A drug-delivering business acting like a Mafia
“We would often be ashamed of our noblest actions if all their motives were known.”
—Francois de la Rochefoucauld (in a severe reading compared to what’s going on with Wigand below)
The main bulk of what the film is about, I’ve already told you in Part 1 of this entry. In this Part 2, to the extent I talk in general terms, it will be about issues not covered in Part 1. Also here, I will talk about certain details of the story I didn’t cover in Part 1, which are good to consider. I will also divide things up here into manageable subsections, because I think once you’ve seen Part 1 of my blog entry, and if you saw the movie (it is hard to find in libraries, at least where I live), you don’t need another long swing through general themes.
Oddly, the setup and general premises tell the vast majority of what you want, or need, to know. As in any good suspense/intrigue story, in The Insider, very much of the beef of the story—what is both interesting about the story and what is relevant to real life and later times—comes with the setup, and the basic plot outlines as I’ve already given: the premises and initial developments of the plot, basically everything that sets up for a denouement. It’s nice this story still seems to speak to us, when it concerns situations that were current (in real life) about 16 years ago and in movie form 13 years ago. And for those with limited time, the rest of the story—just as with the setup—can be appreciated from the Wikipedia article on the film or even Jeffrey Wigand’s webpage on the film.
1. The crux that was the Mississippi
The last 40 percent of the film, in general, follows a tale of between-corporations fear (between B&W and CBS) and within-corporation (CBS) caving-in-then-reversing-course. Some of this series of events seems a bit hard to follow at times, but the overall story is easy enough to appreciate.
One of the interesting parts for me is when Wigand is prepared to testify in a deposition in the Mississippi Attorney General’s case. The Wikipedia article on the film is a bit confusing on one aspect of this, understandably enough.
First of all, 60 Minutes story producer Lowell Bergman has facilitated the arrangement of Wigand’s testifying in the Mississippi case, which Bergman—after discussion amid 60 Minutes managers and the like—believes is important to allow Wigand to feel at ease with violating his confidentiality agreement with B&W—not only that, but to have some legal standing in doing so. (Be aware: I am not a lawyer, but learn about these things as many of us have to learn about the technical “mechanisms” and ethical tendencies of the American “legal-system nomenklatura” [my satiric term] as we wind our ways through the complexities, gratuitous intrusions, violence, and everything else issuing from the legal system that is not really expected or wanted in our lives.) If Wigand, Bergman has reasoned, has been allowed to testify in a state court in a case involving harm from tobacco (see my Part 1 for further details on this), then in a sense he has been, incidentally, compelled to violate, or void (in some respect), his confidentiality agreement. Thus, Bergman reasons, 60 Minutes can be allowed to show its interview of Wigand, where he reveals what information B&W won’t want him to reveal, and he will have that much more legal justification for doing so.
The basic mechanics of a tort action, explained by a legal layman. This is all in the area of tort law, a subset of civil law. Wigand would not be acting criminally in violating the confidentiality agreement; but his decision would be addressed in tort law, in which a harm is alleged for which the plaintiff would seek money damages—the defendant is accused of doing something to trample on the plaintiff's rights to an unimpeded personal future (as in harm to person or to personal rights) or to future business opportunities (as in “tortious interference with business prospect,” which B&W in essence could have sued Wigand, or CBS, for—if I’m reading the film right). This is all on a general level, in terms of what the legal system generally spells out. If someone is sued, that person has to get defense counsel (if he or she can pay for it), and then in a tort lawsuit, essentially each side provides evidence to back up his or her position, in what is known as the pre-trial “discovery” phase, which is typically done confidentially. By definition, such discovery is not part of a trial, and all material revealed during discovery between each of the sides goes no further than the attorneys for each side seeing it (and the plaintiff and defendants seeing, as is practically allowed, what the attorneys have received from the other side).
During this phase, as an ordinary part of the technical and complex way in which it unfolds, judgments by each side are made (and claims accordingly are made in written statements, that is, in parts of responses to discovery requests, from one side to the other) about what evidence will be admissible at trial and what not. (This description I make of what should happen, to the extent I understand it, mainly addresses the interrogatory and documents-and-things types of discovery, and it more or less follows, in, e.g., New Jersey, [civil practice] Rule 4.10; R. 4:17 [on interrogatories]; R. 4:18 [on inspection of documents and property]; and R. 4:23 [what to do on failure to “make discovery”]. The corresponding federal rules of civil procedure are under Title V, Rule 26. A deposition, a form of discovery in which you orally respond to questions—and which is what Wigand was facing in Mississippi—is covered in New Jersey under R. 4:14, and by federal Rule 30.)
This is all a complex area, and I assure you, after having represented myself in the Bauer v. Glatzer lawsuit (2007-10), that the process is not easy. If you were indeed named in a lawsuit as a defendant, even in your making competent written claims (as court rules allow) in your discovery answers about what you consider “admissible at trial” and what you don’t, you have the anxiety of feeling you can be “overruled” on an objection by the other side (and/or by devious practices by the other side). In this sort of case, what I’m getting at is there’s something of a slippery slope between holding on tight to what information you have (on whatever justification) and how able you are to let it out in the discovery process.
Of course, Wigand wasn’t a party to the Mississippi A.G.’s lawsuit, but was considered as a witness. Thus, his performing as a witness was voluntary. There could have been no sanction made against him, via one side’s application to the court, to get him to say what he didn’t want to say. But the one legal thing that could have been said already to be in place to bind his hands was his confidentiality agreement with B&W.
On another detail of this: In Wigand’s case, as a general matter to the extent I understand how the litigation would normally work, as he was being deposed and he answered, his answers needn’t automatically have become public. But if he was included in an eventual trial, what he had to say would become public.
How the deposition part of the Wiegand tort matter is handled in the story. If you understand this, then you can understand a good amount of what the plot setup for the Mississippi Mississippi
Richard Scruggs is a character who is one of the attorneys in the Mississippi A.G.’s case, and actor Bruce McGill plays the attorney (Ron Motley) who actually administers the questioning to Wigand in the deposition. (McGill is good at playing a bulldog of a person, even when the person is basically on the good side, as is the sheriff in My Cousin Vinny [1992], or is a grifter of some kind, in Matchstick Men [2003].)
What I have described about the general discovery process that is ordinarily tied to a deposition is what the law provides for in its disinterested outline. As many of us know, actual flesh-and-blood lawyers (do they have real blood?), depending on their personal proclivities and/or the pressures they are under from their employers, can engage in use of the rules, and tactics not expressly forbidden by the rules (or that maybe are frowned on by the spirit of attorney-ethics rules but are still in fact engaged in), that serve the ends of their clients in a high-handed, or “ends-justifies-the-means” way. So (if they represent a company that is or can be a plaintiff) they can do things that are meant to intimidate the other side into shying away from doing something—like revealing a trade secret—that would not serve the plaintiff company (which is the case here); or if the company is suing the whistleblower, the objective of intimidating could be to get the person to agree to a settlement that includes strict limitations on what he or she can say publicly about the company.
As should be obvious, when Wigand was in Mississippi Mississippi
The B&W attorneys who were there to “head Wigand off at the pass” were there to intimidate Wigand into not testifying. Of course, as the overall story has it, this was a crucial pass for Wigand’s role in his relationship with B&W and regarding Big Tobacco’s liability to being sued, and held liable, by up to all states in the U.S.
What the restraining order was about. It is in this high-drama situation that B&W sought and received a temporary restraining order (TRO) from a state court in Kentucky
The Wikipedia article on the film is confused, or a little muddled, on an aspect of this. It says, “Though the restraining order, obtained by [B&W’s] lawyers, was thrown out in Mississippi , Wigand is threatened with the contention that if he testifies and returns to Kentucky Kentucky
But the problem for Wigand is that, as Motley says earlier, if he returns to Kentucky
All this heightens the dramatic tension for Wigand. Once you understand what the deposition entails, both in general legal terms and in the particular way articulated in this story, and you see how B&W used legal means to have weapons in a situation in which, to some extent, their hands were tied in the Mississippi
2. Wigand’s decision as a textbook case of hard deciding
The script, by Eric Roth and Michael Mann, is almost Shakespearean in a way with how it handles the drama. Wigand, in contemplating what to do on the threshold of actually being deposed in Mississippi
There are two things to say, one on the general issue of human deciding and the other on Wigand’s apparent personality.
Tough decision-making, in the flesh. It would take a philosophical dissertation to comment on this as much as it deserves. Suffice it to say that it is a good example of why I became more involved in psychology and the phenomenological side of philosophy than in any of the hard sciences or the more mathematically inclined parts of philosophy, such as symbolic logic. I remember in studying one thing from the work of Alan Turing, whose research in logical systems and artificial intelligence was a precursor of computer science, that it was impossible to have a complete system of logical reasoning that was adequate to deciding every question. This was from a sort of mathematical perspective.
We also know from real life—those of us who’ve stumbled along with it with difficult choices, suffering, etc.—that the hardest decisions aren’t the type that can be resolved through simple logical reasoning. Symbolic logic, for those inclined to use it, simply wouldn’t work here. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Nature hates calculators,” and that’s because due to the nature of human life, to the courses our lives take and how our varied sets of interests align with each other, etc., calculation doesn’t decide it all. We are sometimes faced with competing value systems: for example, Do I lie and be a prostitute to support my family, or do I stand up for the broader social welfare and thereby lose my family through divorce? We can recognize that such tough decisions are what can bring the most dignity to our lives, but the way to decide leaves us almost torn. And we can feel forever changed, in some way not for the better, once we’ve decided. This is not helped when an industry representing billions in sales may be at stake in some respect on the back of our decision.
When we make such a decision, we can write out on paper the pros and cons of each alternative path of the decision. We can consult with friends, with literature or philosophy books, with whatever our Bible is; we can lie down and cry, or take a head-clearing break with a hike…. And we find that as much as we learn over the spans of our lives, sometimes the principles or heuristics for important decisions that we thought we had learned to keep to heart—how to reason, and what substantive stuff to take into account (maybe after having learned not to be careless in some ways)—still don’t apply, or don’t seem enough. Some of the basis for the decision seems to hearken from some sense of instinct or intuition that seems unfamiliar to us. Then, once the decision is made, we can write out in our journal the reasoning we used to decide, at least to satisfy us. Others might review the decision and say they wouldn’t have decided that way. But that is how this works: we decide, and we have to be satisfied with the decision, and to hell with what “compulsively” second-guessing others might think of it.
Wigand’s personality, as hinted. The other thing to say here is not just an appreciation of Wigand but addresses what becomes another phase of the story, B&W’s embarking on a huge smear campaign against Wigand, with a 500-page dossier and with their use of major media outlets. Was Wigand (as they went to great lengths to argue) a bit eccentric? Was his finding a bullet in his mailbox something he set up himself, as a ruse to help support his sense of being victimized? Was he (if we may be so bold as to ask) paranoid—did he even have a personality disorder?
Certainly the negative things implied here were the type of things B&W opted to try to focus on to undermine Wigand’s credibility as a witness in the Mississippi case and in the 60 Minutes interview. (Of course, this sort of smear campaign by a former employer of an employee, used to undercut the employee’s credibility as a lawsuit witness, could easily make the reasonable adult ask [as to the employer], If the employee was such an unreliable sort, why did you employ him or her in such a sensitive position?)
My own reading of Wigand, from looking at the movie closely, and from considering how this all has been handled as news, and from checking out his own Web site, is that, first, whatever eccentricity he has was basically beside the point. Here is why I explained, in my September 29 blog entry, that my psychological disposition is largely phenomenological and existential, and that it admits we can know only so much about someone from the available evidence and what our means of interpretation allow. I think Wigand was a sort who could be a bit unstable—maybe had some level of personality disorder—and hence had his checkered past, as was suggested among the more credible allegations in the background stuff about him dug up (by B&W, and as the film has Bergman and Wigand discussing heatedly in a phone conversation). He had a first marriage, and handled it a little recklessly, perhaps. Did he shoplift at one time? Maybe.
But if there was something rather erratic about his early life, I think he was the sort who, once he used his craftsmanly education (with his biochemistry degrees from SUNY-Buffalo, and with his father having been a mechanical engineer, all suggesting a sort of family-ingrained conformist bent) in a large-corporate setting, and could reestablish his personal life with a new family (how do you like that his second wife Liane, played by Diane Venora, seems like an attractive model who can cry on cue?), then he could cement a stability for himself that could keep him productive, “sane,” and dignified. But he also had a conscientious streak that brought him to really start to draw the line when he became privy to the B&W plans to use a cancer-causing substance to increase the addictive quality of nicotine in its cigarettes. He was then in crisis: blow the whistle on his former employer (once he was fired), or adhere to his confidentiality agreement in large part to protect his loving and sanity-supporting family?
Faced with this decision, which of course the movie spells out in florid ways perfect for analysis by a high school English-honors paper, he is also faced with the potential to be a bit unstable, never mind the old ghosts of his more erratic younger life being brought up. Hence his seeming mercurially difficult to deal with to the relatively appealing and accommodating Bergman. The grounds for Wigand’s future personal stability would turn out to lie in a work future that comprised something more suited to an idealistic (and in a sense less professionally ambitious) type—schoolteaching. He no longer would have a vaunted job as vice president or such at a big corporation, but his means to secure stability both financially and personally would be preserved. There of course would happen to be the “collateral damage” of his losing his second wife to divorce (which happens some time after the deposition, and for Wigand could only have been feared as he decided whether to testify).
Further, it’s possible that as part of his cementing over his sense of what he was and had become, amid his difficult decision about whistleblowing, he would compromise his representation (to whomever it mattered) of what kind of hero he was. Prior to Wigand’s doing the 60 Minutes interview, the Mike Wallace character, asking “Who are these people?” when Liane arises from a restaurant table, upset by the prospect of the interview, is answered by Bergman, “They’re ordinary people under extraordinary pressure.” Some version of this poetic summary is seen on Wigand’s Web site today. He says he is not an extraordinary hero.
Wigand has a right to assert this. Maybe his eulogizers will up the assessment when he’s gone. We all can assess this different ways, depending on what we admire in heroes. But the question of whether Wigand was unstable in some way seems answered as fully as it need be, as long as he’s alive, in the way he has decided to handle a monumental decision and how he portrays himself now, as an ordinary person. Maybe we’ll never fully know what made him tick, and perhaps it’s none of our business. But sometimes the fear of personal breakdown is the real “scare tactic” one in Wigand’s shoes need obey, and not so directly the threats from a heavy-handed legal team from a corporation that is out to avoid billions of dollars in liabilities, however much that company might deserve that.
Aside from all this, we can confidently say that the smear campaign undertaken by B&W was about as cynical, ruthless, and gratuitous as the movie suggests.
3. The 60 Minutes staff gets apparently self-interested counsel from a CBS attorney
About 1:45 into the movie, a new complication is that the “CBS Corporate” counsel Helen Caparelli points out one possible consequence of Wigand’s earth-shaking revelation about B&W—in part, making another legal lesson for us—that, per the legal standards of what makes for tort law, B&W would be likely to sue CBS for tortious interference with business prospect (remember from my Part 1 how this would hinder the sale of CBS to Westinghouse, etc.). She says, at one point, that unlike in a Mississippi state court where Wigand’s testimony could be looked at for its truth within its context (which seems to me like a pettifogging argument), CBS (she argues) would require a higher standard of what constitutes truth, because “We [CBS News] are the standard for everyone else,” in terms of what the public will take as truth.
Further, when it comes (she argues) to Wigand’s interview being aired on CBS, if CBS were sued by B&W, “the greater the truth, the greater the damage.” But if Wigand “lied, the damages are smaller.” Here, thematically, the technical aspect of the tort law is focused on regarding money amounts; and story-wise, hard business considerations are being made.
Later, someone in Wigand’s court (is it Bergman?) points out the Caparelli stands to get X millions in fees or some other compensation contingent on the sale of CBS. So much for her impartiality in the Wigand matter.
I am skimping on discussion here, in good part because Caparelli seems just a self-interested lawyer representing how much “CBS Corporate” would shirk its public responsibility in declining to air the full Wigand interview, and hardly poses the ethical issues that Wigand faced in deciding whether to be deposed.
All this is one collection of the details of the long post-Mississippi phase of the movie, which is interesting, but can seem a bit cluttered.
4. 60 Minutes today—along with the status of the supremacy of the major New York media (some offhand notes)
In some ways, of course, the movie is dated, almost surprisingly so in just 13 years’ time. We can see how much has changed in the media in this time. The idea of 60 Minutes being such an almost-unquestioned, and so-central, trustee of journalistic integrity seems almost quaint, which the film seems to accept as a premise (somewhat as if it is catering to very midbrow tastes, but also conforming with what was pretty much a fact at the time). Of course, the film makes this idea about 60 Minutes part of the plot mechanism—having the newsmagazine endure its own crisis of conscience in how much to cave in to a leviathan corporation’s threats or potential for same.
And the change in 60 Minutes’ stature through today is not simply due to the passing of Mike Wallace, Don Hewitt, and Andy Rooney, but to the change in audience tastes and in the status of the media, especially given the Internet—much of which couldn’t have been accurately predicted 13 years ago. In fact, along these lines, and along those of the recent financial crisis, we have been undergoing a cultural change in some important respects that are at least as wrenching as that that took place from the early 1930s to the 1950s, when America was forged into new economic and cultural directions by the Great Depression and World War II. Who occupies the role now that 60 Minutes had through approximately the early 2000s, with the kind of reach network television used to have?
I have long been a fan of 60 Minutes, and that show is the one network television show I so regularly watch, even though I would be one of the first to remark how much it now caters to a younger audience, with segments on rock stars (usually not objectionable to me—but the choice of the earnest ingenue/prodigy Taylor Swift is a little on the frivolous side), sexier correspondents (e.g., Lara Logan—a good reporter, don’t forget; and now looking older post children and having been brutalized in Egypt), and an almost complete replacement of the original “gerontocrat staff.”
We used to be gratified to see the old crew—Wallace, Safer, Rooney, even the relatively “girlish” Lesley Stahl—lined up in the intros at the start of the program, like a review of what grandees are still in the Politburo turning up on the reviewing dais on Lenin’s tomb during a May Day parade. OK, no one has been given a one-way ticket to the Gulag; we’re still in solid hands. Today, even Steve Kroft counts as a sort of “old guard” member, and by age, he’s a baby boomer.
It is especially remarkable how no suitable replacement—either in terms of a personality or the type of short segment—has been found for commentator Andy Rooney, whose departure from the show was triggered in good part by the Grim Reaper and who almost preeminently symbolized how the show was one whose fairly journalistically circumspect and formerly often “boring-topic” approach could address the sensibilities of those elders who were content to see how adult TV journalism could be, which of course—because of the TV element—is still a relative form of “adultness.”
(Rooney could have had a piece beginning: “Why is it that we have plenty of psychiatric medications for people with mental illness, but nothing to treat the stupidity of normal people? Can we have a medication to deal with the tastes of those who like Jersey Shore?”)
Among the remaining “gerontocrats” is Morley Safer, now the elder statesman after having been the relative boy of the 1970s-90s crew. Safer is now a little over 80 and not nearly as old as Wallace or Rooney were when last on the show; he is also—in a way that would keep any breathing soul “eternally young”—the only 60 Minutes correspondent who can speak so well about high culture. He could maybe write, “With his smiling-tortoise face, turkey wattle jowls, hunched posture, and old-man clothing—all so evocative of that old expression, ‘We ain’t getting any younger’—and yet, so key, his urbane writing and being apparently the only old TV journalist who knows who Cezanne and Trotsky were—he seems as if he has outlasted his time, at least in terms of marketability, if not in terms of life wisdom and what he can talk about, from his reading and otherwise, with dinnertime guests. The kids are now running the shop, and Safer keeps a flame that seems ever-guttering. Safer is like Jimmy Stewart in the 1970s, his best days past, almost as if with opportunities for work no more dignified than a slot in some tacky mid-decade sequel to the Airport disaster movies. The hope of doing a significant amount of dignified work seems so much more no longer an issue; now he might hope that the obituary writers can get the simple facts on his life straight.”
[I deleted a nice paragraph on The New York Times; don’t want to muddy the waters, which wouldn’t have been much, in view of the recent well-deserved celebration of the life of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, a key publisher in a period of the newspaper’s development into its modern form and stature.]
5. Times have changed
The Wikipedia article on the film totes out a list of quotes from reviews, and one I think is funny—from the publication Entertainment Weekly, which to me has never worked hard to forfeit shallow appeal in favor of trenchant honesty: it gave the film a “B” rating and said the film is “a good but far from great movie because it presents truth telling in America as far more imperiled than it is.” Really? That reviewer could now take a breezy look through Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010, which I have not seen), Oliver Stone’s W. (2008, ditto), something on Bernie Madoff…or just a quick look through a recent week’s worth of a reputable newspaper.
