For twenty years the state ‘crime lab,’ the News and Observer reports, has been withholding evidence and misleading juries at trials and sending innocent people to prison – but no one has been fired, which makes the fate of Eszter Vajda (another state employee who did lose her job last week after the firestorm over her documentary about the cyanide buried around Alcoa’s old aluminum smelter in Stanly County) seem, well, odd.
After months of shuffling through environmental reports and reading lawsuits and interviewing widows of Alcoa employees who’d died of cancer, Vajda was not only shocked – she’d figured out those old files were telling a story she’d never imagined. But part way through her documentary she ran head on into a hurdle: Her researcher, Martin Sansone, had to go home to England and her employer UNC-TV wouldn’t pay to fly him back to finish the film.
Most sensible young women (and anyone with more common sense than stubbornness) would have given up on making a full length documentary when they couldn’t afford to buy an airplane ticket. But whatever Eszter Vajda’s vices fear wasn’t one of them. She had her teeth into a story and to be stopped by an airline ticket was insufferable – so she and Sansone asked a group of Republicans, who’re on the other side of the fight from Alcoa down in Stanly County, to pay Sansone’s expenses.
Taking money from folks opposing Alcoa when you’re making a film about Alcoa wasn’t going to look good, but for years UNC-TV had been taking money from people to make films about them (say, for the Golden Leaf Foundation) so, perhaps, Vajda just looked at what UNC-TV had done in the past and figured, How is this any different?
Sansone flew back to Raleigh and Vajda charged ahead and then ran head on into another hurdle: Most journalists thrive on controversy because it sells newspapers. But the managers of UNC-TV, in addition to being journalists, are level-headed government employees. They don’t need to air controversial programs (which makes people mad at them) to make money so it’s just plain common sense for them to avoid controversy like the plague. (Two of the features on UNC-TV’s website this morning were “Share Your Favorite Baseball Memory” and “A Tour of the Great Lodges of the Canadian Rockies” with station manager Tom Howe.)
When her superiors at UNC-TV told Vajda they didn’t want to air her hour-long documentary she cajoled and appealed but got nowhere – then she lit into them.
Raleigh’s no longer a small town but word does still get around and pretty soon ears down at the legislature picked up on the rumblings between Vajda and her bosses and that landed UNC-TV in an odd place: In the middle of a tug of war between Alcoa’s lobbyists (who were trying to kill a bill Alcoa didn’t like) and a handful of local state legislators trying to pass the bill. The legislators figured, even if they hadn’t seen her film, it couldn’t hurt if Vajda told the story of, for example, Alcoa suing the Health Department to stop it from posting signs along Badin Lake, by its smelter, warning pregnant women not to eat the fish because they were contaminated with PCBs that can cause cancer.
But even when the old bull-moose of the Senate, Marc Basnight, weighed in UNC-TV wouldn’t give Vajda what she wanted. In the end she could only talk the station into airing three short segments – so most of her documentary was headed for the elephant’s graveyard of unfinished documentaries when something even more unexpected happened: Senator Fletcher Hartsell sent a pair of subpoenas to UNC-TV and Vajda, personally, telling her to bring the full hour long version of her documentary over to his Senate Committee so Senators could look at it.
That didn’t trouble anyone much except Vajda’s fellow journalists who saw the idea of subpoenaing a journalist as a kind of heresy and let out a howl of outrage that would have made a tub-thumping Baptist preacher proud. Hard bitten reporters who’d been publishing public records to embarrass governors for years roared subpoenaing a reporter was unconstitutional and UNC-TV ought to tell Senator Hartsell to stick his subpoena in his ear
Trapped between lobbyists, State Senators, and a mob of howling journalists UNC-TV had more controversy on its hands than it had ever dreamed of and when the Attorney General’s office told them there was no legal way to look a judge in the eye and argue a public record created by a journalist (who worked for state government) was exempt from the same laws governors have to abide by they stuck the flag.
Vajda trooped over to the legislature and played a rough cut of her documentary to a room packed full of Senators and Alcoa lobbyists and for the first time folks got to see The Alcoa Story and it was a doozy: Right at the start of her film Vajda launched into a list of toxic chemicals that are waste from aluminum smelting – cyanide, arsenic and PCBs – then moved right on into how Alcoa had been dumping them in Stanly County since it opened its smelter in World War I, then moved on into local cancer rates and groundwater contamination and ended up by asking a question it’s kind of amazing no one asked before: Why doesn’t the state do a study to find out if what Alcoa’s been doing down in Stanly County since World War I is a public health threat?
Vajda’s documentary sent a shock wave through the legislature and then another odd thing happened: Out of a clear blue sky UNC-TV started sending letters to people who’d posted her film on the Internet ordering them to take it down because it violated their copyright. In other words, UNC-TV was saying Vajda’s documentary was a public record but no one could show it to anyone else because it was copywrited.
If, a year ago, Governor Easley had told the News and Observer, Sure my emails are public records. And sure you can see them. But you can’t publish them. They’re copywrited – the press would have had apoplexy. But, this time, not one journalist complained.
Instead several of Vajda’s fellow journalists tore into her over Sansone’s travels and never mentioned copyrighting public records or PCBs; -- then UNC-TV issued a terse statement saying Vajda was no longer employed by the station.
Finally, when the smoke cleared, one local paper – Yes, Weekly – did ask Alcoa the million dollar question – and it’s about all the vindication Vajda is likely to get.
What, the paper asked, did Alcoa claim was biased about Vajda’s film?
Well, it wasn’t true, Alcoa spokesman Mike Bellwood said, that Alcoa is a trillion dollar corporation like Ms. Vajda reported. Then he added that Vajda was also wrong when she reported Alcoa’s Yadkin Dams could be ‘recaptured’ by Congress for $16 million. (In fairness to Vajda, in her documentary she actually said Alcoa had told the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ‘recapture’ would cost $24 million.)
As Yes, Weekly pointed out Alcoa didn’t dispute a word Vajda had reported about the cyanide buried around its smelter.
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