Dismissed as tabloid Brits when they joined an ailing US news show, the duo behind the notorious Michael Jackson film talk for the first time about their role in the superstar singer. James Silver reports:
It is exactly a year since Martin Bashir and James Goldston, the British TV journalists behind the controversial Michael Jackson documentary, took over the ailing US news magazine show Nightline. It’s fair to say they weren’t exactly hailed as rescuing heroes, in some quarters at least. Snootier sections of the American media portrayed the arrival of Bashir and Goldston from ITV1’s Tonight - with their string of populist scoops, ranging from the Michael Jackson film to Who Wants to be a Millionaire: A Major Fraud, which also aired in the US - as British tabloid barbarians rattling the gates of a last bastion of serious news.
That perception is something which clearly still rankles with Bashir, who is best known for his 1995 Panorama interview with Diana, Princess of Wales. “When we came here people said we were going to rip the [Nightline] franchise to pieces. Yet James had worked on The Money Programme and Newsnight. His background couldn’t be more serious and traditional. When I was at Panorama, we did everything from the Ridings School collapse to investigations into the sale of the UK’s coal regions. But no one has ever talked to me about those stories.”
For 26 years Nightline had been an institution, presented by veteran newsman Ted Koppel - a buzzard-faced anchor with grey hair and gravitas to spare, described by Bashir as “possibly the greatest journalist in TV history”. Last year, in what many observers saw as his unceremonious ousting, Koppel, winner of a staggering 42 Emmys, made way for Bashir - as well as American co-hosts Terry Moran and Cynthia McFadden - while Goldston was appointed executive producer with a brief to reinvigorate the show.
Nightline was, unquestionably, a fading franchise watched by an ageing audience. It had lost about 40% of its viewers in the decade prior to Koppel’s departure (partly because of the growth in cable news channels like CNN), and fared badly against the more advertiser-friendly programmes ranged against it on rival networks, namely David Letterman’s Late Show (CBS) and Jay Leno’s Tonight Show (NBC).
“I think a lot of people thought Nightline was over when we arrived. Someone actually said to me ‘they’ve called you guys in, you’re only from Britain, you’ll do it for a year, you’ll take it on the chin and bang! [the show will be axed]‘. But that hasn’t happened. And now people have actually stopped talking in terms of Nightline’s survival and that’s a big achievement.”
Indeed, the pair can justifiably claim to be vindicated by rising ratings. Nightline is up 9% year-on-year, bucking the trend in American network news. It is also succeeding in attracting a younger demographic and is frequently matching and, on several occasions, beating Letterman, the man ABC chiefs very publicly tried to poach to shore up falling audiences and sliding ad-revenues in the last days of Koppel’s tenure.
Nevertheless, despite the rise, some critics are still carping. According to the Wall Street Journal, “the new team behind Nightline accomplished [their success] by softening some of the show’s programming and adding lighter features and more celebrity coverage.”
Unsurprisingly, Goldston, 38, thinks that’s an unfair assessment. “It’s inevitable when you take a show with a history like Nightline’s and an anchor like Ted Koppel that whatever you do to change the show will be criticised by people who’ve loved it just as it was for 26 years. But our body of work over the past year, both domestically and internationally, stands up against anything that anyone’s done anywhere in the world. My view is that the show had to change because Ted Koppel left. We essentially had to reinvent Nightline for the here and now. There’s also this notion that the old Nightline would never have done a celebrity story, which is not true - Ted Koppel once interviewed Kermit.”
Bashir, 43, picks up seamlessly. “What some people have ended up with is a false view of what James and I represent, alongside a misunderstanding of what the show used to be. I have probably done 50 stories so far and only two or three things might be described as ‘celebrity’.”
But it is Bashir’s celebrity stories that made his name, colouring his reputation among ABC colleagues on his arrival. The Diana scoop came first, in November 1995. Later, he landed Louise Woodward, the British nanny accused of child murder in the US, for Panorama. In 1999, he was snapped up by ITV for its new current affairs programme, Tonight with Trevor McDonald, which opened amid a blaze of publicity with his interview with the five men suspected of murdering the black teenager Stephen Lawrence.
While trying to land some of his biggest interviews, Bashir has been accused of using subterfuge and sycophancy; it was claimed that he persuaded the notoriously private Michael Jackson to allow him access to his personal life by convincing him that the interview would be far gentler than it eventually turned out to be.
Furthermore, it was alleged by the star’s defence team at the subsequent trial that Bashir had obtained the interview, in part, by writing in a letter that seeing Jackson with his children made him “want to weep”, while also promising to introduce him to UN secretary general Kofi Annan.
It is not the first time that his technique has been the subject of comment. Former colleagues in Britain say that he throws his “heart and soul” into his subjects, getting under their skin, befriending them.One journalist wrote of his “lavish levels of sycophancy and insincerity”. Bashir’s supporters say it is simply part of his exceptional drive. Steve Anderson, who was controller of news and current affairs at the ITV network when Bashir landed the Jackson scoop, described him as more than a journalist. “I wonder in the end if his real skill is of someone who might otherwise have been a psychologist. He really seems to be someone who is able to get into people’s heads, and get their trust,” he said, in a 2003 Guardian profile.
In person, Bashir indeed appears disarmingly charming, laughing heartily at the suggestion that Jackson did not know what he was getting into. “As far as Michael Jackson’s concerned, he signed three contracts. He knew exactly what was happening and the film didn’t emerge in the way that he’d hoped.” Goldston, who produced the documentary and was present throughout, cuts in. “It’s hard to argue, I think, that he didn’t know what was happening. He is in every frame of the film, from the very first to the last.”
But does Bashir deny the accusation that certain assurances were given to Jackson in order to secure the interview? “He wasn’t promised anything. In the first interview I did with him I asked him whether his father beat him and he started to cry. How could he possibly say that he thought it was going to be a soft interview after that? ”
Bashir glances at Goldston for support. “I mean that was our first interview, you were there, it was in his movie theatre. He’s sitting there answering those questions on the first day of many days filming, and you’re asking me whether he was under the impression he was going to get a soft interview?” He changes tack, clearly feeling he has said more than enough. “I’m determined not to say anything outside the journalism. I don’t have anything against the guy. I love him. I learned to play the bass by playing the bass line to Billie Jean. There was nothing untruthful about the position I took, which is that I think he is one of the greatest musical artists of the 20th century, but his life is clearly flawed and there are elements of it which are of interest.”
Given that the charges brought against the singer were an indirect consequence of the film, I ask Bashir whether he feels any pity for him. “But he was acquitted,” he points out. “I don’t think I was responsible for anything that happened. We just followed what he did and how he lived his life.” Goldston intervenes. “The charges were brought subsequent to the broadcast, but we didn’t make any direct allegations of any kind in the piece itself.”
What it was like to be part of the extraordinary media circus in the Santa Ana courthouse? Goldston is hesitant: “Well, I think … No, I don’t think so. ” Bashir laughs, a touch nervously, and Goldston declares: “I don’t think we should answer that. You’ve come to do an interview about us and Nightline and not about Michael Jackson.”
Goldston adds, in a clear reference to an earlier question about whether Jackson was misled: “You mention coming in saying you are going to ask about one thing, then asking something else … you see how easily these things can be misinterpreted.” Bashir is still laughing and says: “I’ll tell you about it later.” His mobile phone rings. He is needed on a story. The interview is over. Jeffrey Schneider, ABC news vice-president, is looming in the doorway. Meanwhile, across the street, NBC has unveiled a poster advertising its breakfast juggernaut Today Show.
“Can you believe it?” cries Bashir. “I just got called by [New York Post gossip column] Page Six about that,” adds Schneider, joining him at the window. “And I’m about to give them a quote which says ‘Maybe if NBC hadn’t spent that much money on their billboards, then they wouldn’t have to lay off so many of their staff.’” All three roar with laughter. “OK,” says Bashir to the Guardian’s photographer. “Where do you want to do the pictures?” We head down to street level and the busy sidewalks of the Upper West Side. Michael Jackson, of course, is never mentioned again.
Source: The Guardian
