Publicity
about The Insider stresses the courage of a
whistleblowing research scientist, formerly employed by a
tobacco company, who in 1995 exposed the fact that cigarettes
have been altered in recent decades to enhance their addictivity.
As a result of his testimony, there have been successful lawsuits,
with damages totaling $246 billion to fifty states in recovery
of Medicare and Medicaid funds. Indeed, Dr. Jeffrey Wigand
(played by Russell Crowe) is at the center of the film. We
see how in 1993 he was fired by Brown & Williamson, a tobacco
company, because he objected to the fraud, how he and his
family were terrorized (death threats, lawsuits, smear campaigns)
to the point that his spouse divorced him and gained custody
of his two daughters, how he testified in court against the
tobacco companies, and how he then became "teacher of the
year" in his new career as a high school teacher in Kentucky.
But the unexpected exposé of The Insider, occupying
more film footage, is how CBS mishandled the story. The focus
is on Lowell Bergman (played by Al Pacino), former Ramparts
muckraker, who is a producer of Mike Wallace's segment of
the television program "60 Minutes." Bergman accidentally
gets wind of a possible big story from Wigand, cultivates
Wigand to divulge the incredible secrets of the most celebrated
fraud in American history, promises that Wigand will be protected
from bodily harm by supplying attorneys and bodyguards, and
escorts Wigand both to court and to an interview with Mike
Wallace in the CBS News studio in New York. At this point,
however, the tobacco company threatens CBS with a lawsuit
that would bankrupt the network. CBS corporate executives
demur, tell CBS News to shelve the interview, and Mike Wallace
(played by Christopher Plummer) capitulates. Bergman feels
betrayed; he promised Wigand that the story would air, so
he does an end run: He leaks the story to the New York
Times to humiliate CBS, which finally runs the interview.
Then Bergman quits to join the faculty at the University of
California in Berkeley while serving as a producer of the
PBS investigative program "Frontline." Directed by Michael
Mann, based on the Vanity Fair article "The Man Who
Knew Too Much" by Marie Brenner, The Insider
reveals how unchecked corporate power has tamed formerly independent
journalism, a paradigm that can serve to explain why the public
agenda excludes so many urgent social issues-the barbarous
death penalty sentence inflicted upon so many innocent Blacks,
lack of medical insurance for citizens of the richest country
on earth, elections bought through gaping campaign finance
loopholes, and many others. However, the distributor, Disney/Touchstone,
owns rival ABC, and there is a hint in the film that Peter
Jennings would not have blinked if he got the story first.
We see testimony before Congress by the "seven dwarfs," the
CEOs of the major tobacco companies, as they opine that cigarettes
are not addictive, contrary to evidence reported by their
own scientists, yet their perjury has not brought about prison
terms for any of them. We hear a detailed explanation of the
chemical process whereby additives have been deliberately
designed to make cigarettes "nicotine delivery systems." A
single puff, thus, delivers carcinogenic substances directly
to the body, while non-tobacco additives hook minds to repeat
the self-destructive habit until serious health problems emerge.
Wigand is currently on the lecture circuit, donating his speaking
fees to Smoke-Free Kids, a nonprofit that he started in his
new hometown, Charleston, South Carolina. The Insider,
which bears the tagline "Warning: Exposing the Truth May be
Hazardous," has been nominated by the Political Film Society
for two 1999 awards -- as the best film exposé and the best
film raising consciousness of the need for greater democracy.
MH
I
want to comment on this film
