Michael: Thank you everyone.

And Lowell, thank you so much for joining us tonight.

Um, let's not bury the lead.

Let's get right to it.

I'm gonna read a couple of, uh, quotes that I found about journalism, past, present, and under current siege.

"Journalism is what we need to make democracy work."

Very simple statement.

Who do you think said it?

One of our heroes, Walter Cronkite.

Here's another one, “The lowest form of popular culture, lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and the contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives has overrun real journalism.

Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.

” Another very famous name said that.

Carl Bernstein.

I got, I got one more for you.

It's more recent, and this is a contrasting viewpoint.

“The press are a true threat to democracy, and in fact, are the enemy of the people.

The fake news media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great country.

NBC news should be investigated for its country threatening treason.

” That's a bit of the other side of the spectrum, isn't it?

Do I need to tell you who said that?

No, I didn't think so.

This is an educated audience.

Lowell, in light of all that, I mean, I don't even have to ask you a question about that, but I am concerned about the future of a free and independent media.

And do you share that concern?

Lowell: Well, I'm, I, I don't know who shared the concern.

I'm wondering just like a nu- number of things in questions that, that we face, whether we can do anything about it.

And I think that that's one of the big, uh, difficulties in trying to deal with the current state of media information, ga- information, dissemination of information, and the failure to regulate it or to keep it under control, particularly when it's electronic.

Um, so, um, I'm not, I'm not very positive about the, um, ability, particularly of this country to make up for the damage that's taken place so far.

Uh, and by that I mean, um, uh, and I'll, I'll just tell you why I, I got motivated to sort of come out of retirement or semi-retirement, uh, which was reflecting on Donald Trump, the last, the person you quoted, um, and, uh, his appearance in 2015 at the Republican primary, uh, and to take the stage as a legitimate candidate for president.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: And I realized, um, many- a number of years at that moment when I was watching that, that that could not have happened before 1987.

There was no way he would've been on for more than one day.

And that was because electronic media, up to that moment, was regulated into the United States, 1987, um, by regulations that began back in the mid 1920s for radio.

And were enforced, imposed and caused people in particularly in broadcasting, to be careful about how they said things or allowed people to say things on the air.

And I don't think people, uh, adequately understand this reality that used to exist.

I'm not saying that the broadcast industry at that time, uh, or uh, since then has acute- you know, has performed in ways that I don't raise questions about.

But up to that moment, that could not have happened.

You could not have had the normalization of that kind of behavior, use of words, personal attack, uh, disinformation, obvious disinformation, fictionalized versions of events.

Uh, it wouldn't have happened.

You didn't see it.

If you're old enough to remember what television was like in the United States, for example, in the 1960s, you rarely saw anyone given airtime talking about segregation in a positive way, unless it was in certain stations in the south.

And many of them lost their licenses.

So, we've forgotten that history and that past, and we've forgotten that the president of the United States in 1987 when he won, uh, when he was campaigning for president, said that the government is the enemy.

That was the first time someone in a political campaign since John Buchanan in, in the 1850s, attacked the central government in a negative way.

Uh, you could not have been in the Republican pr-- Uh, like right now, Donald Trump is, is not willing to, um, pledge that if he was in the, uh, he, to get on the stage in the, in the, so-called debates that they're having, he has to say that he'll support whoever the nominee is of the Republican party.

He won't do that.

You may recall he said the same thing about who would he, would he go along with the election in the United States when he was running for president?

That would've disqualified him.

Period.

Before 1987.

Michael: Yeah.

Well, you know, we, we were talking earlier and you said that television is unique.

Television news is unique, is that it's always been regulated or used to be more strongly regulated.

Newspapers, not so much so, constrained only by Lowell: Libel laws.

Michael: Libel laws.

Michael: Um, you know, New York Times versus Sullivan, which kind of defined that and made it easier for newspapers to print what they wanted to print.

But you're saying that, that the regulation of the TV news in- industry ultimately was probably a good thing, as we've witnessed since its decline and erosion.

Lowell: Is it- From the beginnings of radio it was understood.

I, I went back during the pandemic when I had nothing else to do and went and, and went through the Berkeley Library system, which you can now do remotely.

And, um, and went and looked for, I don't know how many of you ever heard of the public interest standard.

The public interest standard is still written into the first two paragraphs of the 1934 Federal Communications Act.

The public interest standard says that if you have a license for, as a broadcaster, you have to make, you have to live up to this standard.

It was, it was actually words that were taken from a, from a, uh, a, um, uh, utilities act, the Federal Utilities Act of 1920.

So, I, I asked myself the question, well, who came up with that standard?

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: Right?

Lowell: And one of the people I talked to who just passed away this year, Newton Minnow, who had been the head of the FCC in 1961, who famously went and watched everything on television for a week and then went to the National Association of Broadcasters and announced that what they had created was a -vast wasteland.

Michael: Vast wasteland.

Lowell: Right.

And immediately, television news in the United States went from 15 minutes to 30 minutes.

Immediately that CBS started putting documentaries back on the air.

So there was regulation by the fear of financial or other damage to the station and its value.

So, I went back and said, where, where did this come from?

In my conversations with Mr. Minnow, and through documents I found in the early 1920s, if you would read these documents, this new invention called radio sounds just like the internet.

It's being described exactly the same way.

It was totally outta control.

People were saying whatever they wanted, people were broadcasting across the country with giant transmitters.

There was no order whatsoever.

Hate speech lies and so on.

That problem landed on the desk of the Secretary of Commerce under Calvin Coolidge.

His name was Herbert Hoover.

Michael: Oh, wow.

Lowell: And it was Herbert Hoover who came up with the public interest standard for the, for granting licenses to people in the community to have this new technology, which he then describes as being the best thing that could happen to communities, the best way to get, educate people and spread culture, and have standards and protect democracy.

And so, the Radio Act of 1927 included these standards.

The, he became president the next year, and, and the, uh, commission that was set up, the radio commission began to pull the licenses of stations that were preaching the doctrine of the Ku Klux Klan that were selling, um, snake oil, uh, and various other disinformation operations.

Three of these cases got to the appellate courts, federal appellate courts, and it was upheld that you could pull a license.

That tradition was taken over in 1934 and existed until 1987.

There were limits on what you could do.

When, when I got my first job at ABC News in, uh, early 1978 and got my contract, I received a, a binder of standards and practices that I had to sign with my contract.

Michael: Mm-Hmm.

Lowell: It was filled with all the things that I should watch out in terms of how I behaved, what, where I went, what, how did I ask permission to get into a restaurant where people had a expectation of privacy.

All the laws and everything else were included in that book.

Now, I'm not saying that the networks operated, you know, all the time in the best possible way, but it was there.

And what I'm telling you is you could get equal time if you had a dissenting view.

You could, if you got attacked on the air, they had to give you time at the same time to an equal size audience and so on.

That was all changed by President Reagan, and he announced that he was gonna change it when he took office.

And I was in the executive offices of ABC News where in New York, where they were my fellow, I was a very junior executive.

I mean, and, and a reluctant one, by the way.

But, um, they, all they were talking about is how much more money we're gonna make.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: Right?

You couldn't sell a station without the approval of the FCC.

People, the best in the communit had to be the identity of the person who owned it.

To this day, you can't own one unless you're a US citizen.

And that's why Rupert Murdoch became a US citizen.

So he could own station licenses.

You couldn't have used the name Fox News given their content.

It wouldn't have been allowed on a program like that in our opinion program.

So, we did have another time, not, not that these regulations were perfect, but there was an understanding that electronic transmission of information is different than print.

And, and the impact in both the 1920s, the 1930s, the Second World War proved that in spades.

So that the 1949, you get what's called the Fairness doctrine that comes Congress passes, which gives the audience power to complain and change broadcasting.

So, what I, I wanted to do just talk about that a little bit, because when I learned all of that, I was realizing this is a history we don't know.

And there is a way to deal with the current situation.

The question is, can we and politically will, can we change the, uh, what I call the suicide pact that we now call the First Amendment?

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: Okay.

Michael: And we'll talk about that more as, as we talk about your latest documentary project, which is around trying to figure out a way that we can handle the emergence of... media on the internet, and the lack of regulation of facts and truth.

And as these guardrails disappear, I think it underscores the increasing importance.

Not that it hasn't always been important of good investigative journalism, and that there's still media outlets out there that are, that are pursuing the truth.

And that's always been your passion.

I wanna get a little sense of, of, of your path towards all the achievements that you, that you had accomplished, um, in that world.

You, you started out, um, pretty early in San Diego doing investigative reporting, and maybe you can kind of pick it up from there.

Lowell: Well, I was a, a, I was a graduate student at the University of California in San Diego, uh, in the, in the mid 1960s associated with my fellow seminar, uh, uh, student Angela Davis, for instance.

And, and we had a, we were studying, uh, a form of, uh, what, what would be called, um, the Frankfurt School of, uh, critical Thinking, which really is sort of a, it's hard for me to describe it 'cause it's, it's like, gets pretty arcane.

But it's basically, uh, uh, looking for a social theory that wasn't communist and wasn't capitalism, and looking for a new social theory.

In the midst of these studies, um, uh, our, our- the professor who we were studying with, Herbert Marcuse, was identified on Associated Press, uh, dispatch out of Europe as having given a speech to 20,000 students in the streets of Rome, who then ran around town and spray painted 'Mao, Marx, and Marcuse' on the buildings.

This infuriated the governor Ronald Reagan, and demanded that he be fired, that the local press, which was not, I would say the best newspaper chain in the world, The Copley Press, um, campaigned to get him fired.

And then all of a sudden his house was attacked.

Um, uh, there was, uh, not only death threats, but they cut the phone lines.

He's a German expatriate professor with his, with his wife.

They fled San Diego.

Um, and I, being one of the graduate students for a while, we were walking, armed walking into school with a number of death threats that were taking place.

So, we got together and we decided that, given that there was no dissenting voice in any of the media, that we would try to start a newspaper.

Now, my roots in the newspaper business goes back to being an apprentice typographer in a type, uh, hot type shop, that means lead type, um, in, uh, back in the late 1950s, early sixties.

And so, I joined it with, and I finally could use a job there where I was paid, you know, where you had to punch a clock.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: Um, and... Lowell: And we started this, uh, to do a fast version of it.

We started this weekly newspaper, you know, and it was a staging area for the war in Vietnam, very conservative community right across the street, if you will, from Tijuana.

And, and we found immense number of stories to do, and we focused on, um, uh, basically the question of who ran the city and county of San Diego, because you couldn't figure that out from the news.

Micheal: Yeah.

Lowell: The news was not very good.

And in, in that area.

And actually, that's how I met Denny Walsh, who was sitting over there.

Uh, I was sitting in their offices in downtown San Diego and, and, um, uh, waiting for people to come in and buy our newspaper.

And because we also distributed to young people who went out and sold it.

And outta the backseat of FBI car, which we could tell an FBI car, when we saw one, uh, came a gentleman who might have been an FBI agent, but he walked in and he had a peculiar Kansas twang in his voice and introduced himself and said he wanted to buy copies.

And Denny bought like, I think 10 different copies and gave us $2.50 and left and got back in the car.

He did say that he was from Life Magazine, which we found kind of unusual.

So, it wasn't until two years ago that Denny and I interviewed him.

So, what were you doing downtown Um, so we were under, this gets me into the, uh, where journalism turns into, uh, real journalism starts to happen, at least with me, Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: personally.

And that is that we were focused on what turned out to be the richest and most powerful people in town.

And they had some pretty, let's say, criminal ideas about how to make, how to make money, and how to keep their personal power.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: And, uh, two years later Denny would do a big spread in Life Magazine about that.

He barely mentioned us in the, in the article, but it, it, when I went and I went to see him at the time.

But, uh, it gave me en- it gave me encouragement that actually you could start out the way we did with just basic information that people hadn't heard before or wasn't distributed in the town, and, and that things would change.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: And change-- 'cause both of those gentlemen basically got indicted and convicted eventually.

And one of them did some hard time 'cause he managed to get out of prison every weekend and go on one of the other guys yacht with, with the warden of the, the federal Penitentiary.

But anyway, um, so that gave me a lot of, um, uh, enthusiasm for, for the work.

And, uh, then after that, I found by following that track and that sort of focus in many ways of who, who's really in charge and what's the power and where does power come from, and who's got it, and what are their connections, which got me into the relationship between legitimate business and organized crime.

And, and it was, uh, I mentioned this to some of the people you had me stand up and have pictures with earlier, and they thought it was pretty funny.

Um, I, I wound up getting sued by, uh, for libel for $630 million in mid seventies.

Um, and, uh, the gentleman who was the lead plaintiff, um, was a, well-known organized crime figure, but he denied that he had really ever been convicted of a crime.

And he was Mr., Mr. Las Vegas of the year, and so on, and so on.

And, and, uh, but that litigation went on for 11 years.

Um, and, um, uh, he wound up today, he's the number one vi- uh, um, he's, he's the number one exhibit at the Mob Museum in Las Vegas.

[LAUGHTER] Uh, but, uh, or- and various other things happened to me, uh, in the course of pursuing this particular kind of journalism.

Michael: Well, I, I wanna get to the next one too.

'cause, uh, it's an equally interesting story.

Um, another galvanizing moment for you was the unfortunate assassination of that journalist Don Bowles in Arizona.

And you, you were telling me earlier that kind of motivated and inspired you to really begin formulating a team and an organization dedicated to investigative journalism.

Lowell: Well, what happened was, I was, I was working for Rolling Stone Magazine when it was still in San Francisco, uh, actually did a story about how Ronald Reagan became a millionaire, which, uh, the only person who picked it up in 1976 Lowell: was Mike Wallace, Michael: Ahh.

when he was at the Republican Convention.

Everybody else seemed to ignore this way somehow.

How did this actor become so wealthy?

Um, but, um... let's see...

I'm sorry.

I, oh, I was with the CIR, okay.

So, um, in 1976, uh, Don Bolles was a reporter at the Arizona Republic.

And I had been in touch with him by phone.

I had never met him.

He was pursuing, um, a small company, well, small in size that is the offices which were over a over gas station in Buffalo, New York, that, that controlled all the, um, um, all the cash business inside race- 60 racetracks and stadiums across the United States.

In those days, people, when you went up to the counter and bought a hotdog, you paid in cash.

A lot of cash, the Jacobs family.

And they had a company called Emprise when Bolles had been reporting on them.

And, um, and they weren't happy.

But, um, one day his, he got in his car and it blew up in downtown Phoenix.

And when he was dying, the EMTs said that the one word he said was, “Emprise.

” Uh, so, uh, a group of people on the East Coast and the Midwest led by a, an editor at Newsday in New York named Bob Greene, who was an early, if you will, creator of investigative reporting teams.

Um, uh... this got ahold of me and said they were coming out to the western part of the United States, and they were gonna do this investigation in Arizona.

So I met them in Phoenix and participated in this activity, uh, for a while.

And I was struck by the ability to take on so many subjects in depth as an organized unit.

Michael: Yeah.

You were one of what, 27 reporters who worked on that story?

Lowell: Right.

Michael: Wow.

Well, it was a whole series of stories.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: So, and he managed all of that.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: And so, I took that away with me when Rolling Stone moved to New York at the end of 76, um, that maybe we could set up a nonprofit that would do not only in-depth investigations, but also help people doing stories and assist people with resources.

And we did that and set up offices initially in downtown Oakland.

And it's been in Oakland, San Francisco back and forth.

It's still around.

I think it still has about now it has like 50 employees.

Michael: Hmm.

Lowell: Um, and so, but that was the first 501(c)(3) designation for doing investigative reporting.

Michael: Wow, interesting.

And then Bob Greene was approached by Roone Arledge, who a lot of people know was Michael: head of News at ABC-- Lowell: head at ABC.

and ABC You were telling me they were trying to compete with CBS and NBC, which had a much more robust, uh, established news division.

And they, uh, Roone wanted to build up ABC News.

So, he contacted Bob, and Bob got in touch with you and Lowell: Right.

And they were gon start a new magazine program 'cause 60 Minutes was starting to make money.

It was, it became one of the top 10 programs at the late part of the seventies.

Yeah.

Late seventies.

And so, um, and what, what attracted me to it was that, uh, when they made the job offers, I said, well, now I'm not moving to New York.

And I said, I'm staying here.

And they said that was okay.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: No one else had ever said that was okay.

[audience laugh] Lowell: So, so... And so that, so they, they hired me.

Uh, I had never taken a picture.

I had never been on a shoot.

Um, uh, I had never edited a film.

Um, but in those days, they had enough money and, and were putting enough money in that they could have someone like me basically work as a, if you will, a researcher reporter, and provide the, the meat of the story, particularly if you're looking for a new story.

Um, and it wasn't, it didn't take me more than a year to start producing my own stories.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: Um... but that was my, how I broke in and what I found really interesting, uh, you know, and there are, first of all, there's, there's all these forms to traditional broadcasting that take place in different cultures.

And in the culture in the United States, it was more so than, let's say other countries.

It's the on-camera person who's, who's the key person in the story.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: And you create this, uh, if you're playing the role of reporter and producer, which is what I was doing, uh, you create a character.

Some of them are better than others.

Some of them really are interested in the story, and some of them are just reading what you write.

Uh, and, um, and so at ABC, there was a lot of flexibility.

And because, um, I get, I used to say this because, because I decided to stay in Berkeley because I wasn't in the midst of the hothouse of New York and what goes on in the media, I can come up with stories that they didn't see in New York.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: Right.

So, I did the first major, for example, um, presentation of Hawaiian marijuana to the American audience, uh, back in 1979.

That was pretty hip at the time.

Michael: I guess so.

Lowell: Uh, I, I did an, another story about, I think I mentioned to you, um, earlier, um, where I met, uh, the covering governor's father and involved a, um, a someone, a man who was convicted of a double murder in 1940.

In those days, if you got sentenced in California, you got sentenced to an indeterminate sentence.

So you would get, let's say, two years to life.

Right.

And then the, the, the parole board would then decide whether or not you had been quote, rehabilitated.

Um, this, so this gentleman was convicted of a, a double mo- murder, a mob related murder in Los Angeles.

His name was Pete Pianezzi.

And he had been a newspaper truck driver in San Francisco.

And Gavin Newsom's grandfather was his lawyer.

Um, and, and he got outta jail after about eight years, uh, and had no record insisted he was innocent.

Eventually they got him a par, a rehabilitative pardon, in 1957, I believe.

And, um... he, um, but he wasn't satisfied.

He wanted to get a pardon of innocence.

And the family that is Gavin's father inherited the case, continued to, uh, lobby to get him a pardon of innocence.

And there had only been eight pardons of innocence at that point in the history of California.

And I became aware of this situation because another organized crime figure, a guy Denny knows or knows of, Jimmy "The Weasel" Fratianno, a famous mafia hitman in California, uh, who lived in Hayward at the time, um, had sued me for $15 million at one point.

But I dont- that's a whole nother thing.

And, and, uh, and, and gone away.

But The Weasel had flipped and become a, the sort of the, uh, star of the Witness Protection Program.

It was in the late seventies.

And he calls me up from witness protection, heaven, wherever he was.

And he's, he's complaining that they want him to testify against all these mafia chieftains in different places.

And, and, um, you know, he's the star government witness.

And it turned out that the guy who was running the Witness Protection Program was, let's say, a source of mine by that point.

And, um, and his, his complaint was, "I know..." it's hard for me to do an invitation of his voice, but he- "I know a guy who is innocent.

All they want to know is who's guilty."

[audience laughs] "And I know that..." This is on his own.

I mean, nobody contacted him, but he said his, his former partner in crime had just been assassinated before he flipped.

And, and, uh, "Bomp" a guy named Frank Bompensiero.

And, and he told me, "Bompensiero killed these two guys in LA, and this guy did the time.

And that's not right.

And I want to, I want to testify that there's an innocent man who served time, but they won't let me do it."

So, I contacted the Justice Department and on behalf of ABC News and, and said, I want to interview Fratianno but also, what is it about him saying that the, that this gentleman is innocent?

Right?

And I get a letter back saying that Fratianno is inherently incredible on the subject of innocence.

[laughter] Michael: He's a liar, in other words.

Lowell: Which made great copy, by the way.

Michael: Yeah, no kidding.

Lowell: Uh... and so the bottom line was we did a story on ABC News on 20/20.

By then they were- that was the magazine program.

And, um... uh, guess what, Jerry Brown gives the guy the ninth pardon of innocence in the history of the state.

So when Gavin Newsom, a couple years back, uh, suspends all executions in the state of California, at the press conference, he, they ask him why he did this.

And he starts telling, telling the story of Pete Pianezzi 'cause of his father and his grandfather.

So anyway, that's a long, long version of a story that comes back around.

Uh- Michael: I should for- I should forewarn you that, that he, he's gonna drop some amazing names over the course of this conversation.

We're gonna hear about some amazing figures throughout history in this discussion.

Um, tell me about the transition from ABC to 60 Minutes and what it was like to work with Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt.

Lowell: Well, I had no, I had no real complaints about ABC and how they treated me letting me stay in, in Berkeley.

The, the difficulty I did have is they wanted me to live in New York.

And I just for various personal reasons, um, having just gotten together with Sharon, also having, uh, being a, a, uh, single parent before that, um, I just didn't wanna live in New York.

I grew up in New York.

Michael: Yeah.

And also because I am sensitive to the subject of how your own personal finances or your own personal vulnerability, um, can influence your editorial decisions, um, I knew that I would be under a lot more pressure to cave in, if you will, uh, to various influence and so on, on stories if I lived in New York.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowelll: Um... And, uh, so I wound up, uh, I did nine months in New York for ABC and told them goodbye.

I'm going back, it says in my contract, I can go back.

And they did- they just started going nuts.

Um, and so that was gonna come to an end.

And then I get a phone call and it's Mike Wallace.

And he hears I'm leaving and, uh, would I like to come to work at 60 Minutes.

And we talk about that a little bit.

He had just seen this story I had done, uh, that was a wild story about a Black man who was hung in a jail in Long- in Signal Hill, California.

But, um, uh, so I was, you know, Mike Wallace was going, okay, you know, big time.

And, and I said, well, it's great.

Thank you for calling, but, uh, I'm not moving to New York.

And he said, "Well, you can't get the job."

I said, well, it's too bad.

So, hung up.

And 10 minutes later he called back.

And I, I found that that's the one thing I learned from Nancy Reagan: It's just say no.

Michael: You just say no.

[laughter] [laughter] Lowell: And, um, and, uh, and he said, "Come to New York, we'll talk about it."

And that lasted 14 years.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: And, um... And it was interesting that people used to think I lived in New York, but I didn't.

Michael: Yeah.

Michael: What was he like to work with?

I mean, you mentioned that he, he seems like the kind of guy that would've a temper, and you said that was pretty accurate.

Lowell: What you, what you saw on TV was what you lived with.

He's very, he was very smart.

You know, I, in, I, I have to say that when I, first, first couple of stories I did for 60 Minutes, you know, in those days when you would lay down a, a track, a narration track that your talent, the person you see on camera, uh, that's what they call 'em, talent.

Um, uh, you know, when, especially if they're at a radio and Mike's at a radio.

Harry Reasoner was at a radio, uh, and Bradley was at a radio.

They, they have voice control.

They can, they can hit a 10th of a second.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: Um, there are all kinds of things they can do that just enhance your story.

And, and so that was really phenomenal.

Um, on the other hand, on the temper business, Mike exhibited that immediately as soon as we started working together.

Um, and, um, I wont, uh, tell the whole story here, but let's put it this way.

He chewed me out with his nose about two inches from my face in a parking lot with the door windows open on a three story, DEA head headquarters in San Diego, California, where the guy who we were supposed to interview, the first guy, got a phone call from Washington saying, "Don't go to do the interview."

Wallace turned around and said, "Come with me."

We went out there and he just started screaming at me as to why he should never have hired me.

Why you'd ever want to recruit m What kind of idiot was I, you know?

And so on by the, by the time he was finished, there were people hanging out of the windows.

[laughter] And I'm standing there, and I think I called you that night, right?

Yeah, I did.

Michael: I would've wilted like a weak old flower.

Lowell: And he says, "Okay, let's see what else we can get to do."

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: And so, the next thing I had on the schedule was for him to stand in the vault in the DEA headquarters, which was filled with drugs - marijuana, heroin, all kinds of it, cocaine.

And he was gonna, the, the idea was he would stand there, what we call a stand up.

Right?

Which was scripted, by the way.

It didn't come out of his head by himself.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: And, and he went in there, he had the text, he memorized text, he said, let's shoot.

And off we go, right?

Michael: Yeah.

So I go back to the hotel that night Sharon was in, in Hawaii with the kids.

And I say, what the hell was I doing thinking it was gonna- this is gonna work.

It's not gonna work.

But I did realize that the next day, that I needed to figure out some way of getting revenge.

[laughter] Lowell: So, so...

So I had arranged for two, um, cigarette boats.

If, you know, a cigarette boat goes about... Michael: Very fast boats.

Lowell: ... 150 miles an hour very fast boats for drug smugglers who would go offshore.

So we, the key character in this drug trafficking ring, which was out of- these were former Navy brats out of Coronado, California, was called the Coronado Mob, this story.

Um, and so the, the, the chief driver has got his boat, and we have another boat, and the other boat, and we're shooting film, by the way, in those days.

So 16 millimeter.

And, and so we go out and to show people what it's like offshore off the Hotel del Coronado, and, uh, going back and forth to Mexico.

So we have one boat going really fast with Mike in it, and with the driver, and he's got a microphone, and we're radio control, a radio... on the other boat with the cameraman, Wade Bingham, who was a great guy, and Wade's filming.

And then all of a sudden he turns around to me and says, "My camera broke."

Michael: Oh, no.

Lowell: He said, "Well, what are we gonna do?"

He says, "Well, I got another one back, you know, in the marina, the car."

And I said, let's see, it'll take us about 30 minutes to go back and 30 minutes, that means an hour.

So, I get on the radio and I tell Mike, "You stay there, Mike.

We're gonna get a new camera.

We'll be back.

You just stay right there."

[laughter] An hour and a half later... [laughing] we came back, we finished the shoot, and Mike was so furious... Michael: Yeah.

that he ordered the, this guy the who, he, the guy running the boat to g- you know the Hotel Coronado.

He was staying in the Hotel del Coronado.

He had the guy bring the boat right to the surf break, and he thought he could get off the boat, you know, and, and he took his shoes off and he jumped off the edge of the boat and disappeared and, [laughter] And a soaked Mike Wallace walked to shore and Michael: Well played, Lowell.

-Well played.

Lowell: So...

So that was the beginning of 14 years with Mike.

-Um... Michael: Yeah.

Well, let's, let's jump ahead here because I want to talk, I wanna talk about your time at the New York Times and Frontline, of course.

And how you really, one of the thought leaders around taking content from one platform, one media platform, and offering it to others, and getting more, more eyeballs, more comprehension, more actually more diverse stories out of some of the content you were creating.

Lowell: Well, okay.

So, you have to go back in time when the, when the internet is just, uh, this thing we're all getting used to that exists, and we have computers, but, um, uh, you know, but there wasn't, there was dial up.

Remember dial up?

Michael: Oh, yeah.

Lowell: And, um, and, and mostly text.

But one of the things, and, and then there are websites.

And so, one of the things that I realized at 60 Minutes, and I have the boxes to prove it, is that, is that a lot of these stories take a lot of work and a lot of time, and a lot of paper, and a lot of documents and a lot of material.

And you get, let's say for 60 Minutes, in those days, you would get 15 minutes to tell a story at best.

Michael: Right.

Lowell: Right?

Sometimes.

When I did the McMartin Preschool, I got like a, a program and a half, um, but, um... that was very unusual.

Or eventually tobacco.

And, and, uh... what I realized was that I, I would, had all these transcripts that could be useful to other people that were never gonna be seen that nobody, you know, you get, as it many people would complain, you interviewed me for 20, 25 minutes, you used 20 seconds, right?

Um, where's the rest of the material?

So, it seemed to me that, that, and there was some distrust out there, particularly in the political class of, uh, giving us interviews because we were gonna just cherry pick what made- -wherever it fit with our idea- -Distort what they're saying.

and what was going on, and we wouldn't be, they wouldn't get a chance to really tell their story or challenge our story.

Right.

There was a regulation at CBS that, uh, and at ABC, that you were supposed to tell a subject of the interview, and that if they requested it, they, they had the right to have a full transcript.

That means they didn't have to bring their own tape recorder or whatever.

You gave him the same transcript you had.

And I was instructed at both networks not to tell anybody that this was in the standards and practices, um, because of the potential for litigation, because we could be challenged about how the editing went, and so on and so on.

So, when I left CBS under stressful conditions, because for the first time actually in the history of motion pictures, um, the real name of a broadcasting and entertainment company is used in, that's, is used in a motion picture in a negative light.

Michael: Mm.

Lowell: Okay.

If you look at All the President's Men, if you look at any of the, uh, major, uh, films that have been made about real life Bos- uh, Spotlight.

Michael: Yeah.

Boston.

Lowell: The owners and the management all look great.

In, in my story of the one that I'm in, in The Insider, the management doesn't look so great, or the owners.

So, and that's still true today.

And if you want to see The Insider, go and try and find it on the web.

It's there, it's there.

You'll find it eventually, and it'll cost you 17 bucks, uh, to watch it.

But it's hard to find.

It's not on any regular platform.

It's not distributed, it wasn't, it was nominated for seven Academy Awards and it was never rereleased.

So, um, that says a whole nother side to the- Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: the entertainment industry and actually, uh, is worth mentioning if we have time in terms of what we are living with now.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: Uh, but, um...

Uh, I lost my train of thought.

Michael: You, you were talking about the- how having all that, all, all of that content that never made it on into a news story -into a news story.

Lowell: Oh, yeah.

So, when I went to Frontline, one of the things that, that I, uh, talked to the management about was what about on the website, putting edited versions of the, that is 'cause some of the transcripts you need to edit 'em just to make sense out of it.

Michael: Right.

Lowell: Uh, edited versions on online.

Not, not to get more people, but to actually make the reporting easier and also give people resources after the fact.

Writers, book authors, whatever.

And I found that that really enhanced my ability to get, particularly in Washington, to get people to go on camera, because I told them, we're gonna put your transcript, the relevant parts of it unedited, basically- Michael: They trusted you more.

-on there.

Michael: They trusted- Lowell: Right.

And you'll see it Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: We'll be, we'll be transparent.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: Uh, the last thing that broadcasting wanted to do, basically.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: Um, so, um, uh, that became, that, that had real results, uh, right after 9/11, because, which I was also reporting for the New York Times and for Frontline at that time, both at the same time, because to get people on camera, because, um, they knew that the transcript was gonna be out there.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: And they thought that was pretty interesting.

And, and in fact, eventually there were two bestselling books that came out that, if you may recall, in the early, like 20 years ago, maybe 21 years ago, uh, authored by Anonymous, right.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: And it was a CIA officer but no one knew his name.

He was anonymous.

And if you looked at the, at the footnotes in the books, they're all citing the transcripts of interviews on Frontline.

Audience: Oh.

Lowell: So they got it.

And later, this gentleman went public, and I did put him into a Frontline broadcast, but he, he described it to me that this was the way he got his books approved by the CIA by showing them that this information wasn't classified.

Michael: Amazing.

Um, we wanna turn over to the audience for questions in just a few minutes, but I, I, I want to maybe briefly cover two more things.

One is, uh, The Insider, you mentioned it, um, working with the producers, working with Al Pacino.

What was that like for you?

Lowell: Well, he's... Michael: And what did you think of his portrayal of you as Lowell Bergman?

Lowell: Well, it's like an out-of-body experience, you know?

Michael: Yeah.

I'm sure.

Lowell: It's a- But you know, he's Italian.

He's shorter than I am.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: What can I say?

Um, uh... Well, we should, I really should say that Michael Mann, who, it turns out Don Hewitt was convinced, this is the guy who ran 60 Minutes.

That, that I had a, a cabal with Michael Mann that had been going back to the fact that they both went to the University of Wisconsin in 1963, 64.

And, and, uh, uh, and that I had done some work with Michael on the side that CBS had approved.

And, uh, but, uh...

It, it fulfilled two things for me.

What, what it was like, it was pretty crazy.

I mean, yeah.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: That, the idea that this was all happening.

I mean, if you- they came to Berkeley, you know, like, this army came to Berkeley of people and we're in a park, we're in a parking lot of the junior high school.

You know, they took it over.

And, um... And you learned a lot about why these motion pictures cost so much, right?

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: How they work.

Uh, I was really, really, really impressed with, um, uh, Eric Roth, the screenwriter.

Um, I think a, a lot of, I was able, because I, as Hewitt said to me number of times, "Why are you taking notes?

” Why am I taking notes?

Um, uh... That we were able to get word accurate- Michael: Mm-Hmm.

Lowell: stuff into the script.

I mean, if you see the film, there's a, there's a, a scene where the general counsel of CBS tells us about something called tortious interference, which is a concept that has never come up before in the context of the First Amendment, and rarely has since.

Um, and she gives a speech and it's basically word accurate in the movie.

Um, so I was able to tell...

Okay, CBS wouldn't have had problem if I told the story of the tobacco industry and what happened with Jeffrey Wigand, the whistleblower, and so on, and so on, and so on.

What they didn't want to see, and by the way, I couldn't do the film unless CBS released me from my non, our, my confidentiality and, and other clauses in my contracts.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: They owned, they owned me.

I couldn't say a word about what happened inside.

To me, the problem was I could talk about what this obviously dangerous company that was part of killing 700,000 Americans a year, um... What it had been doing, what it knew.

Michael: Right.

Lowell: But I couldn't, I couldn't tell, without CBS's approval, um, what happened inside CBS.

We didn't even get into the film that the owner of Lorillard Tobacco was the chairman, the CEO of CB- of CBS, you know, so that didn't even fit in the film.

But, but I couldn't, couldn't have done anything that was, that showed CBS in a negative light that would have a fiscal effect on the company.

-Right.

Michael: Mm-Hmm.

Lowell: And so, uh, it took six months in negotiation and they released me for, to show for the three years of the, that it took to get this guy on camera, um, and get the story out.

It was important to me to do, make that as accurate as possible.

And I think they did a great job doing that, um, because it had never been told before.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: That people, you know, in this business... Lemme back up for a second.

The Center for Investigative Reporting - non-profit investigative reporting - people who are in the newsrooms are told very often that your newsroom will, will follow any story wherever it leads without fear and present it without fear a favor.

It's b * * * * * *t. I mean, I, I mean, sometimes that's true.

You know, it really is true.

And sometimes everybody does the right thing.

But as Denny knows, I mean, he's the, he's the first person I've ever heard of who, who had a story killed.

And, um, that, that they knew about, which related to the corruption of the mayor of, of St. Louis, this is back in 1968.

And Denny's story gets killed.

And Denny being, I don't know, self-destructive like me, um, uh, sends it to the Wall Street Journal.

And guess what they do with it?

They put it on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and they win the Pulitzer Prize.

Audience: Wow.

Lowell: But luckily for Denny, I don't know, they must have been, I don't know what he had, what he has going with the Pulitzer Board, but they added him to the, the award.

Audience: Oh, wow.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: But that's really unusual.

So, um, that side of the business is, is rarely taught- told with real names, um, real companies, honestly, to the public.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: Which is one of the reasons people don't trust the media.

'cause we're not transparent.

Everybody else has to be transparent and we'll go after them if they're hiding something.

But we aren't, or we weren't anyway, in the past.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: And so that's the beginning of the distrust, it seems to me.

But, um, yeah, so the, it was a great, it was a great experience doing the film.

Um, my mother loved it.

[laughter] Michael: I'll, I'll, I'll combine two questions into my last question which is, are you encouraged by the kinds of graduate students that are coming out of UC Berkeley and other programs?

And some of the great work that they've done, this actually ended up on national news programs in collaboration with some of you instructors?

Lowell: Well, the, and the Pulitzer- The Pulitzer that, in that case- Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: The New- The New York Times is, it's actually better than it used to be.

But the New York Times has strange rules.

So, when we, we, we published that story, they would put two names on a byline.

That was it.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: Right?

Lowell: And that they thought that was a lot, and we wanted to put the two students who worked on it.

Right?

So, they only put their names in there on the digital version in, in lighter type.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: Right?

Lowell: That- but they're, they're but they're in the display in the hallway.

-They're in there.

Michael: Nice.

Lowell: And, um... And now they give credit to everybody, right?

They're- the New York Times, had to break the culture, had to accept, for instance, I was distrusted at first 'cause I was a TV guy when of- what are we letting him in the building for?

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: You know, um...

So, obviously they're doing great video and so on.

So, the idea of multiple platform -reporting is... Michael: It's well established.

Lowell: Well established.

Michael: Yeah.

I think the, uh, uh, the students are as good as they've ever been.

I, the ones I've met.

Um, but I also feel like, uh, and I did some of this before I retired, but, uh, particularly because of the digital technology, we now have lots of people doing reporting who are just as good as the students.

Michael: Yeah.

Who are trying to do things on a local level or in their own publication.

Um, and, uh, they're just, I, I guess they'll, we'll never be satisfied this way that, that they all need support in various ways.

But we, we are, uh, and I, I've just been spending some interacted somewhat with the, with one of the, the largest non-profit, which is ProPublica.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: Right.

Lowell: Which I did have something to do with when it started, what is it, 15, almost 15 years ago.

Um, uh...

They're doing great work.

Michael: They are.

Lowell: The problem... Lowell: The problem is, uh, getting, uh, traction on stories, but Clarence Thomas is working out getting something with quite a bit of traction right now.

Yeah, Michael: Yeah, yeah.

That's true.

Lowell: So it, it, the idea is, is that if you...

The ideal newsroom in a, in at CBS was walled off from the business side.

So, to go back to the Insider, if you see the movie, you'll see the scene with the general counsel.

On the way crossing the street, 60 Minutes' offices are across the street from the sort of headquarters building on 57th Street.

On the way down the elevator and across the street, Don Hewitt, who was the executive producer of 60 Minutes, said to me, "I've been here since 1948.

The general counsel has never come to CBS news before."

That's the business side.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: Right.

Uh, BlackRock.

Right.

We didn't go to BlackRock.

She came to us, actually, they summoned me to BlackRock 10 days before that meeting.

Uh, and that was when I first heard the, the, the phrase tortious interference.

Michael: Um, last question before we- I, I wanna know about your current project.

You, you are examining, exploring, studying the way the internet is, there are efforts around the world and here at home to try to create some guardrails around- Lowell: Well, I'm- first thing I was trying to do is, how did we get here?

Lowell: Yeah.

Michael: Right.

Lowell: And the, so that's where I found out about Herbert Hoover and, and sort of brought it to the present and the deregulation of analog electronic media and the way in which, um, whether it's cable or, or broadcasting and, and the nature of the news, even on, on these stations now, uh, has much fewer limits and, and, um, and basically guide guidelines.

So, that's why you don't get trusted in the end.

I mean, that's, that's why you can't trust it.

It's very difficult to know what to believe.

Back over time by the, the internet is born at, at that same moment where it, analog media is deregulated.

The internet passes from being a property of the Pentagon into the public sphere.

And five years later, about 1993, you're finally having websites created and things starting to happen.

That's all happening in an atmosphere of no regulation.

There are no limits except for the things like Section 230, which you may have heard about, which gives them no liability for what they recommend to you.

Right?

So, you have no, you, you have no, uh, restraints.

And we all know, as Newton Minow says in the interview we did with him a couple years ago, um, he says, "We always knew that if you ran pornography, you'd get the biggest ratings."

Right?

So, uh, and that's what we, that's in an essence, that's what we're suffering from.

We're suffering from, uh, what's a fact?

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: Right?

I mean, I think it was Moynihan, uh, uh, the late Senator Moynihan who said that, that, uh, Michael: Facts are funny things?

Lowell: Well, no facts, you know, we have to agree on facts.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: Right?

Lowell: To have a democracy.

Michael: We can differ on opinions, but we shouldn't differ on facts.

Lowell: Right.

So, um, so it's not a comp- it's not a complicated kind of project and not that level except to sort of get an idea of what's wrong.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: So then, and how that happened and how things changed, and we did have a way of dealing with it in the past.

But who is doing anything about it?

And the only place really that anything substantive other than the Chinese and the Russians, who basically control it all, right, is the European Union.

And they have, uh, passed, uh, three very important laws.

One back in 2018 that is, it's called, it has the initials GDPR, but it's basically a privacy act.

You're here in California, when you turn on your phone and you go to an app, you get asked how many cookies do you want?

And you, this and that.

That's an adaptation of the European Union's law in 2018 that has been adopted first by California and now by New York State and eight other states.

The federal government has been unable to agree on a US federal version.

But subsequently, they have come up with a series of other laws, one of which is currently, uh, in effect called the Digital Services Act.

And that they are beginning, they're beginning the enforcement of it.

But for example, a very logical thing, in the European Union with 450 million people, no company online can target children with advertising.

Period.

They can't do it.

So, when you re- and that's a reaction to the mental health crisis with children and, uh, and, and further, and that law has been in place since 2018.

Uh, they have just passed a law that, uh, well, that's the one that after the Privacy Act, they passed this law about advertising to children.

But they have a very sophisticated system for controlling hate speech, disinformation, pornography, terrorist, anything, any illegal speech and a system for analyzing it.

And, and for the first time opening up the algorithms that are used by all the main websites in the world that all do business in the EU.

If they want to continue, they have to open up all of their secrets, if you will, to an auditing system, which is backed up by an enforcement system to make sure that they're not violating these various principles.

Michael: Oh.

Lowell: So, the next one that's coming up in January 1st, which is the Market Act, is gonna break up Google, Apple, um, Facebook, and most of the main, um, what they call very large online platforms in terms of their marketing behavior.

They, they had been suing Facebook, uh, and Google, uh, and, um, Amazon in the EU for the last eight years, and they've won all the cases and they've fined them something, I think the total is somewhere around $5 or $6 billion- euros.

Um, but it's a drop in the bucket.

They realize that's why they passed these laws.

So, there will be laws written down that they, if they want to do business in the EU.

And it's spreading- the Japanese, the Canadians, um, Singapore, New Zealand, they're all, it's like a thing happening, let's put it that way, of spreading the need to bring this under control.

It may be too late.

And then there's AI, right?

But we don't have time to get into AI, so... Michael: Don't have time.

Unless somebody wants to ask that question.

Well, let's open it up to audience questions.

Lowell: Yeah.

I really like to know what you guys think is going on.

Michael: Yeah.

We- Lowell: I'm having a hard time figuring it out.

Michael: Wait, wait- Raise your hand and, uh, we'll come by with a microphone and you can ask your question.

Gotta be questions out there.

Lowell: In the back.

Michael: In the back.

We'll take the gentleman in the back.

Audience: Hi.

Um, yeah, I would just, since you mentioned AI, what are your thoughts on that?

I'll just leave it very vague and general like that.

Lowell: I- I'm, I'm not an expert at all on, on, I just listened to what I'm being told.

I, uh, in the sense of last May, um, these, uh, various people signed us letters and any letter at Elon Musk signs I think about for a while.

Um, and so, all of a sudden, this is an existential threat.

And, and, uh, something they have to have regulation, which to the people in the EU I was talking to, they were just laughing because they've been fighting regulation of any kind for a very long time.

What I'm hearing from people that I trust is that it potentially is a big challenge, but it can be brought under control.

And in fact, the European Union's already passed a law about it.

It doesn't deal with this latest form of open AI, but they're revising it.

They passed a law and hasn't gone into effect yet because it goes through this process there of another year at least of, uh, deliberations.

But I'm sure it's an, it's a threat, a potential threat.

It's definitely a threat coming up in all the elections that'll be coming up.

Mm-Hmm.

Um, but it, I think it makes it more urgent for people to talk about a regulatory regime that also remains an op- that allows an open society to, to thrive as, as opposed to being just all of attention, all of the, all of the, uh, helplessness people feel, uh, when they get inundated by what's going on on the web.

Michael: Another question.

Raise your hand.

Um, how about this gentleman here, In the cap.

Lowell: You, sir.

Michael: Yeah, there you go.

Audience: Hi there.

Thank you for tonight.

Oops.

Its like sitting and talking to a friend.

Anyhow, my question is, is between, uh, investigative journalism and private... my life, how do you draw the line about what you are curious about Lowell: And privacy, you mean?

Audience: My private, my- in my initial privacy?

Personal privacy.

Lowell: I mean, uh... For example, we, I'm, I'm not exactly sure what, what you mean by my, someone like an investigative reporter investigating you as a private person?

Audience: You draw the line at only companies that you investigate, or, or were you talking about individual crime people?

Lowell: Yeah, I mean, there's-- Audience: Investigate, so... How do you draw that with the, with the, uh, instructions that you give people?

Lowell: Well, I'm not exactly sure, uh, I know how to answer that other than to say, first of all, corporations supposedly are people under the law in the U.S. Um, but there are people behind them.

So, one of, one of my rules of, in an investigation, uh, usually where we have some sense that there may be wrongdoing is who's profited from this?

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: So, that becomes an investigation of an individual, a, a person.

They may be involved in a corporation, for instance.

Um, and usually that will give you a lot more insight into what's actually going on.

Um, you know, thing, things that happen, um, that are, let's say that, that are dangerous, like the case of Dangerous Business.

That was a story of a, a company in Birmingham, Alabama, based in Birmingham, Alabama privately held company, um, with thousands of employees across the country.

Uh, they were making, I, they make iron pipe, they make, uh, sewer pipe, basically.

And, um, and, and part of their business plan, uh, was, um, from the beginning, from its origins in 1921, uh, was to violate all the safety laws and the environmental laws and pay the fines, uh, um, and, and they got very wealthy and became one of the biggest iron, iron pipe manufacturers in, in, definitely in North America.

They bought out the whole op- they bought out all of Canada.

Um, and I had never heard of them.

They had very few clips anywhere.

They had plants in, in, uh, New York state, up upstate New York.

They had a plant in, uh, Provo, Utah.

They had a plant in Oakland.

They had a plant all over the place.

Um, and, uh, because they were privately held, and also because they usually didn't have their name except in sort of small letters on the plant, they had a very low profile.

Most of them were organized steel workers plants.

Which they later, I later learned from people in the company, they used a union instead of having an HR department.

Um, and because they were running 24 hours a day paying union wages, um, and had lots of employees.

But in one year they, they injured 9,000 and they killed nine people.

Um, and, uh, we were able to piece it together.

Uh, we discovered that the FBI, in one case, the first case we looked at, um... By the way, I found out about this on 9/11 in an airplane over the Pentagon.

Audience: Oh, wow.

Lowell: Because a prosecutor from the tobacco ca- uh, stories of six, seven years before walked on the plane.

And I hadn't seen her in, I dunno, four or five years.

And so she, uh, she's gone to Tyler, Texas.

I said, "What, what's in Tyler, Texas?"

She says, "Well, there's this company that's killing its workers.

And the local town, DA won't prosecute him.

Says, it's all industrial accidents."

The attorney general of Texas, he wasn't doing anything.

And the FBI says, they don't investigate because under federal law, OSHA law, it's a misdemeanor to kill a worker.

[audience disbelief] Yeah.

That's the one, that's the line that got me in the story.

It's a misdemeanor to kill a worker.

I, you know, and as she pointed out, it's a felony to kill a wild burro on federal land.

So, she was, she was being sent out to, um, do research to help the OSHA investigators and potentially train them as criminal investigators.

'cause they were so angry about this.

In some pl- in some cities like New York and Chicago, the local DA's office takes this kind of stuff seriously.

But in Texas and many other places, Alabama, uh, where they were headquartered and had three plants, um, uh, you know, so... Did we go after the family, the McWane family?

Not by name, other than the people who, of the family from where it started on, and just who was running the company.

They wouldn't talk to us.

Um, and I had a number of encounters with some of their lawyers in the elevator of the lawyers.

I spent a lot of time in this elevator waiting for these lawyers to get on.

Um, but, um, uh, so some, some of these stories are, um, it's not necessary really to get into what I would call the private life of public people, uh, unless it's relevant to the story itself.

Michael: Uh, let's see.

We have two questions up front here.

How about, uh, this gentleman here?

Yes.

Audience: Hi.

Hi.

You mentioned it a little bit, uh, Lowell, uh, you care to comment about working for the investigating unit and dealing with the FBI, both looking at the FBI and working with the FBI.

Lowell: Well, I was a subject of FBI investigation.

Um, and it's very funny in the sense after the fact, um, during the late 19, oh, during most of the sixties, and, and then in, in including this newspaper in 1970, um, uh, I was involved in the anti-war movement and civil rights and various other things related to that, and got to the attention of the FBI, according to my file, starting in 1963.

Um, but what, uh, and just as preface, um, in 1970, in my FBI file, they put me on the National Security Index.

And, uh, which meant I was one of 15,000 people to be rounded up in, in the event of a national emergency.

What I liked about it was that I didn't like the idea of getting rounded up, but it was that they said specialty: propaganda, meaning the newspaper.

Um, and, um, and, uh, and that the, the form has boxes.

Um, SWP for the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party, CP Communist Party, so on and so on.

Um, and, but with, uh, they, they tucked the box that said ANA and it took me, I had to take the form to a guy I knew who had just retired from the FBI, uh, back in the late seventies and asked him, what's ANA?

"He says, you're an anarchist."

Which 'cause, and why?

And why am I an anarchist?

"'Cause you don't belong to any of these organizations."

So... [laughter] Michael: Too structured for you.

Lowell: Oh, yeah.

So, so I have the, I had the unusual experience, and this has to do with journalism.

I had the unusual experience of being able to find what I would call honest cops, um, in San Diego, uh, who approached me, uh, and some of my colleagues about the stories we were doing.

Um, and, uh, who didn't work with the FBI in that time, they were talking about Hoover's, FBI.

Um, and I mean, and it opened me up to the sort of internal, um, structure of law enforcement and the different sort of categories people work in or agency that they work in.

And people in the, in them would have different sort of philosophies or ways of going about doing business.

The Department of Labor, for instance, used to have investigators who knew all about corruption in the unions and the related organized crime people or businesses that that was going on.

Those were very interesting people.

I didn't know they existed.

Um... At one time there was a subdivision of the IRS called the Intelligence Division of the IRS, and they came to see us in San Diego after they were reading our newspaper.

And as Denny told me later, a couple years ago, so was the FBI and giving it rave reviews, but, uh, but not to us personally.

Um, but the, but I met a bunch of people in IRS intelligence who they, I don't know how to describe it, but, um...

These are the people who put Al Capone away and put Agnew away.

And, and, and these guys were often, I would say middle class, workin class guys who got themselves through school, got, you know, got law degrees or accounting degrees, and they were dispatched out into the world to find people who were stealing money from the US government, basically, and taxpayers by laundering money or being involved in illicit activities.

And I found, these are the kinds of guys who told me, who taught me to read the business section and the social and the society section of the newspaper first.

'Cause that's where you get your leads and, and forget about the front part of the paper.

Um, and, uh, so I think it changed my perspective on the coming outta the sixties.

It came, it changed my perspective on law enforcement in particular, and that you can't look at people in it, including at the FBI.

Um, because later I kept meeting people in the FBI, the FBI changed its focus af- after the church committee hearings completely.

So, where the number one priorit became organized crime and corporate corruption and so on, as opposed to subversives, we fell to the bottom of the list, subversives.

Um, and, and so, um, you know, it, it, it really all depended on the individual or group.

Um, more recently I've had a lot of experience through with the CIA and, and let's say the counterintelligence section of the FBI over the last 20 years.

And, and similarly, there's very impressive people in the operations.

And there's also people who, like in any major bureaucracy, you wouldn't want to be around very long Michael: People with a conscience who become the whistleblowers.

Lowell: Well, or they don't necessarily become whistleblowers.

They're trying to maintain some kind of sense of, uh, honesty about themselves and what they're doing.

Michael: Yeah.

Yeah.

Lowell: You know, I mean, I can think of a, uh, and a number of people in the FBI, uh, people of color who joined the FBI at different times.

Uh, both, uh, Asian Americans and others who've been a little dis- I would say, disenchanted with the organization.

Um, and at different times went to great extents, particularly in the Chinese organized crime area who got into that and got into the FBI in the late eighties when that became an important area.

Many of them have left.

Um, but...

I, I've sort of lost touch in the last, uh, five years, so I can can't get you two up to date on what, what is or isn't going on.

It's, it's frightening to me that literally that, that the, um... former president and his acolytes have, um, declared war on, uh, what normally you would think of as the people they would want to align with if they're truly conservative.

Um, and so on.

What we're dealing with is a really a unique form of American fascism that is, uh, really hard to, to imagine.

That's what I, that's what I'm concerned about.

I don't know how far the FBI, I know that, that in my making inquiries about this, these developments going back now, seven or eight years, they weren't doing very much at all in this area.

I'm sure that's changed.

Michael: Yeah.

Um, we have time for a couple more questions.

You, sir.

Audience: Alright.

So, my question is more about Mike Wallace and the ambush interview.

Lowell: Uh-huh.

Audience: and I'd heard this whole thing about, you know, you know, he pioneered it.

It was the most entertaining thing, you know, it was very satisfying to watch him chase people around and catch them.

But then that changed.

Was that because of what he did?

Or, you know, there was like this... Lowell: It's 'cause Geraldo came along.

Michael: Ahh.

Lowell: It's because it, it be- and they didn't need to do it anymore.

They, I mean, I'm serious.

I mean, it was a way to get attention.

Si- similar to the having the undercover camera in the used car dealer where they turned the odometer back.

Right.

Which, you know, it's the gotcha thing, or Mike coming out of a closet, right?

He got, he got seriously sued for that back in the mid 1970s and, um, in one case, um, so...

It's a dramatization that they used to get attention.

Audience: Was that something you chose as a producer, or, or did you roll your eyes at like, oh... Lowell: I never did it.

I wouldn't do it.

Uh, I mean, we did confrontational interviews.

No, I did things like, I, I had a rule for instance, that if you see a prosecutor get up and talk at a press conference at the beginning of a case and gives this presentation like the, you guys did in Sacramento with the, with the, uh, uh, Lodi case.

And they start talking about, you have Al-Qaeda, uh, in Lodi, California, and you have this and you have that, which makes international headlines, there's something wrong with the case.

The same thing happened with the DeLorean case.

I did the McMartin case.

Um, I helped start the McMartin case, 'cause I had this executive role at ABC and, and was asked to, this is back in 83, and was asked to advise some ABC people in LA how to get documents so that they could run the story about how there had been the satanic cult and 350 kids had been molested and so on and so on over 30 years.

But I just taught, told them about where you can find search warrants fired- filed in a local courthouse before the digital age.

Um, but three years later I met the defendants.

It wasn't them, and it didn't happen.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: And we, and I wound up doing, three segments of 60 Minutes about it in a two-week period.

And the, and the district attorney of Los Angeles dropped the case basically.

And this kid had been in jail for five years, and the reason he was in jail for five years is because it wasn't safe for him to walk around the streets of LA, not because he couldn't get bail.

So, you know, hysterias, frenzies, uh, and I tell this, I've told this to students, when you see it going on, take a deep breath and wait.

Michael: Yeah.

Lowell: And, and that's what Donald Trump is.

He's a, a constant frenzy, you know, and the thing that bothers me is that we know his routine and everybody keeps covering it.

Even this 90 felony counts.

I mean, so who caress how many felony counts he has?

Let let the system take care of it and give it normal coverage, but to play into it is what he's playing.

It's a game he's playing... You know?

And that's one of my... That's my beef.

Michael: Time for one last question.

Um... Lowell: Denny.

Michael: Denny has a question.

Denny: Hey, Lowell, this current project of yours, are you aiming just for television or is it gonna be a multi-platform kind of thing?

Or you hope it will be?

Lowell: Well, I hope it will be.

I, I'm, uh, I'm doing something for the first time without an infrastructure, uh, without an organization involved, um, at this point.

And one reason is that I've had a lot of experience with the streaming industry over the last 10 years, uh, playing, they call it executive producer, but it really is consultant.

Um, and, uh, I have from having those interactions with at least three of the major ones, um, these are not news organizations.

These are entertainment companies.

They're interested in profit, they're, they have no public interest clause.

So, when you have a documentary, and on the other hand with PBS, I'm assume PBS is going to do certain films about this and maybe documentaries.

They have done some, um...

But, uh, similarly they have fi- financial and other constraints.

So, um...

I don't, I don't know yet what the form will be.

I'm at, at the spot where there's been some real interest and I'm, and I've gotten a couple of donors.

So I've been able to pull together what will probably be like a preliminary reel and see if I can get the kind of funding and placement that'll make some kind of difference, or I'll just, I don't know, do a shorter version and come here to KVIE and give it to you guys and you can put it on the air.

[laughter] Michael: Great idea.

Lowell: That's why I came by the way, I came here today to- Michael: We'll talk.

[laughter] Lowell: I have, I'm, I, I can beg, you know.

Michael: No, you dont need to beg.

Lowell: And um, so... What I'm concerned, really concerned about is that I did a, a, a program, uh, during the pandemic period with, uh, the graduate school public policy at Berkeley as a Zoom event.

And I would, and the working title was, "The First Amendment is Not a Suicide Pact."

Uh, they told me I couldn't use the word suicide 'cause it might be taken the wrong way or something.

So we called it something else.

And, and it really was about the internet and the, exactly what I talked about, Newton Minow, the public interest.

Uh, and, and whether or not- And this doctrine of the First Amendment that has become, has gotten outta control.

And I, I, I think I'm like this survivor because of the First Amendment.

I mean, between the $630 million La Costa case or, um, who else sued me?

Well, anyway, the police department in San Francisco.

At least they didn't shoot me.

They, they did pull their guns out in the courtroom.

Oh God.

Audience: Oh God.

Lowell: Um, uh, you know, or my background in, you know, the First Amendment has been a basis for me to have a career.

But I also would say at the same time, part of the basis for me to have a career was the shift the United States went through politically and otherwise in the early 1970s, winding up with Watergate and then the church committee hearings, that gave me a certain legitimacy with what I was doing.

So, it's the outside factors that I think are extremely important.

And right now, this, this originalist view the Supreme Court has that you can't, you can't regulate firearms unless you can somehow find a precedent for it from 1780.

Uh, or, uh, that, um, money has First Amendment rights and, you know, and, uh, it's all this crazy interpretations that are making chaos possible.

And I, and it's a very difficult question.

It's complicated.

Um, it puts people to sleep when you try to talk about it in any detail.

So, I'm also wrestling with how you present that?

And, and in somehow inspire people to understand that you, just because the government decides doesn't mean it's bad.

Audience: I hope we'll get to see it.

Lowell: So do I. Michael: We all hope you get to see it.

Please join me in thanking one of the staunchest defenders of the First Amendment, [clapping] someone who has done so much [clapping] for journalism and democracy.

[clapping] Lowell Bergman.

Lowell: Thank you.

Michael: Thank you, Lowell.

[clapping] Michael: Thanks so much.

Good Job.

-Have a great evening everyone.

Lowell: Thank you.

Michael: And thank you for all your support of PBS KVIE, Frontline and journalism.