man who challenged their lies and backed it up by revealing all he knew as an insider to the industry for years. In this movie, we learn it wasn't just Jeffrey Wigand who we have to thank for Big Tobacco's downfall, it was also Lowell Bergman, and the fickleness of the executives at CBS who nearly killed the story -- did kill it, until Bergman pushed back on his own and risked his career and his neck.

I can only hope that there are more Lowell Bergmans than there are Eric Klusters in the journalism world. But I suspect it's the other way around these days.