Months passed. September, October, and then the holiday season and December, and I had been without a stitch of income for more than six months, save for an article written for Soldier of Fortune and a couple of lectures at scattered venues, where the main income came from charging the organizers the equivalent value of the Sky Miles cash-in tickets that I burned. Friends and family were fronting me small loans, and my diet consisted almost exclusively of deer I had shot during hunting season.
The poster.
The only access to information on Chechnya was a newly created Web site on the newly created Internet. The Web site was run by a Dane named Norbert for a dozen or so obsessed members of a Chechnya-specific discussion group to which I became instantly addicted, logging on for all-night, on-line screed sessions with the other ether personalities who also seemed to have nothing better to do than sit up all night and rant-punch the keyboard. The most frequent contributor, and thus combatant, was an Armenian academic named Artur, who kept changing his name when suspended from the list for violating Netiquette, mainly in the way of hurling personal abuse and invective at a car mechanic who lived somewhere in Massachusetts and who went by the name of Mark, but had been revealed as really being a North Caucasian Muslim named Murat. Other regulars included a Canadian Quaker named Ross, who urged peace for both the real and the electronic Chechnya, and a Washington-based lawyer named Boyd, whose convoluted legal analysis and determination to take Boris Yeltsin to the newly established War Crimes tribunals at the Hague only partially obfuscated the fact that he was either insane or an anarchist or both.
I had no one else to speak to; I knew no one else who cared. It was, altogether, a bleak Montana winter.
Then in February, or maybe March 1996, the telephone rang.
The person on the other end of the line identified himself being one Danny Schechter, and in a thick New York accent he explained that he was the director of a New York City production house called Global Vision. Specifically, he said he was the producer of a program called Right and Wrongs, and that he had finally gotten around to viewing that VHS tape I had sent months before. While the quality of the copy was pretty bad, he was interested if I had the originals, because R & W was thinking of doing a special episode on Chechnya, and that while they did not pay much because they were a not-for-profit organization dedicated to truth and verity, there might be some compensation involved if the original material were up to snuff.
Rights and Wrongs. I had never heard of the show before.
The Global Vision office was located in a building fenced in by kebab stands and basement porno joints on Broadway and the low fifties, and was in a constant state of chaos of interns running in and out of cramped studios working on seventeen shows at once. Framed letters of thanks and praise, including one from Nelson Mandela, had pride of place in the visitor’s waiting area. They described Global Vision in terms such as “radical” and “extraordinary.” One framed newspaper clip described Danny Schechter—usually referred to as the “News Dissector,” it seemed—as being a visionary child of the 1960s antiwar movement who had won a coveted Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in the 1970s, translated that into a full producer’s job at ABC in the 1980s, only to toss it all away in disgust at the dumbing-down practices of the mainstream American media, which was only interested in product for profit.
I heard The Dissector ranting on the phone about something to someone some fifteen minutes before he kicked his office door open and commanded his secretary to allow me to enter the inner sanctum. He greeted my arrival with a torrent of abuse to whomever he was talking to on the other line, while suggesting with hand gestures that I redistribute the mounds of yesterday’s papers scattered on his visitor’s chair and have a seat.
“No, no, no!” he shouted, maligning his invisible audio victim. “I will not accept that bastard’s apology! Remind him that until he comes crawling on his knees to beg forgiveness for his awful journalistic sins, we will continue to ream his ass and refer to him as the fascist that he is!!”
Clunk went the telephone, and the News Dissector finally turned to me.
“Hi, I’m Danny—and you’re Glotz, right?”
“Goltz, actually.”
“Now, look—your material is great, but what you sent me was shit,” he said. “But we need your material as the centerpiece of a special feature we want to do on Chechnya.”
I was flabbergasted at how quickly my life had changed.
“So let’s go downtown,” said the Dissector. “There is a film about rape as a weapon of war featuring a couple of women from Bosnia I am supposed to introduce, and after that we’ll catch a drink.”
We hit the film on Twelfth Street and then followed up with a reception at NYU, before dipping down to Tribeca to talk business. I forget the name of the bar, but it featured some two hundred different types of vodka, most at five bucks a shot.
“You know why I like you?” asked the News Dissector rhetorically.
“No,” I honestly replied.
“It is because you hate Michael Rosenblum.”
Rosenblum was the creator and CEO of Video News International, now New York Times TV, and presumed author of the malignant poster depicting me as a KGB plant.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because Rosenblum hijacked my idea and called it his own. It was me who developed the idea of distributing home video cameras to one-man-band journalists. But Rosenblum grabbed the idea and turned it into a for-profit business. Sold the idea to the New York Times for twenty million bucks! I was giving cameras away left and right in South Africa for free long before Michael Rosenblum was born! That’s an exaggeration. But this is not: Do you know what he did with the first chunk of heavy money he received when the Times bought him out?”
“He bought himself a midlife-crisis red Porsche when I was sleeping in a Moscow gutter,” I snarled.
“Don’t get crazy,” cautioned the Dissector. “Just remember what the greatest form of revenge is.”
“Success.”
Welcome to Rights and Wrongs, human rights TV.
If the average American television viewer never saw the half-hour Global Vision special on Chechnya in the scattered, three-week broadcast period of late April to early May 1996 on their local PBS channel, they are to be forgiven. Although half an hour long and narrated by Charlayne Hunter-Gault, the program was pretty hard to spot. It showed on channel 13 in New York City at 2:30 A.M. on a Sunday and on channel 9 in Chicago at 7:30 A.M. Saturday, and was rebroadcast at 1 A.M. on Wednesday. The Washington, D.C., area pulled it in at some other ungodly hour, and California—excluding L.A. and San Francisco, as I recall—ran the show at midnight on Tuesday or dawn on Friday. Yes, one thing can be said with assurance: Nowhere in the entire United States of America was Rights and WrongslChechnya run on anything approximating prime-time TV. It was a marginal program, full stop. Myself, I happened to be staying at the house of antitelevision friends in Seattle at the time, and had to resort to ducking out to a local bar to catch the broadcast at noon on Saturday, only to find myself speaking in Spanish.