Current TV Gets Real for Valentine's Day

On Valentine’s Day Eve (Wednesday) @ 10p ET /7p PT, Current TV airs Blood Roses and Deadly Diamonds, an honest assessment of the human cost of our Valentine’s Day mania. 

The segments are part of Current TV’s Vanguard reports, a series of on-going investigative  pieces airing each Wednesday in the 10p ET/ 7p PT slot.

This is fresh, insightful reporting on subjects too often ignored by the broadcast nets but obviously very Gen-Y relevant.  No wonder they’ve abandoned the nightly news.

After watching Blood Roses and Deadly Diamonds you might think twice about the consequences of those Valentine’s Day purchases.  In some cases, love kills.

In Deadly Diamonds Marianna van Zeller reports from Sierra Leone.  Zeller, a Portuguese native and multi-lingual graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, is a more dispassionate Lara Logan (ABC News Iraq correspondent). 

Her style is straightforward.  She steps out of the way  and allows her subject matter to do the work, and her reporting is all the more believable for it.  Deadly Diamonds is a "day in the life" story of a destitute scavenger who mines gems in return for 30 cents a day and two cups of rice.

The segment appears to be a repackage or perhaps a replay of the vid posted here on the Current website.  Nevertheless, the pods really lend themselves to big screen viewing.

Vanguard journalist Kaj Larsen, and reporter Jael De Pardo, travel to Colombia to get inside the flower business where 90% of U.S. roses are produced and exported.   Here they encounter workers picking flowers for two dollar a day.  Pesticide exposure has been linked to severe health issues.  "The flower industry is big business, but it comes with a price," says Current’s press release.

Larsen is a former Navy SEAL with a masters degree in Public Policy from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is a joint fellow at the Jebsen Center for Counter-Terrorism studies and the Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics, and Public Policy.

Larsen has reported extensively from Afghanistan, profiling the first Afghan woman running for office and covering the resurgent heroin trade.  As part of his in-depth coverage of torture, Larsen subjected himself to waterboarding.

I’ve been touting Current TV for a long time now and especially the Vanguard series.  Using small digital cameras, Vanguard journalists fan out across the world to feed highly relevant stories to a young globally-minded audience. 

Their segments all have an intimate, adventure travel feel - long bus rides on dusty roads, visits into the homes of workers etc.  Here’s a vid that gives of sense of where Zeller stayed in Sierra Leone – no hot water, little electricity and bucket baths.  

It’s adventure travel with meaning and substance.  With this formula, Current is reaching a young audience that has spurned the traditional outlets.

The cable net is helping to fill the news void created after the broadcast nets’ slowly suffocated their international reporting over the course of several decades. 

During the Discovery Summer 2006 TCA press tour, Ted Koppel slammed the broadcast nets for cutting budgets and shuttering news bureaus:

Our network news divisions simply do not have the corps of foreign correspondents that they had twenty to twenty five years ago. Now it is done far more by parachuting in an anchor or some correspondent who is based in London…..

What we don’t have, but what we need more than we have ever needed before in the history of television, is young, aggressive correspondents who are willing to spend two, three, even ten years in a certain region getting to know the language, getting to know the culture, getting to know the people. I don’t think there is a commercial network around that has a permanent correspondent based in India.

 According to stateofthenewsmedia.org: 

Network news in 2006 had just slightly more than half (54%) as many foreign stories as it did in the late 1980s — tracking almost exactly with the decline in the number of bureaus. 

Maybe Current Vanguard is the incubator of new television journalism.  I wonder how long it will be until Zeller moves on.  She really is all that.  

On Current, you will find journalists who often speak the language and spend a great deal of time in the places they report from.  Zeller frequently covers Africa, for instance.  For Rebels in the Pipeline, a four-part series, she flew to the Nigerian oil rich delta region to report on corruption, instability and the fury of the impoverished. 

Zeller in the Nigerian delta region:

Since - as Zeller notes - the U.S. increasingly depends on West Africa for oil, I highly recommend this vid. 

In many cases, the quality of reporting surpasses the broadcast news networks.  In Zeller’s Streets of Syria and other segments, she heads to Damascus and looks at their enthusiasm for Hezbollah.  She drills down, running journalistic circles around CBS’ Katie Couric’s puffy foray into Syria and Iraq last September.  (Couric’s drop into the hot zone was a classic example of parachuting.) 

All the Vanguard vids are posted on the Current TV website in an area reserved for the Vanguard Journalism segments.  There are a number of highly qualified young journalists covering stories for Current. 

Just a few examples:

From Laura Ling (Lisa’s sister):  Great Firewall of China: the battle between China’s censors and their 150 million Internet users.

In Toxic Villages, Laura also traveled to an electronic wasteland in Southern China, a repository for much of the world’s high tech waste.  The Chinese goverment reportedly arrests and beats journalists attempting to cover this story.

From Russia with Hate:  Christof Putzel investigates a growing movement in Russia where neo-Nazi groups are brutally attacking immigrants and spreading their hate by posting violent videos online.  This was a breakthrough story covered by ABC Network.

Fast Times at Tehran High:  Iranian-American Yasmin Vossoughian looks at how young people are pushing the limits in one of the most socially repressive societies.

The only caveat I would offer is: clear your schedule.  Every time I tune into Current TV or tap the website, I end up plastered in front of the screen for a couple of hours.

Below, Current’s promo: