Lowell Bergman

Lowell Bergman
Bergman in 2013
Born	(1945-07-24) July 24, 1945 New York City, New York, U.S.
Education	University of Wisconsin–Madison (B.A., 1966) University of California, San Diego (graduate fellow)
Occupation(s)	Journalist, television and documentary film producer, professor
Known for	Reporting (earning a Pulitzer, multiple Emmys, and numerous other awards)
Spouse	Sharon Tiller
Website	UC Berkeley faculty page

Lowell Bergman (born July 24, 1945) is an American journalist, television producer, and journalism professor. Over a career spanning nearly five decades, Bergman worked as a producer, reporter, and director of investigative reporting at ABC News and as a producer for CBS’s 60 Minutes, where he left in 1998 as the senior producer of investigations for CBS News. He founded the investigative reporting program at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and taught there as a professor for 28 years. He was also a producer and correspondent for the PBS documentary series Frontline. Bergman retired in 2019.

Bergman's investigation into the tobacco industry was depicted in Michael Mann’s The Insider, which was nominated for seven Academy Awards and featured Al Pacino as Bergman. From 1999 to 2008, Bergman was an investigative correspondent for The New York Times. In 1999, he formed a partnership between the Times and PBS’s Frontline, leading to collaborative investigative projects across broadcast, print, and web platforms. Bergman's work has been recognized with honors in both print and broadcasting, including the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, awarded to The New York Times in 2004 for “A Dangerous Business,” an investigation into worker safety violations and environmental law violations in the cast-iron sewer and water pipe industry.

Bergman has received numerous Emmys, six Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver and Golden awards Silver and Golden Baton awards, three Peabodys, two Harvard Goldsmith Awards for Investigative Reporting, a George Polk Award, the RFK Grand Prize, a Sidney Hillman Award for Labor Reporting, a Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism, the National Press Club’s Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism, a Mirror Award from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and the James Madison Freedom of Information Award for Career Achievement from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Through the non-profit production company Investigative Studios, he has continued to work on documentaries and documentary series, serving as co-executive producer with Brian Knappenberger on Netflix’s The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez and as executive producer and reporter on Agents of Chaos, a co-production with Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions.

Early life and career

Bergman’s grandmother was the first secretary-treasurer of an ILGWU local in New York; his grandfather was also a founder. His father, Alex Bergman, emigrated to the United States from the Hungary via the Cuba in 1938. His mother was born in the United States, had a career in the fashion industry, taught gourmet cooking, and then managed apartment units in Mt. Vernon, New York until her death in 2019 at the age of 101.

Bergman graduated with honors in sociology and history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and was a graduate fellow in philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, where he studied under Herbert Marcuse. In 1969, he co-founded the San Diego Free Press (later San Diego Street Journal), an alternative newspaper, with several fellow students. Bergman and others, including Richard “Black Dick” Blackburn, instigated the probe that led to the downfall of the San Diego financial empire of C. Arnholt Smith, president and chief executive officer of U.S. National Bank in San Diego. Bergman went on to contribute to Ramparts and The San Francisco Examiner. He also made contributions to Ramparts, The San Francisco Examiner, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. His work for the Times included guiding its first documentary partnerships with PBS’s Frontline, covering the energy crisis in California and Al Qaeda before and after 9/11.

In 1977, Bergman helped found the Center for Investigative Reporting. He was part of the reporting team that continued the work of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles, who was assassinated in 1976 while investigating land fraud committed by organized crime.

Television career

From 1978 until 1983, Bergman was a producer and reporter and was then in charge of investigative reporting at ABC News. He was one of the original producers of 20/20. In 1983, Bergman joined CBS News as a producer for the weekly newsmagazine 60 Minutes and worked with its lead correspondent, Mike Wallace. Over 14 years, he produced more than 50 stories, including exposes of organized crime, international arms dealing featuring Sarkis Soghanalian, then the world’s main weapons supplier to Saddam Hussein, international drug trafficking in Venezuela involving the CIA, and the Iran-Iraq and Persian Gulf wars. His five stories on California’s then-expanding prison system, including the supermax facility at Pelican Bay, revealed the horrors of solitary confinement and the staging of “gladiator” matches by correctional officers. He also produced the first U.S. television interviews with Lebanon’s Hezbollah leadership in the early 1990s.

The story of Bergman's investigation of the tobacco industry for 60 Minutes was chronicled in the 1999 feature film The Insider, in which Bergman was played by Al Pacino. According to Bergman, the film's success and its portrayal of 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace and producer Don Hewitt led to him being virtually blacklisting from the show.

Reporting across multiple platforms

Bergman, an early proponent of the multimedia model, established an alliance between The New York Times and Frontline after leaving network news in the late 1990s. This collaboration resulted in a series of stories, including coverage of California’s energy crisis, the country’s war on drugs, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the roots of 9/11, the credit card and gold industries, the post-9/11 hunt for “sleeper cells” in America, and recent Al Qaeda’s attacks in Europe. The collaboration also produced a number of award-winning projects with print, broadcast, and online components. Extensive websites, prepared in large part by students in Bergman’s seminar, accompanied many of these projects, including “Secret History of the Credit Card”, “Al Qaeda's New Front”, “The Enemy Within”, “The Real CSI” and “News War”. “News War” examined the challenges facing the mainstream news media, drawing on more than 80 interviews with key figures and behind-the-scenes access to news organizations.

Collaborating with other New York Times reporters, Bergman helped produce a series of articles detailing the financial arrangements between Vice President Dick Cheney and Halliburton, both before and after Cheney's retirement as chief executive officer of that firm.

Awards and honors

Bergman has received top honors in both print and broadcasting. The New York Times won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, for “the work of David Barstow and Lowell Bergman that relentlessly examined death and injury among American workers and exposed employers who break basic safety rules.” The series, "A Dangerous Business", detailed a record of worker safety violations and environmental law violations in the iron sewer and water pipe industry.

He is the recipient of numerous Emmys and other honors, including six Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver and Golden awards, three Peabodys, a Writers Guild Award, the National Press Club's Consumer Journalism Award for Television on the credit card industry, a George Polk Award, a Sidney Hillman award for labor reporting, and the James Madison Freedom of Information Award for Career Achievement from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Academic highlights

Bergman has mentored many journalists and facilitated the publication of student projects in major media outlets. Projects from his investigative reporting seminars at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, have appeared on national television, including PBS' Frontline and Frontline/World, ABC's 20/20, Nightline, CBS Evening News, and 60 Minutes II; and in print, where students have been primary authors or contributors of stories in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as in magazines, The Atlantic, and international and local newspapers. Bergman also helps secure financial support from private donors and foundations for student travel and research.

In addition to being the first President of the Center for Investing Reporting in 1997, he was a consultant involved in creating Pro Publica thirty years later and the founder of the Investigative Reporting Program (IRP) at UC Berkeley in 2006. He served as Executive Director and Chairman of the Board of the then UC Berkeley-affiliated Investigative Studios, a non-profit production company, until late 2019.

In May 2007, Bergman established three annual Fellowships in Investigative Reporting at UC Berkeley.

Interviews

• "Smoke In The Eye: a Talk With Lowell Bergman", PBS Frontline (1999). "There's a major difference between All The President's Men and The Insider", Lowell Bergman has said of the comparison between the 1976 film on Watergate and Hollywood's new version of the events depicted in Frontline's report, "Smoke in the Eye". "In All the President's Men, the editors and reporters are heroes. That's not the case here."
• "Long March through the Institution" of Television Journalism; Conversation with Lowell Bergman. Part of the "Conversations with History" series, Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley with Harry Kreisler, (2001)
• On September 27, 2006, Bergman appeared on The Colbert Report.
• On February 27, 2007, Bergman was interviewed by Terry Gross of WHYY's Fresh Air about the Frontline documentary "News War: Secrets, Spin and the Future of the News." The four-part series, which Bergman co-produced, is about the mainstream news media and the political, legal and economic forces acting on it. The third installment looks at how the pressure for profits and shifting advertising dollars are affecting the news business.
• On February 27, 2007, Bergman was interviewed for the "What's happening to the news?" segment by Marketplace's Kai Ryssdal about how the Internet has changed journalism.
• On June 11, 2007, Bergman was interviewed by George Stroumboulopoulos for CBC Television's news magazine, The Hour.
• On January 26, 2009, Bergman discussed Halliburton's record $560 million settlement with the Justice Department and the SEC for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act with NPR's All Things Considered. Bergman's documentary on bribery in international commerce will air on PBS's Frontline. Frontline/World: The Business of Bribes | PBS April 7, 2009.

External links

• Lowell Bergman's home page at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
• CNN on The Insider, (November 1999).
• A chronology of the 60 Minutes decision not to air the tobacco industry exposé. (1999).
• Lowell Bergman at IMDb
• Lowell Bergman at The Interviews: An Oral History of Television