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60 Minutes Special Don Hewitt August 23 2009

Category: News & Current Affairs
Description:
60 Minutes Special Don Hewitt August 23 2009 (CBS) This has not been a happy summer for those of us who work at CBS News: last month Walter Cronkite died, and this past week we lost Don Hewitt, the man who created 60 Minutes 41 years ago. Don was 86, but in his head and in his heart he was a kid. Words like "passion" and "enthusiasm" are too weak to describe this human dynamo. As correspondent Morley Safer explains, Don was his boss for most of the 45 years he has worked at the network and he was not an easy man to please. But when you did please him, you were on top of the world. And so was he. He was also a thorn in the side of his corporate bosses, though he liked to describe himself as a pain in the ass. And he was madly in love with broadcast journalism. We take a look at Don Hewitt - this founder, producer and above all, ringmaster of what he regarded as the greatest show on earth. "I once said to CBS, 'In my next contract I want a gun, and a whip and a chair,' because it's like being in a cage full of tigers. And there are temperaments. Not the least of which is mine," Don Hewitt once said. Ringmaster and lion tamer - Don became a show unto himself. Since the very beginning of television news more than six decades ago, he lived by a deceptively simple motto: "It's four little words. Tell me a story. And that's all we do. Tell 'em a story," he explained. Years before 60 Minutes, he was at Edward R. Murrow's side as television expanded its reach to broadcast live, from coast to coast. He produced the very first televised presidential debate, Kennedy vs. Nixon, in 1960. He was with Walter Cronkite the day John F. Kennedy was shot. And with 60 Minutes, he revolutionized broadcast news, dispatching what he called his "team of tigers" to the four corners of the globe to carry out that four-word mandate: Tell me a story. "There is no place on Earth that you haven’t been," Hewitt said when the broadcast turned 25. "And there's nobody on Earth that you haven't met. …And that is the great value of what we do, I think." He was, in fact, the boy wonder of CBS News, and remained the awestruck kid well past retirement age. He was opinionated, outrageous, with a quick wit and a short fuse. "The only problem is that when you've been around as long as I have, you get to be kind of a pain in the ass," Hewitt once said. And as his friends and colleagues will tell you, on balance, the pleasure of Don's company was mostly worth the pain. "I mean, he put on a show in the control room. And it was just wonderful. It was hypnotic," Phil Scheffler remembered, who worked at Don's side for over half a century. 60 Minutes Executive Producer Jeff Fager remembers his first meeting with Hewitt. "I remember it well. He said, 'Listen kid. All you need to do is bring us good stories.'" Fager succeeded Don in 2004 as executive producer, and he remembers all too well being the new kid on the block, 20 years ago: screening one of his first 60 Minutes stories for the ringmaster. It was a somewhat dry report on the Polish economy. "The first thing he said was, 'Where do you want it kid, right between the eyes?' He hated it. And what really was amazing is a couple of hours later he called and he said, 'I have some ideas for how we can make this story better.' And he did," Fager remembered. "He was like P.T. Barnum in the sense that he would bring the circus truck to town every time he got to talk to you," actor Alan Alda said. Don called Alda his best friend; Alda says that even after hours, Don talked constantly about work. "Because it excited him so much that he was, I think he was still a boy who was amazed at his success." The boy grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y., 45 minutes from Broadway. Fifteen cents would buy him a Saturday afternoon of cartoons, newsreels and melodramas. The movies got under his skin and stayed there. "He once said to me that when he goes to a Western movie, he comes out walking bowlegged," Safer remembered, laughing. "He told us many times how when he was in the war, he had seen so many war movies that when he was finally standing on the ship, and the enemy planes were coming at him, he thought 'Where's the music?'" Alda added. The movies gave him his role models: rascals who had the moxie to beat the system during the Great Depression. "I never knew whether I wanted to be Julian Marsh, the Broadway producer on 42nd Street, or Hildy Johnson, the reporter in Front Page," Hewitt said. Johnson came from the newspaper world, just as Don's father did. It was a whiskey soaked jungle of snappy talk and scooping the competition. And impresario Julian Marsh in 42nd Street was surrounded by bright lights and Broadway babes - Don's kind of world. "We always thought if Don Hewitt went into Broadway, he would have been just as big and just as successful," Fager said. "I mean, he had that way, he had that showmanship." In 1948, CBS put on its first TV newscast; Don was 25, with some wartime reporting experience under his belt. Somebody suggested he check out the CBS News studio, upstairs at Grand Central Station. "And I walked in. I couldn't believe it. You know, there are lights and cameras and makeup people and it looked like a Hollywood set. And I fell in love," Hewitt remembered. And the best thing was: no longer did he have to choose between being ace reporter Hildy Johnson or Broadway star maker Julian Marsh. "I thought, 'Oh my God, in television you can be both of them.' And I got hired," Hewitt remembered. Soon, he was producing Douglas Edwards' newscast, the forerunner of the CBS Evening News. There were no satellites, no computers - nothing much except huge, bulky cameras and Don's manic enthusiasm. "It wasn't very good, but it was respectable. I always thought it was the infancy of television. Like we were making those shows out of Play-Doh," Hewitt said when the Evening News turned 50. "Don has described those early days as playing with Play-Doh. Kind of making it up as you go along," Safer remarked. "No question about that. There were no signposts. No rules," Scheffler agreed. "Nobody had any experience in this before. And so he really was the inventor of the kind of television news that we do now." In the summer of 1956, the ocean liner Andrea Doria collided with a ship off Nantucket. Don, Doug Edwards and a cameraman flew off to have a look. The other networks had already come and gone, beating them to the first pictures of the crippled ship, dead in the water. "I said, 'Well, what the hell. We're here. Let's go anyway,'" Hewitt remembered. "We're flying over the Andrea Doria, it turns over, and like a big dead elephant, it sank right beneath us." "Dumb luck. By being late, we got the story," he added. Hewitt would do just about anything to get the story and shaft the competition. When Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev visited a farm in Coon Rapids, Iowa in 1959, Don put one over on NBC. "He stole their truck, their video truck," Alda explained. "And drove it into the middle of a corn field, where no one could find it. Now that's not Mr. Nice Guy, you know. He did return it, eventually." But Hewitt clashed often with CBS News President Fred Friendly, who found him too brash and too unpredictable. In 1965, Friendly figured out a way to get Don off the Evening News; Don thought it was a promotion. "His wife told me later that he came home and said, told her the story about how Friendly had come to see him and said, 'You know, Don, this Evening News is not big enough for you. We're gonna find really great projects for you to do.' And his wife said to him: 'Idiot. You just got fired,'" Scheffler said. "It was devastating at the time. You know, I had my legs cut off," Hewitt remembered. He remained at CBS, but sought solace out on his beloved beach. Next to television, he worshiped the sun and his kids. He produced a few earnest documentaries, but hungered after something with a little more punch. "He got bored easily, is the problem," Scheffler said. And out of that boredom came Don's greatest idea: 60 Minutes. In a sense, it should have been called "15 minutes." Don couldn't sit still for anything longer than that. "It's really a reflection, I think, of his attention span," Scheffler said. "His attention span was 15 minutes. And so he said 'We'll do a program that has three 15-minute stories on it." It began in the fall of 1968, without, at first, Phil Scheffler. "I turned him down. I said, 'You know, Don, I don't think your show's gonna be serious enough.' And I said, 'Besides, you know, it's not gonna last very long,'" Scheffler remembered. That was more than 40 years ago. Scheffler eventually came on board, as did any number of oddballs. "Don managed to attract the best people in the business. And he kept this ensemble full of crazy egos all working towards the same end," Fager said. Asked what he means by crazy egos, Fager said, "More like tigers in a cage, and every once in a while they'd jump out of their cages and Don would have to figure out a way to coax them back in." With Don cracking the whip, it was not a place for the fainthearted. "I saw him fire the same producer three times in the halls," Fager recalled. "He fired Mike [Wallace] at least 50 times," Safer added. "Well, Mike probably deserved it," Fager joked. Alan Alda wondered if all that high drama achieved any purpose. "Was it successful in getting you to think on another level?" Alda asked. "Oh, absolutely," Safer replied. "I think it made the pieces, the stories, in the final analysis, much leaner and much more direct." "And would he turn out to be right?" Alda asked. "Mainly he was right," Safer said, laughing. But there were some rough moments in an otherwise brilliant career. In 1995, the then CBS management suppressed a 60 Minutes expose of the tobacco industry. The story eventually was broadcast, after it was reported in The Wall Street Journal. Though the tobacco story haunted him for years, Don continued masterminding the broadcast for another decade. "His job was his life. And that's what made it so hard for him to give it up. In fact, he said quite publicly 'I wanna die at my desk,'" Fager said. Don left the broadcast - reluctantly - in 2004, at age 81, and slowly made peace with the idea of having more time for the grandchildren. And of watching 60 Minutes not in the screening room, but in his own living room. Asked what he thinks Hewitt's legacy is, Phil Scheffler said, "His legacy is 60 Minutes. There's no question. I mean, this was his shining, his crowning success." Fager said, "It's a great legacy, this broadcast, and it hasn't strayed much from what he envisioned in the first place more than 40 years ago." "He gave the country nourishment but in the form of, to a great extent in the form of entertainment. It wasn't like eating your broccoli. What he gave us was a good old-fashioned hot dog, but somehow it nourished us like broccoli," Alda added. "There is some kind of genius in that. He was able to fuse those two things."
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The Madoff Hustle 2009 06 28 BBC2 This World

Category: News & Current Affairs
Description:
The Madoff Hustle 2009 06 28 BBC2 This World 449 MB / 00:59:00 International investigative documentary series. On June 29th, Bernie Madoff will be sentenced for perpetrating an elaborate con. From his headquarters in New York, the capital of American finance, Madoff masterminded a fraud that netted billions of dollars and ensnared thousands, from Palm Beach billionaires and Hollywood movie stars to pensioners across the US. Madoff did not stop at America, however - he went global in his search for victims. Willard Foxton, whose father - a former British army officer - committed suicide after losing his life savings in Madoff's fraud, has embarked on a personal investigation into the Madoff con and the devastation it has wrought. On a 14,000-mile journey that takes him to New York, Florida and California, Willard meets fellow Madoff victims, two of Bernie's former employees and a Madoff family friend, who has known Bernie for over fifty years. As his investigation progresses, Willard tries to discover what happened to his father's money and gains an insight into how Bernie Madoff ran the con undetected for decades. Narrated by Robert Vaughn. Name.........: This World - The Madoff Hustle.WnA.avi Source: http://www.uknova.com/wsgi/torrent/view/80254 Cap: WnA Other shunster posts at:http://www.bt-chat.com/browse.php?category=11
Seeders: 61
Leeches: 9

FRONTLINE - Boogie Man-The Lee Atwater Story

Category: Documentary
Description:
In 1989, Lee Atwater was a political rock star. After masterminding George H.W. Bush's presidential victory over Michael Dukakis, the colorful, blues guitar-playing Atwater was relishing his new role as chairman of the Republican National Committee as he redefined the role of the political operative. Two years later, the political strategist would be dead from a brain tumor at the age of 40, cast aside by the Washington power players he'd helped create and wracked with remorse for the tactics he'd employed in his political ascent. In Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, producer Stefan Forbes reveals new information about the meteoric rise and tragic demise of a man both admired and reviled for the controversial, sometimes racially-charged political tactics that helped elect George H.W. Bush president and inspired protégés such as Karl Rove. Through a wealth of compelling, never-before-seen footage and photos, as well as interviews with boyhood friends, elite Republican strategists and political adversaries, the documentary examines Atwater's impact on the way modern political campaigns are waged. "[Lee Atwater] mattered in American politics," Newsweek political writer Howard Fineman says, "because of the man he got elected, because of the party he shaped. He was very important not only to George H.W.'s victory, but to his son's victory." Boogie Man traces Atwater's rise from his early days masterminding political victories in South Carolina. Among his triumphs was a fiercely contested battle for chairman of the College Republicans between Karl Rove and Robert Edgeworth. Rove lost, but Atwater mounted an appeal of Edgeworth's victory. The contest was ultimately decided by then Republican National Committee chairman George H.W. Bush, who gave the election to Rove. "That was a pretty early lesson for Karl Rove from Lee," says Joe Conason of The Nation and Salon.com, "that you could play the hardest of hardball and get away with it." Boogie Man recounts how fellow South Carolinian Sen. Strom Thurmond took an interest in Atwater, tutoring him in the use of highly emotional wedge issues such as abortion and crime that would help Republicans win over disaffected working class voters to a largely pro-business agenda. Says Atwater intimate Tucker Eskew, "Resentment became the future of the Republican Party." In the documentary, viewers hear from numerous journalists and politicians who say Atwater's use of scurrilous rumors, push polls and other dirty tricks propelled him onto the national scene, where he became assistant to Ed Rollins, campaign manager for Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election bid. "A lot of people told me he wouldn't be loyal to me, told me not to pick him," Rollins says. "I admired his work ethic." Not long after, Rollins says, Atwater arranged what turned out to be an ambush media interview, in which Rollins was accused of running a dirty-tricks campaign against the Democratic vice presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro. "Lee had put a spear in my back," Rollins says. "It was just a two-year effort to destroy me. He wanted to run Bush's [presidential] campaign." Boogie Man takes viewers behind the scenes of the contentious 1988 campaign, remembered for the infamous "Willie Horton" ad, which portrayed Mass. Gov. Michael Dukakis as soft on crime and easy on rapists and murderers. Among the film's revelations is Republican operative Roger Stone's account that, while he was running the Bush campaign, Atwater said he had secretly arranged financing for the Horton ad. "[Atwater] locked the office door," says Stone, "and he popped the famous Willie Horton spot onto a television. He said, 'I got a couple boys who are going to put up a couple million dollars for this independent.' And I said, 'That's a huge mistake.'" After Atwater was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1990, some of his closest friends say that, terrified he was going to hell, he embarked on a desperate search for redemption. "Lee really was confronting some very troubling facts," says Eskew, "that in winning he had hurt people. Fear had been part of his toolkit. That fear came back on him." But producer Stefan Forbes notes that his reporting reveals a more nuanced story than media accounts of Atwater's remorseful apologies for his tactics. "Lee apologized directly to some of the people he'd hurt," says Forbes, "but never criticized the GOP, or even disavowed negative campaigning. And his vision of politics as war would continue to affect a new generation of GOP politicians and operatives." Eskew says Atwater knew how to control media narratives. "Now it's kind of rote in politics, but Lee was saying early: Perception is reality. He was ahead of his time." "Atwater had a genius for the sticky issue -- simple enough, scary enough that the media could latch onto it," Conason says. "[George] W. learned that the only thing that really matters is who wins." While some argue that Atwater's political successes resulted solely from dirty tricks and a win-at-any-cost mentality, former colleagues say that view is an oversimplification. They explain in Boogie Man how Atwater's keen attention to the concerns of middle-class Americans helped him identify issues to which his Democratic opponents were often tone deaf. "It's so much easier to blame dirty tricks than it is to acknowledge hard work," says Eskew. "Did he give his opponents ammunition to criticize him for negative tactics? Yes. Does that obscure the fact that he outfoxed them at nearly every turn? Not to those of us watching closely." Former colleague and conservative commentator Mary Matalin agrees. "They had to kill the messenger because they couldn't kill the message," she says of Atwater's critics. "They had to turn him into the boogie man -- Satan incarnate." "Lee Atwater made himself a figure of demonology to psych out his opponents and anesthetize people to his tactics," says Howard Fineman. "And the sad part -- some people would say the justified part -- was that the role that he made for himself literally ended up imprisoning him." 81 mins.
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Leeches: 1

Missing Links DVDRip - newest 911 documentary

Category: Documentary
Description:
******************************************************************************* Missing.Links.DVDRip.fixed ******************************************************************************* ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- General Information ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Type.................: Movie Video Format.........: DivX 6.8.4 pro Video Bitrate........: 800 Kbps Audio Bitrate........: 96 Kbps Resolution...........: 352 x 240 FPS..................: 29.970 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Release Notes ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MISSING LINKS is the first movie to expose the identity of the criminals responsible for 9/11. Officially released on 8/18/2008 Now you will discover the definitive truth about 9/11 and learn why even the most popular movies on the subject have failed to address the evidence exhaustively presented in this video. The facts will make it abundantly clear that the so-called 9/11 ôTruthö movement has been infiltrated and is ultimately controlled by the same criminals group who masterminded the attacks. As they say, 'if you want to control the dissent you lead the dissent.' Utilizing evidence from the FBI, CIA, NSA, US Armed Forces Intelligence sectors, Foreign Intelligence organizations, local law enforcement agencies and independent investigators, Missing Links goes where no other 9/11 video has dared to. 911MissingLinks.com MissingLinksVideo.com MissingLinksFilm.com MissingLinksMovie.com MissingLinksMovie.org
Seeders: 3
Leeches: 10

BENEDICT PEDOPHILE MASTERMIND - ENG - sub ITA

Category: News & Current Affairs
Description:
Sex crimes and the Vatican - - A secret document which sets out a procedure for dealing with child sex abuse scandals within the Catholic Church is examined by Panorama.
Seeders: 11
Leeches: 1

POPE BENEDICT: PEDOPHILE COVERUP MASTERMIND (Panorama) 2006 10 01 Ita sub. (DivX)].

Category: News & Current Affairs
Description:
POPE BENEDICT: PEDOPHILE COVERUP MASTERMIND (Panorama) 2006 10 01 Ita sub. (DivX)]. Original Title: Sex crimes and the Vatican (Panorama) 2006 10 01 Ita sub. (DivX)]. A secret document which sets out a procedure for dealing with child sex abuse scandals within the Catholic Church is examined by Panorama. Crimen Sollicitationis was enforced for 20 years by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became the Pope. It instructs bishops on how to deal with allegations of child abuse against priests and has been seen by few outsiders. Critics say the document has been used to evade prosecution for sex crimes. Crimen Sollicitationis was written in 1962 in Latin and given to Catholic bishops worldwide who are ordered to keep it locked away in the church safe. It instructs them how to deal with priests who solicit sex from the confessional. It also deals with "any obscene external act ... with youths of either sex." It imposes an oath of secrecy on the child victim, the priest dealing with the allegation and any witnesses. Breaking that oath means excommunication from the Catholic Church. Reporting for Panorama, Colm O'Gorman finds seven priests with child abuse allegations made against them living in and around the Vatican City. One of the priests, Father Joseph Henn, has been indicted on 13 molestation charges brought by a grand jury in the United States. During filming for Sex Crimes and the Vatican, Colm finds Father Henn is fighting extradition orders from inside the headquarters of this religious order in the Vatican. The Vatican has not compelled him to return to America to face the charges against him. After filming, Father Henn lost his fight against extradition but fled the headquarters and is believed to be hiding in Italy while there is an international warrant for his arrest. Colm O'Gorman was raped by a Catholic priest in the diocese of Ferns in County Wexford in Ireland when he was 14 years old. Father Fortune was charged with 66 counts of sexual, indecent assault and another serious sexual offence relating to eight boys but he committed suicide on the eve of his trial. Colm started an investigation with the BBC in March 2002 which led to the resignation of Dr Brendan Comiskey, the bishop leading the Ferns Diocese. Colm then pushed for a government inquiry which led to the Ferns Report. It was published in October 2005 and found: "A culture of secrecy and fear of scandal that led bishops to place the interests of the Catholic Church ahead of the safety of children." The Catholic Church has 50 million children in its worldwide congregation and no universal child protection policy although in the UK there is the Catholic Office for the Protection of Children & Vulnerable Adults. In some countries this means that the Crimen Sollicitationis is the only policy followed. The Vatican has refused repeated requests from Panorama to respond to any of the cases shown in the film. Italian subtitles 00:38.58 DivX MPEG-4 shunster
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Leeches: 1

Democracy Now! The War & Peace Report 08/29/05

Category: News & Current Affairs
Description:
Headlines for August 29, 2005 - Hundreds of Thousands of New Orleans Residents Flee Hurricane - Officials Fear New Orleans Will Turn Into Toxic Lake - National Guard Equipment in Iraq, Not Louisiana - Shiites and Kurds Agree on Constitution; Sunnis Reject Text - Reuters Sound Technician Killed by U.S. Troops in Iraq - Pentagon Official Demoted After Criticizing Halliburton Deal - NYPD Arrest 49 At Critical Mass Bike Ride Is Global Warming Causing More Devastating Hurricanes Worldwide? Hurricane Katrina forced a mass evacuation of New Orleans and may leave up to a million people homeless. As this unprecedented storm deluges the South, we look at new evidence that human-induced global warming is causing the increased strength of tropical storms. [includes rush transcript] Two Thousand Bush Supporters Rally in Crawford The last weekend of Cindy Sheehan's vigil outside President Bush's property in Crawford drew ever more supporters. Also in Crawford were two thousand counter protesters. We hear from a pro-Bush military mother and the owner of a Bush memorobilia store in Crawford. [includes rush transcript] Military Mothers and Veterans Call for Troop Pullout on Last Weekend of Camp Casey Cindy Sheehan and other military families spoke at a mass rally during the last weekend of Bush's vacation - and the last weekend of Camp Casey. We hear from Cindy, mothers Amy Branham and Jane Bright, and a Marine veteran. [includes rush transcript] The Posada Files: El Paso Judge to Determine Whether Bay of Pigs Was Terrorist Act Cuban-born former CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles is facing a deportation hearing El Paso today. The judge will look at Posada's record to determine whether he should get asylum in the United States. Protests around the U.S. and Canada are calling for Posada's extradition to Venezuela for masterminding the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner. [includes rush transcript]
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