Gavin MacFadyen

[on journalistic online research] If somebody put something up on the Web five years ago and it's long gone, can you find it? I think you probably know: You can. Nothing is gone from the Web. That's the astonishing thing. You have to find the little engine that will get you there. And in this case it's called the Internet Archive or the Way Back Machine. And the Way Back Machine will tell you everything you ask for about something that happened in the past. You've got to be very specific in what you enquire, like the site for Nestlé cocoa October of such and such a date. And it will take you there. If they logged that day, it will be there. They miss some things, but on the whole it's very accurate. We have a website in the group that I run which has nothing but information of this kind. So if you go on the website, which is called www.tcij.org [The Center for Investigative Journalism], and look for resources and books and things like that, we publish all that stuff. It's free.[2013] Show less «

[on representation] You could make a case that all the biggest American failures, which are pretty significant - like the war in Vietnam, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan - all these are failures. And yet no one makes any films about failures. I mean it's really quite astonishing. I'm sure you know this, but the Gulf of Tonkin - the famous incident which started and legitimized President Lyndon B. Johnson's war in Vietnam - was a total fiction. Just like WMD. And nobody at any time questioned it until very recently. Under the Freedom of Information Act, we've got the documents now that prove they invented that, too. As described, it never happened. And the captain signed a deposition saying: It's not in my recollection. This is the thing that started a war that killed three million people, and he has no recollection. It's astonishing. Then they wonder why people question the integrity of all these institutions that promote this kind of nonsense. So we have an unusual obligation then in telling the truth, to try to tell not the respectable truth, but what the truth really might be in the best reading we can give it. And that's something very difficult. Very difficult.[2013] Show less «

[on interests that shape media] For example, one of the big films that I wanted to make and didn't make was a film called "The Henry and Adolf Show". And it was to be a fictionalized account of Henry Ford's support for Adolf Hitler, which was significant. He was the largest foreign contributor to the Nazis. In the very early days, it has to be said as well. His financial support began in 1921, when most people in Germany had very little knowledge of Hitler. By 1923-24, he was getting known. But Ford was giving huge sums of money through the German Ambassador in the States, who had been invited to Detroit, which was the headquarters of the Ford Empire, and received the money in the Detroit Opera House. They shared a box, and the envelopes would change hands. And the Ambassador would get back to Germany with a big check. I've tried to tell that story many times, but I've gotten absolutely nowhere. "A good next story, please." [audience laughter] They have no interest in telling what we know to be true now. So it's very tricky to tell a story that isn't a respectable story, which is the obverse of All the President's Men (1976), where sections of the establishment really wanted that story told because they wanted to get rid of Richard Nixon. I'm glad they decided to get rid of him. But nonetheless, it wasn't an open and closed case at all. It wasn't two intrepid reporters risking all hell on earth to tell this fantastic story. I mean they were supported by the biggest newspaper tycoon in America and virtually the operational head of the FBI. That's a hell of an ally to have if you're telling any story.[2013] Show less «

[on 'blind spots' in journalism] I should say, too, that the real question about All the President's Men (1976) was not how they told the story. It's about who paid for the story. Why was that film made? It's very unusual for a major newspaper in any country to attack the president of the United States or a major official with a volley of enormous power, over and over again, every day. Front page stories. I mean, that's a policy. That's not a breaking story; that's a policy. You take that decision. And they took that decision. One woman took that decision. The woman, Katharine Graham, who owned the Washington Post. Nobody ever thought to ask her: Why did you do that? She didn't care about Nixon or anybody else for that matter. She was more important in some respect. But clearly the decision had been taken, which the audience was unaware of, that it was okay to attack the president of the United States and drive him from office, which she succeeded in doing. That central fact, which is much more important than what these two reporters did, is not even mentioned. It[the film] never even raises the question.[2013] Show less «

I worked a lot [as a technical advisor] on The Insider (1999) - the Michael Mann film with Al Pacino about the tobacco scandal. I found it to be the only honest [feature] film that I've ever had anything to do with. Right or wrong, it didn't matter. I agreed with everything in it. But it was also a very honest film about the dilemmas that all these people faced and had to deal with. In that respect, it's quite unique.[2013] Show less «

[on investigative journalism] Most countries are in need of it because there's so much distortion and omissions in the poor press coverage of the realities of political and social life. I don't think the situation in some countries is more grotesque than in others, but there's a need for investigative journalism in almost every country even the ones with a good reputation for free speech. (...) It is always talked about how sacred free speech is [in United States] on one hand but, on the other hand, the press doesn't report and ask questions or pursue major stories in US if they are politically sensitive. Small stories, of course, they would but the NSA story would not have been published in America and the major stories about the CIA would never get been published in America first. Abroad yes, and eventually they would come back to the US, but the US generally as a whole would never do that. So there's a huge need even in America for principled, thorough and denegotiated investigative reporting.[2013] Show less «

[on WikiLeaks] I was a television investigative reporter in London for 25 years and dealt in 100 or more investigative mainstream programmes which involved the lives and difficulties of 15 or 16 major whistleblowers, people who gave up a great deal to come to journalists for help to expose what they felt were crimes of conscience, terrible abuses of human rights, and all the rest. Most of the people who came in this period were torturers and murderers financed by governments who had had enough and wanted to speak out, and so we provided the facilities for them to do that. But what of course was always disturbing was that we had no facility inside our own news organisations and our own news rooms to handle the human consequences, the bad things that almost inevitably happened to these whistleblowers. They'd lose their homes, they'd lose their cars, particularly they'd lose their spouses. It was a never-ending crisis for them. And we had nothing to do except to field the phone calls and offer sympathy, but we had no institutional means of doing it. And that was a frustration I think many of us felt who didn't want to abandon people who'd helped us.(...) But that 2007 conversation with Julian Assange changed, in a sense, my own apprehension of what we could do, and I became dedicated, in a sense, to the idea that we had to protect these people. And just towards that end, the powerful effect of what Kristinn Hrafnsson and Julian and others did in Iraq was demonstrated to me by the number of families in Iraq who felt a sense of closure now that they knew where their husbands and sons and stuff had been killed on the ground. Because the films that we did for Channel 4 and the work that the Guardian did, even before things got sticky with them, was really wonderful and providing that information to people on the ground and it got to many of them.[2012] Show less «