Inside ‘The Insider’: When Economics, Ethics Collide

That praised new movie, “The Insider,” has more layers than lasagna.

On top is a moving, pulsating, even scary fact-shaped story about good--in the persons of Al Pacino as former “60 Minutes” segment producer Lowell Bergman and Russell Crowe as whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand--versus the evil of Brown & Williamson Tobacco Co. and censoring corporate brigands at CBS.

It goes something like this:

Bergman, one of the best reporters in the business, builds a powerful “60 Minutes” expose of alleged B&W; deceit about tobacco hazards, with former company scientist Wigand as the crucial on-camera source.

Nervous in part about a confidentiality agreement Wigand signed when leaving B&W;, CBS Inc. puts the kibosh on running his interview. Usually fearless “60 Minutes” executive producer Don Hewitt sides with CBS. Usually fearless Mike Wallace initially does, too. Says Wallace emphatically: “I’m with Don on this.” Only Bergman fights for it to air.

“60 Minutes” instead runs a timid and vague Big Tobacco piece that doesn’t mention Wigand’s name. It runs the Wigand interview only months later, after his comments become public record in an anti-tobacco lawsuit, and after other media report much of his story.

Bergman is furious about this entire chapter and feels betrayed. Wigand is devastated.

Run credits, go home.

“The Insider,” however, is much more than a good guys/bad guys tug-of-war over a single story.

At its heart is a cautionary tale about conflict-of-interest perils in today’s ever-incestuous media sprawl, one in which corporate marriages and alliances relate everyone on some level to nearly everyone else. Often, reporters aren’t even aware of the ties.

This sinkhole is not unfamiliar to the Los Angeles Times, following stunning revelations that its Oct. 10 Sunday Magazine devoted to the new Staples Center was prepared by the paper’s editorial staff, unaware of an agreement to split half the profits with the center, something publisher Kathryn Downing has acknowledged was a mistake.

“The Insider” brings the issue of ethics vs. economics into even higher relief.

In his interview with Bergman, Wigand had accused Thomas Sandefur, then president of B&W;, of perjury when joining other tobacco CEOs in telling Congress they did not believe nicotine was addictive. He also charged the company with aborting his search for safer cigarettes and firing him after he protested its use of a cancer-causing flavor additive in pipe tobacco.

Although B&W; has issued denials across the board, Bergman, Wallace and Hewitt had sufficient confidence in Wigand to plan running his damaging interview.

Until corporate CBS interceded.

By the way, when CBS did kill the Wigand interview, the network was controlled by Laurence Tisch and his family. The Tischs also ran Lorillard Inc., a tobacco firm that was negotiating with B&W; to purchase several cigarette brands. And Tisch’s son was one of the tobacco CEOs who had testified before Congress along with B&W;’s Sandefur.

Perhaps even more telling, “The Insider” notes that CBS Inc. feared that a threatened B&W; multibillion-dollar lawsuit over the Wigand interview would kill a pending sale of the network to Westinghouse Electric. That sale was expected to earn top CBS executives millions from stock options, and later did.

As critics everywhere are pointing out, “The Insider” should not be taken entirely at face value.

Hewitt and Wallace have accused director Michael Mann of dramatic license in the extreme, of colluding with Bergman, a consultant on the film and a friend of Mann’s, to make him a hero at their expense.

B&W; has weighed in, too, charging that Wigand lied, for example, about the death threats against him that are in the film. Big Tobacco--yes, that’s a group you can trust.

How fragile credibility is.

The movie’s hyperbole notwithstanding, who would not be suspicious of the network’s motives in quashing the Wigand interview? True or not, the conflicts-of-interest scenario has a plausibility that can’t be ignored. And because perceptions often blend into reality, it’s no wonder that Americans appear increasingly skeptical about media integrity.

At least they’re now seeing a bit of the hard work reporters put in, for “The Insider” is also the first movie since “All the President’s Men” to project a true sense of the tedious groundwork often underlying the best journalism.

Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 political thriller put a relentless tail on Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they investigated Watergate, slogging with them through a thick swamp of frustrating missteps, blind alleys, rebuffs, stammering phone interviews and monotonous detail work en route to front-page glory and a Pulitzer.

The result was glamorous, but not the laborious process that got them there, even though Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman were the actors playing these reporters on the screen.

Contrast that with the usual depictions of either news herds rushing toward a story as mindless monoliths or fearless types gathering and reporting information in a single blinding flash of action without ever taking a note or writing a line of copy.

This fantasy also clashes with “The Insider,” which blows the lid off the notion that TV newsmagazines--and much of network news--are largely the sum of their on-camera stars. Although other TV magazines have joined “60 Minutes” in giving on-screen credit to field producers, viewers still have no way of knowing the extent of this collaboration. Or how much of the marrow of these stories is owed to unseen, largely anonymous personnel like Bergman, who do much of the reporting before celebrity journalists step before the lens.

“The Insider” sharpens that picture, even though Bergman’s partner on the B&W; piece--as it was on most of his stories--was Wallace, reportedly among the “60 Minutes” correspondents most actively involved in the stories they’re seen reporting.

And party now to a tobacco story dispute that lingers like a hacking cough.