TV Review | Big Men

AlterNet / By Thomas Delapa,
August 8, 2014  |  

They Might Be Giants

The PBS documentary 'Big Men' is a refined, methodical probe into wildcatting capitalism and corporate neo-colonialism.

If there was gold in them thar hills, there must be black gold in them thar oceans.

That might have been the operating motto powering Texas-based Kosmos Energy when it went drilling for petroleum off the coast of Ghana a decade ago. In 2007, they hit a gusher, tapping into a huge oil reserve—now the aptly named Jubilee field—leaving Kosmos-nauts as well as Ghanaians with visions of barrels of petro-dollars dancing in their heads.

But before Ghanaians and their government fantasize about their own colorized remake of the Beverly Hillbillies in the Sahel, they only need look next door to Nigeria to see what happens when a poor, undeveloped African nation strikes it big in oil: There will be blood... as well as greed, corruption and war.

In the new season of PBS’ award-winning POV documentary series, filmmaker Rachel Boynton’s Big Men (Monday, Aug. 25) stands lean and tall, digging into a cautionary tale that merges Fortune magazine with Joseph Conrad at his grimiest. The end product is a refined, methodical probe into wildcatting capitalism and corporate neo-colonialism, but one that nonetheless runs a little dry in bedrock analysis.

Boynton takes her cameras and crew from the streets of Ghana and the deltas of Nigeria to the slick boardrooms of New York City; from America’s entrepreneurial one-percenters to Africa’s wretched of the earth. Shot over five years, her 95-minute chronicle is a hefty accomplishment, giving viewers a multifaceted, fly-on-the-wall probe into how the gears of 21st-century Third World turbo-capitalism work—and the grease that keeps it all running.

If Boynton has a protagonist, besides Ghana itself, it’s Bill Musselman, a straight-shooting, old-school oilman who spearheaded Kosmos’ African explorations as CEO. The upside to Boynton’s considerable access to Musselman and other Kosmos execs is their chatty, off-the-cuff comments; the downside is the relative rarity of provocative questions or research that dig deeper than her objective style permits. Yet for all of Musselman’s amiability— even when Wall Street bears begin biting in Great Recession 2009—he revealingly spouts off when a Norwegian official argues that the best way to prevent Ghana from being exploited is to heavily tax the multinational drillers. Like any good free-marketer in our regressively Ayn Randian era, Musselman views taxes as bad business, if not sludge.

At the beginning of Big Men, Boynton quotes U.S. capitalism high priest (or witchdoctor) Milton Friedman, who sermonized that the “world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests.” The Chicago School economist scarcely qualified his “I got mine” mantra, but Boynton pours out examples of the destructive absurdities of such a crude individualist credo. We’re taken to oil-rich Nigeria, where greedy and corrupt elites have so wildly pursued their interests at the expense of their country that they’ve created a brutally stratified, stagnant land of haves and have-nots. This is a place where the destitute villagers secretly sabotage pipelines just to be hired back to repair them, and where armed militants in ski masks set hellish fires to oil refineries. (It’s also worth mentioning that Nigeria is where poverty and despair ignited the barbaric Islamic backlash of Boco Haram.)

Big Men’s title comes from an observation of a Ghanaian tribal leader who says that “everybody wants to become a big man" and get fat from a diet of oil money. The ultimate question that Boynton poses is if Ghana can break the Nigerian (and Mideast) mold by democratically sharing the wealth from its share of that oil money—some $444 million in 2011 alone.

But the deeper question, and not only for Ghanaians, is who exactly owns the Earth’s diminishing natural resources, and how much they should profit by them. Musselman and venture capitalist Jeffrey Harris claim that the great risks involved in exploring for oil justifies their enormous takes on the back end. But what’s the bottom line and who really pays when a corporation (BP, anyone?) recklessly befouls our precious waterways and coasts for generations to come? And don’t the Jubilee field and discoveries like it just keep gasoline relatively cheap, prolonging our bottomless addiction to fossil fuels and the amoral corporate pushers that pump them?

The answers from Big Men are sizeable but they don’t always measure up to the well of questions Boynton implicitly raises. To wit, how’s this for a toxic gusher: Kosmos Energy CEO Brian Maxted was a monstrously big man in 2011, fueled by $58 million in salary and stock options.
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TV Review | A Fragile Trust: Plagiarism, Power, and Jayson Blair at the New York Times

 April 29, 2014  |  

AlterNet / By Thomas Delapa

Don’t Stop the Presses: Jayson Blair Lied!

A new documentary examines the plagiarizing journalist who smeared the New York Times and made up an Iraq War soldier's interview.

 

There once was a sign that hung on the wall at the legendary Chicago City News Bureau, training ground for such famed scribes as Ben Hecht, Mike Royko and Seymour Hersh: “If your mother says she love you, check it out.”

Those were the bygone, dog-eared days when even lesser U.S. cities were awash with thriving dailies, and most delivered “extra” editions noon and night so we could read all about the latest news.

The ink has dried up on the banner days of traditional journalism. Revenue streams in the Internet age have slowed to a trickle, as have readers willing to cough up a dime for their daily news, weather and sports. Even fewer today will pay for classified advertising, happy to sell their used stuff on Craigslist and eBay. Longtime print institutions from the New York Times to Time magazine have struggled to stay afloat, many going under, while gimcrack websites have sprung up on the new media horizon as often as obnoxious pop-up ads, making the very concept of newspapers feel old. Amateur “citizen journalists,” many with an ax to grind, have hacked into journalism’s turf, and if you can break the story of the latest celebrity uncoupling you just might scoop yourself up a job at TMZ or Fox News. Facts? We don’t need no stinking facts.

It was in this panicky, writing-on-the-wall media cauldron that Jayson Blair smeared the great name of the New York Times, that august, 160-year-old institution and flagship of U.S. journalistic excellence. A documentary of the scandal that turned the Times into a really stinky edition of the Onion titled A Fragile Trust: Plagiarism, Power, and Jayson Blair at the New York Times, will be telecast nationally on Monday, May 5 as part of PBS’ Independent Lens series.

Getting the disgraced Blair to tell the truth now may sound a little like asking Clifford Irving to tell us about the real Howard Hughes, but filmmaker Samantha Grant steams ahead, indulging him as he answers (sort of) her pointed questions and reading excerpts from his widely unread memoir, Burning Down My Masters’ House. Once a wonder-boy intern at the Times, Blair was brought on board as part of a program designed to promote multicultural editorial voices. Along with past and present members of the paper’s staff, Grant talks to journalists such as Seth Mnookin, author of Hard News and a blunt foil to Blair’s sometimes papered-over excuses.

In this seismic scandal and coverup, Grant doesn’t need to follow the money, only the string of lies (and lines of cocaine) Blair spun in hundreds of stories he filed in five years of reporting. They all furiously began to unravel in 2003 with his first-person article on the plight of a Texas mother whose Army son had gone missing during the Iraq war. As the fiasco unfolded, it was Blair who was discovered missing in action: Not only did he not even speak to the soldier’s mother, he brazenly plagiarized an article by the San Antonio Express-News’ Macarena Hernandez.

It’s dicey to read between the lines in Grant’s brief, 75-minute chronicle on exactly why Blair wasn’t fired long before the scandal hit the headlines. His editors had long known that his articles were fact-challenged and fraught with error, and they were also aware that his drug and alcohol problems were proving toxic to his work. Former executive editor Howell Raines passes the buck, blaming middle-management staff, while those mid-managers contend that Raines never bothered to read the memo strongly urging a ditch-Blair project.

Was Blair a unique case? Raines now calls his former star reporter a “sociopath and disturbed individual.” Yet another observer says the debacle was a “tragedy of the electronic age,” with broader implications. After all, Blair’s e-plagiarism was just a quick click away, since he could easily cut and paste stories from other websites, slyly juggling them to cover up his trail. Any teacher today can unhappily report how many students similarly sample and patch together their class papers, starting with that bottomless virtual inkwell of secondhand information, Wikipedia, while writing off bona fide source material, e.g., books. 

For his part, Blair is apologetic and chastened in one sentence, evasive and equivocating in the next. In his resignation letter to the Times, he confessed that he “was not ready for prime-time,” but then adds, incredibly, “despite my enormous talent.” He also blames his bad behavior on drug and alcohol abuse, his way of medicating a manic-depressive illness. Ten years after, Blair has since taken his talents to a job as a Virginia “life coach.” Bruised and battered, the Times keeps marching on, but the clock may be ticking.

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Thomas Delapa is a film critic who has written for the Chicago Tribune and AlterNet. He teaches film at the University of Denver.