Danny Schechter's Rights & Wrongs

Globalvision, an independent television production company, is located in what its literature calls the "historic National Screen Building" on roadway in Manhattan, between a store where luggage is 50 percent off and a theater showing a double feature: Hot Big Bazooka and Princess Orgasma. The company's suite of offices is on the seventh floor, and the first thing you see when you walk in is a giant world map.

Straight ahead is the office of one of Globalvision's founders, Danny Schechter, a place with two clocks, one of which works, and stacks of magazines and newspapers, from Television Technology to The San Francisco Bay Guardian. Down the hall is the office of co-founder Rory O'Connor, a much neater place, with five handsome wall maps. The two have professional roots in 1960s Boston, where O'Connor was a rock critic for a while and Schechter was news director, known as "Danny Schechter the News Dissector," for a popular commercial radio station. Both went on the solid television careers -- Schechter to CNN and ABC's 20/20, where he spent eight years as a producer; O'Connor to the ABC affiliate in Boston, where he became senior producer, and to CBS's 48 Hours. Both wanted something different, and five years ago founded Globalvision.

For a TV production company, the place is a little quiet. Globalvision produces Rights & Wrongs, the weekly human rights TV newsmagazine you may not have heard of because your local public television station runs it at noon on Saturday, or worse. Fifteen of the eighteen people who put together Rights & Wrongs had been laid off just a few days earlier. Howie Masters, a wiry Good Morning America refugee, is still working, putting together a new episode that will introduce viewers to Lucy Munoz, a seventeen-year-old trying to make a life out of a $ 5-a-day job in a Zenith factory across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas. Masters was moving quickly because, at the end of July, Rights & Wrongs was to "stop focusing on production and focus on fund-raising," as O'Connor puts it. In other words, it's just about out of cash.

All the TV world, he and Schechter point out to anyone who will listen, is rushing to put out news magazines. All except PBS. And here is Rights & Wrongs, they'll continue, a topical newsmagazine with a respected anchor, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, that has been on the air since April in some eighty-five U.S. cities and thirty-five foreign countries and has received generally glowing press -- all without PBS backing.

"Human rights is a story whose time has come," says O'Connor. "With the fall of communism, the end of the cold war, the question is not East-West, but how do you treat your people?"

Schechter gestures toward a stack of human-rights organization reports on a shelf -- all thoroughly researched and well written, he says, but generally ignored, and none with the power of a television image. "People who produce newsmagazine shows, the stories they are proudest of are often human rights stories," he says. "Whether it's 60 Minutes blowing the whistle on prison labor in China or Day One investigating an incident of racism -- these stories get large shares. They do so because the networks promote them. And because these are people stories, they are emotional stories that arouse people's conscience and consciousness. People watch this stuff."

Using a spiel along these lines, Schechter and O'Connor spent two years raising some $ 750,000 to fund Rights & Wrongs, most of the money coming from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Aaron Diamond Foundation, and the Body Shop Foundation. Then, at about $ 50,000 an episode, they spent it -- or most of it.

A deal struck this summer with WNET, New York's flagship public television station, has given the show a reprieve. By becoming a co-producer of Rights & Wrongs and letting Globalvision use the station's facilities, WNET allows Schechter and O'Connor to stretch out what funds are left and mix in more new shows into the re-run schedule. Updated re-runs of the original thirteen episodes, along with the handful of new ones Masters is finishing, will take Rights & Wrongs through November. World on the show's fate will come before that, however, since Globalvision must begin notifying PBS affiliates around the country by the end of September of what is -- or is not -- coming.

Recently I took ten Rights & Wrongs videotapes home, but I put off looking at them. They had titles like "Ethnic Fault Lines," "War Crimes," "Female Genital Mutilation," the kind of thing one may feel a duty to get to but, uh, isn't it time for The Simpsons?

Finally, I watched, and kept watching. The half-hour program generally features at least one long piece, followed by a related Hunter-Gault interview, followed by shorter segments in a "Rights Reel," and ends with a segment with a cultural theme. In the Rights Reel the pace is quick -- Schechter and O'Connor are aiming in part at the MTV generation -- and it often includes the kind of footage you haven't seen elsewhere: dry, cracking land in southern Iraq where Saddam Hussein is draining marshes and forcing the evacuation of whole villages, for example. Some of these short pieces moved too fast for me. If I want to see complex issues without much context, I can always watch the evening news.

The longer stories, often "video diaries" by filmmakers from the countries in question, were something else again. Faraway issues and dramas were presented on a human scale, with clarity and a sense of place, thus making them fascinating -- and not so far away.

In one of the show's "Ethnic Fault Lines" series, for example, a video diary explores the new European racism by visiting a tavern in Prague with some skinheads, baby-faced tough guys who drink their beer and sing their songs about beating up on blacks, all the while saluting a confederate American flag. The viewer gets close enough to see them as twisted human beings, not as a distant political phenomenon. A video diary from Hungary, once the most liberal nation in the old Soviet bloc, opens with a shot of hundreds of young neo-Nazis screaming obscenities about their twin scapegoats, gypsies and Jews. We see an aging skinhead warming up the crowd for a rising nationalist politician, then move on to a counter-demonstration, and are left with the image of a newly democratic country that could tip either way.

From Kosovo, in another diary, comes an image of long grass blowing on the field where the Serbs lost to the Turks 600 years ago, the historic battle that nationalists used to inspire Serbians all over the former Yugoslavia to dreams of a new national destiny and, ultimately, to ethnic cleansing. Kosovo -- an autonomous province in the former Yugoslavia, now the place where it is feared that the Balkan conflict could ignite a wider war -- is 90 percent Albanian. But the Serbs have been transferring power and property from Albanians to Serbs. "I get the feeling," the author of the video diary tells us at the end of his piece, as his camera pans across Albanian children playing on a rusted car, "that [the Serbs] long to fight the battle of Kosovo once again, and this time to set the score right. But when that battle begins, they'll find not the Turkish soldiers of their myth, but Albanian villagers, struggling to survive."

Rights & Wrongs turns to America, as well. Human rights officials interviewed on one broadcast, which ran in May, give Bill Clinton poor grades for his performance on Bosnia and China, and for failing to shut down the Bush administration's HIV prison camp in Guantanamo Bay. Clinton, nonetheless, has promised Rights & Wrongs an interview in coming weeks.

The viewer who really counts is Jennifer Lawson, PBS's executive vice-president, National Programming and Promotion Services. In reforming its cumbersome system for setting a national programming schedule, PBS decided to invest a great deal of power in one person -- Lawson. It is not an easy job, balancing, for example, the mandate of PBS to do serious, innovative public-interest programming against the desire to attract larger audiences. Or balancing the politics of left and right.

She must say no to programming, of course, a lot more often than she says yes. A yes means that the network feeds the show with its helpful imprimatur out to its 346 member stations. It can mean, Schechter and O'Connor say, ruefully, a larger audience, promotion, better time slots, and, often, help with funding. So far, PBS has said no to Rights & Wrongs half a dozen times. Human rights, Lawson has consistently told the two, is an "insufficient organizing principle" for a prime-time PBS series. O'Connor and Schechter have been just as consistent in failing to accept that reason. "What isM sufficient organizing principle?" Schechter counters. "Cooking? The stock market? Rebuilding a house?"

If Lawson is the type of programmer who keeps a finger to the political winds, she might find a political reason for turning down Rights & Wrongs. Schechter and O'Connor's previous effort at a weekly public television series, South Africa Now (see CJR, January/February 1991), had many admirers, but it also drew critics who argued that some of the in-country expertise it relied on was in-country advocacy. Loudest of the critics was David Horowitz, '60s new leftist turned '80s neoconservative, whose Committee on Media Integrity took its critique to public station in Los Angeles, KCET. Horowitz, who now edits COMINT, a publication devoted to correcting the politics in public broadcasting, argues that the show saw things too simply, failing to appreciate Nelson Mandela's struggle with the radicals on his left and F. W. de Klerk's struggle with the radicals on his right. "It was just a propaganda show," he says, "and it presented itself as news." KETC's initial response was to take the show off the air, but afr a week of protests from supporters, South Africa Now went back on with a "point-of-view" label -- a badge not worn by any other program on KCET's schedule, from Firing Line to Wall Street Week.

None of this might matter, and Horowitz hasn't even seen Rights & Wrongs, but it's worth noting that he's no fan of O'Connor and Schechter -- "a pair of intellectual lowlifes," he says -- and that he is now informally giving advice about public television to legislators, including an 800-pound political gorilla named Bob Dole. The senator, in turn, held up public television funding last year because of what he perceives as a liberal bias in its programming. Horowitz, according to a reporter who has covered PBS for years, "is Bob Dole's brains on this subject," and handed notes to the senator before his recent speech to the Public Radio Conference, in Washington. In the speech the senator said that taxpayers "have a right to balance, fairness, and access to their system. Unfortunately, some of the partisans have had their way for so long on the public airwaves that they are having a difficult time giving up something that isn't theirs in the first place. . . .

"We will still be watching and listening," Dole concluded.

Lawson was unaware of this Horowitz-Dole connection, she says, and would not have given it any consideration if she had been. In considering Rights & Wrongs, she adds, politics is not the question nor is quality. Globalvision, she points out, has produced material for PBS in the past (a special on Nelson Mandela's release; three Rory O'Connor Frontline pieces last year -- on BCCI, Saudi Arabia, and the 'resurrection" of the Reverend sun Myung Moon). "We're talking more of a logistical question than an editorial question."

Introducing a regular weekly show, Lawson says, requires "a great deal of consideration," as much, say, as introducing a regular columnist to a newspaper or magazine. New weekly shows have been launched, she notes, citing as an example To the Contrary, a PBS public affairs discussion show- with female participants. But why should PBS get behind a program like Rights & Wrongs, she argues, when it already deals with human rights issues on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and on specials on Frontline and P.O.V.

"I think viewers care about these topics," Lawson continues. "But we prefer specials to a continuous series. Viewers are more attracted to the topic when it is clearly identified as a place and a focus, as opposed to the broad umbrella of a Rights & Wrongs."

Lawson concedes that she hasn't actually seen "that many" episodes of Rights & Wrongs. "I can't say how many episodes I've seen. I have to watch a lot of material here." It's not impossible that she could revisit the request, she says. Just unlikely.

"It would be almost obnoxious," says O'Connor, to go back, once again, to PBS. He is resigned to distributing Rights & Wrongs through the alternative American Program Service, which has distributed the show to public television network stations since April, and to continue pushing stations one at a time to run the show and to give it a decent time slot. Schechter, on the other hand, sounds as if he'd risk being obnoxious.

So does Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who is not exactly small potatoes at PBS. Known for leading The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on high-quality forays outside the Beltway, she is Rights & Wrong's big gun -- lending it her considerable prestige not only as anchor, but also as fund-raiser and promoter, regularly firing off letters to potential funders and to PBS stations. And as one of the show's editors, she tries, among other things, to make sure it is never open to the kind of advocacy charges that could damage it. "I'm in here every week saying, 'We need another voice here, for balance, or 'No, we can't say this,'" says Hunter-Gault. "We do pretend to be objective. The program is not about advocacy; it's about looking at an issue through a certain prism."

Around the time Schechter and O'Connor approached her, she says, PBS had issued a call for new ideas for innovative programming, and she had been meeting with people who were trying to come up with something. "None of the ideas excited me; it seemed a terrible waste of an opportunity. But then Danny called me with Rights & Wrongs. I just jumped right up on top of that one. I was finishing their sentences before they could." Like O'Connor and Schechter, Hunter-Gault saw human rights as a way of looking at the post-cold-war world.

Occasionally she has done double duty -- covering a story one way for MacNeil/Lehrer, another for Rights & Wrongs. This was the case in June, when she covered the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, the first such conference in twenty-five years. For the NewsHour, Hunter-Gault led a debate about "universality" -- the idea that human rights ought to apply equally to all U.N. members, an idea resisted by countries whose leaders claim that their culture or the newness of their democracies means they cannot be held to the same standards as others on such matters as press freedom or women's rights.

Then, for Rights & Wrongs, Hunter-Gault described the "upstairs-downstairs" nature of the conference. Upstairs was the tortuously slow official debate. Downstairs, literally, was the raucous world of the "NGOs," the non-government organizations -- from Amnesty International monitors to eloquent torture victims to fully costumed representatives of indigenous peoples. Downstairs they held demonstrations and impromptu debates, pushed their literature, and generally showed the energy of the worldwide human rights movement that had pushed the U.N. into holding the conference upstairs in the first place.

Hunter-Gault, who as a PBS employee is in something of a delicate position, nonetheless makes her feelings clear. "PBS had said it wanted programs that were exciting, that appealed to young people," she says, "and that were multicultural. Each week we have all the colors of the rainbow on our program. But I'm not saying run this program because it's got diversity. I'm saying run it because it's a goddamn good program that speaks to everything you articulate as a goal. It's solid, it's journalism, it's journalism with a heart."

She thinks the time to go back to PBS might be after Globalvision has raised a million dollars or more.

Close to a million, meanwhile, is about what Rights & Wrongs needs, with or without PBS, just to stay alive. So Schechter and O'Connor are beating the bushes for money. "It's the worst part of my job,' O'Connor says, tossing his blue "bible," the Funding Human Rights directory, on his desk, scattering a stack of letters to organizations ranging from the Grateful Dead Foundation the German Marshall Fund.

Schechter hates fund-raising too. Still, as a pitchman he's pretty good. He notes, as a selling point, that Rights & Wrongs has achieved an unusual world reach. It is aired on the Super channel, owned by Marialina Marucci, an Italian businesswoman, which reaches some fifty million homes in Western and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union -- and is shown in those places in prime time. Rights & Wrongs may run Saturdays at 2:30 P.M. in Los Angeles or Tuesdays at 6:30 A.M. in Chicago, but it's on Mondays at 7:30 P.M. in London, 8:30 P.M. in Paris, and 9:30 P.M. in Budapest. Schechter likes to accentuate the positive.

CORRECTION from November/December 1993: A headline in the September/October issue that read "Danny Schechter's Rights & Wrongs" was misleading inasmuch as it suggested that Schechter was the program's sole producer. As Schechter notes in a recent letter: Rory O'Connor and I created the concept and work jointly as executive producers. The show itself is a Globalvision production and has been, from the get-go, a collaborative effort by a hardworking and underpaid team." This we knew, but brushed aside in our effort to come up with a heading that would parallel "Don Hewitt's Durable Hour."

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