Raney Aronson-Rath
Media TribeShaunagh talks to Raney Aronson-Rath
Raney Aronson-Rath is the Executive Producer of PBS FRONTLINE, PBS' flagship investigative journalism series. We chat about Raney’s time in Taiwan as an English teacher, how she was always destined to work in public broadcasting, the PBS Frontline Transparency Project and an intriguing story involving pictures of George Bush!
Episode credits
Hosted and produced by Shaunagh Connaire and edited by Ryan Ferguson.
Episode transcript
Shaunagh Connaire
Welcome to Media Tribe. I'm Shaunagh Connaire and this is the podcast that tells the story behind the story. It's an opportunity for you and I to step into the shoes of the most extraordinary media folk who cover the issues that matter most.
Raney Aronson-Rath
I argued forcefully to have these photographs in public because I thought they could exemplify and also visualize a period of time in which George W. Bush before he really turned the corner in his life had struggled and they decided otherwise and I'll never actually forget that as a sort of turning point in my mind of, "I think I need to probably work at a place where tough journalism is going to be supported and backed."
Shaunagh Connaire
My guest today is Raney Aronson, the executive producer of PBS Frontline, PBS's flagship investigative journalism series. Frontline has won every major award under Raney's leadership, including Peabody Awards, Emmy Awards and duPont–Columbia Awards. Raney is a leading voice on the future of journalism. Raney, thank you so much for coming on the Media Tribe Podcast.
Raney Aronson-Rath
Absolutely.
Shaunagh Connaire
Where to start with you, Raney? You've had such an illustrious career. Do you want to tell our audience about your journey into journalism and film making and how you became the executive producer at PBS Frontline?
Raney Aronson-Rath
That is such a big question. That's a big one. I think the best way to understand my journey starts with actually my upbringing, which is pretty unusual. I grew up in an off the grid setting in Vermont. A very, very rural part of Vermont and my parents basically made this decision for us to live there and I was brought up without a television but the one thing that we had was the newspaper and it would come every day. As a young person, I mean, I can still remember waiting for the mail to come and opening up the newspaper. For me, that was an entry point into the world. I've always been so committed to this idea that people all across America and the world for that matter now really deserve to have high quality journalism and I had it growing up but it was really in the form of a newspaper. For me, I started out actually as a writer and I went to college. I lived in India in college and then right after college, it was the early '90s and it was actually another recession and certainly smaller recession than we're facing currently but one thing I decided to do is to go overseas again and to live in Taiwan actually teaching English.
Raney Aronson-Rath
I had to support myself and I paid my way. I got over there as a teacher and I immediately started to see this incredible thing happening in Taiwan which is this Democratic revolution. I had done journalism as a college student for one of the greatest college papers, The Daily Cardinal and actually Anthony Shadid was my editor. So I had had college experience but my real first job in the world at large was in Taiwan where I worked for a paper called The China Post and it was a job on top of my job. I taught English but I still really, the thing that I took the most joy in was being a reporter. It was in Taiwan that I got to see democracy in action. The first time the Taiwanese people voted I was there watching and observing. I was a very young reporter at the time so I really was able to do more feature level stories at that point but I really was so struck by the power of journalism and it started really in my early 20s and I got the bug and I never looked back.
Shaunagh Connaire
Well that's brilliant, Raney. I'm guessing at that time, you say the '90s in Taiwan, so I'm guessing it was the emergence of the free press over there. Did that influence your decision then really to end up at PBS? I think before we delve into your career there, I think it's really worth pointing out that PBS is a public broadcast service in the US because our audience might not fully comprehend how important that is in a country where the president calls journalists, "A stain on America."
Raney Aronson-Rath
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think the journey, that part of my journey, actually begins with a form of the stories I was really driven to tell. I was a writer, I went to Columbia Journalism graduate level and I had to actually support myself during graduate school so I had to work and I had these language skills so I was actually hired as a translator to work the overnight shift on a documentary series translating. It was the first time I had been exposed to documentary film and what was incredible for me as a young person, I didn't have to sleep at that point in my life. I don't even know how that's possible looking back except I guess I'm a mother so I do know but at the time I was like, literally in the edit room, my eyes were just opened in a way that they just had never been before. I knew that was the form I wanted to work in. So actually it started with me with form, even though at journalism school at Columbia I was a writer, I decided at that point by the time I graduated from Columbia that I really wanted to be in documentary filmmaking. That's been my guiding light, actually.
Raney Aronson-Rath
I do remember when I was in the edit room, this light bulb going off multiple times and I would just stay in the edit next to the assistant editor asking him a million questions. I look back at that and I'm so grateful to him for actually being patient with all my questions and the executive producer and producers would come in the morning and ask me why I was still there and I was like, "Because I absolutely loved the form." So that was actually my entry point was being at Columbia but then also being hired as a translator on a public television documentary series. It was a very junior level role but I learned so much on that series, which was called Emerging Powers. It was an international series looking at emerging economies. It was one of the most extraordinary experiences as a young person. That was really my jumping off point to saying, "Where should my career go?" It was a number of years before I ended up at Frontline but I think that is really the big turning point for me was committing to that form. A lot of my career has been about, "How do I do the work that I really want to do as opposed to a different type of journalism?"
Raney Aronson-Rath
I was at the networks, I was at ABC News, and I was in their hour long unit but at night I was also working on my own documentary film that I hoped would be seen on public television. I was always really committed to this idea of public television in this space to do non-profit journalism in the public interest. That is what drives me through and through.
Shaunagh Connaire
That's amazing, Raney. I honestly didn't know some of that background. You sound like a workhorse, it has to be said. You don't sleep and you work tirelessly. I believe you joined Frontline in 2001, Raney, is that right?
Raney Aronson-Rath
Yeah, so I actually joined Frontline right before 9/11 officially but then ABC News asked me to stay on through 9/11, which of course I obliged and stayed. I'm really proud of the work that we did and we were working with Peter Jennings and that whole crew but yeah. I joined Frontline in 2001 as a producer and director myself. I actually spent a decade making films for Frontline before I went into the management of Frontline. I'm actually a filmmaker running Frontline and I think that's the key to my job and why I love it is that I'm still a maker in my heart, right? A lot of the work that I do in the edit rooms with filmmakers works because I was a filmmaker and a lot of people who are in editor roles, like if you think about it, a lot of them have been journalists themselves for years and years and years before they became an editor. The same is true for the tradition at Frontline. My job is contingent upon me knowing how to make a film, taking a film apart, and making it better. I had a whole decade of working with Frontline before I came into the management.
Raney Aronson-Rath
I worked with David Fanning, Lu Wiley, the people who ran Frontline before me were my executive producer and executive editors. Those are the people that helped me make films. It's a tradition that I think served me well is making my actual films before going into the role of then managing and helping others.
Shaunagh Connaire
Well I think that's really important, Raney, as well because you really understand the pressure that filmmakers are under, the stresses that come with it. Do you see your role as protecting big, important journalism at Frontline?
Raney Aronson-Rath
Yeah, I mean, protecting big, important journalism is central to me all the time. I'm thinking about how do we do our best and bravest journalism and how do we hold those in power to account? That is a daily ... It's basically the number one thing I'm thinking about every day. Are we being smart enough? Tough enough? Fair enough? That trifecta is really what drives me as a person is how do we tell these stories but how are we fair? How are we tough? How do we have the evidence and the wherewithal to continue being investigative reporters? I think that's the essence of what drives all investigative types like myself and all the people who work for Frontline is how do we do that work with clear eyes? With evidence and proof? How do we hold those in power to account? We're given that space at Frontline to do that day after day after day. I've never had a situation at Frontline where somebody's leaned into our work and said, "You can't say this or that," or just something that we say at Frontline a lot and I always remind my leadership about this and our team about this is, "We're only as good as we are," right?
Raney Aronson-Rath
There's nobody from the outside pressuring us so now we need to hold ourselves to account, too, and how good are we? How hard are we working? Which stories should we be telling? How do we have equity at the centre of our decision making and how do we make sure that we're making the right decisions? This is something that's a daily conversation at Frontline.
Shaunagh Connaire
Well it's so well said and I know the culture at Frontline. You're very much-
Raney Aronson-Rath
You do. I know.
Shaunagh Connaire
Yeah, exactly and you report against your assumptions at every turn-
Raney Aronson-Rath
Right.
Shaunagh Connaire
At Frontline.
Raney Aronson-Rath
That is something that when I came to Frontline from the networks that was ... My eyes were so wide open. This is the process, it's a wonderful editorial process and one that I, every single day, we're following. It's essentially the idea that once you believe something in your reporting then you need to try to actually tackle it. You need to report against yourself at all times and that's the role of an editor, right, or an executive producer in my case is saying, "Why do you believe that? How do you believe that? Who told you that? How do you know that?" Sometimes it's like ... It's actually a sport in the sense of you're really trying to give credibility to what would be perceived as the other side of an argument enough so that when you land you feel that you've been fair and that's something ... It's not objective, right? It's not 50/50 ever at Frontline. In fact, investigative journalism isn't 50/50, right? Investigative journalism says, "This is something that you're investigating and when you found out what you need to find out enough of, then you can bring that evidence to the people who are in charge of whatever you're investigating or the players that matter and ask them tough questions."
Raney Aronson-Rath
That's the kind of culture at Frontline that really equals great journalism. In my mind, that's why we're continuing to do that level of journalism is because we have a culture in which we ask each other tough questions and people ask me tough questions all day long. It's not just one way. This is something, and you've experienced it, Shaunagh. You've seen it in action where we really do have that dynamic of us all being able to ask each other really tough, clear eyed questions.
Shaunagh Connaire
Exactly. Raney, big question, I know you're going to struggle with this but is there a story or project that you feel really proud of? Perhaps it was something that had true impact that you'd like to tell our audience about?
Raney Aronson-Rath
Oh, there are so many at Frontline that I've overseen. It's almost hard for me to choose. I'm so proud of the producers and directors who work for Frontline. In terms of my own work, I think the work that I'm most proud of is actually the work that I did that was in the field called The Jesus Factor. It was the time in my life where I was spending a lot of time in the field for ABC News and this was sort of before the Bush or big presidential moment. I had been able to build these relationships with George W. Bush's Midland Bible study. So I really got inside the Evangelical community of Midland, Texas. It was there where I really started to build my sources around the Evangelical mindset and also I started to understand how they were convening. That was something that I was really proud of. In terms of then coming to Frontline I was able to do The Jesus Factor as a film. Before that I was doing more news related work for ABC on that issue but it was something that I really felt like I kept reporting on.
Raney Aronson-Rath
I think inside the culture war territory is where I'm most proud of is how do we construct conversations? We did that with America's Great Divide where we really went inside this division right now. The divisiveness in our culture and we said, "How can we construct a narrative inside this?" Again, that's clear eyed, that's not a platform for hate, it's not a platform for lies but has an honest conversation about people with different points of view. That's something that we've really been working on at Frontline. I'm really, that's something that I really want to continue doing. That level of reporting and thinking.
Shaunagh Connaire
That's so interesting and I think as you say, now more than ever, we do need to be able to step onto the other side of the court and understand people and listen to people. Do you feel that empathy plays a great role in journalism at the moment? Or at least should play a great role in journalism?
Raney Aronson-Rath
You know, I think empathy is at the centre of all great decision making. I don't think it just relates to journalism. I think you need to remain empathetic to not just the people who disagree with each other and your films, but also to the impact your films could have on their lives. We can give you multiple examples of situations in which Frontline has slowed down to think hard about, "When we publish this, what kind of impact would it have?" The other thing is having empathy in the field. As a field producer and a producer myself, there were times where we made decisions together on access where it just felt like this was not the right decision to actually tell the story in the way that the network might have wanted you to tell it. I think that those, kind of really ethical decisions rather than just empathetic decisions, are actually central to Frontline's journalism. Thinking hard, taking the time to ask the questions and actually what we say is, "Turning the rock over." Thinking about it from multiple different directions. How is this going to come out? What kind of impact will it have? Is that much of a personal story necessary?
Raney Aronson-Rath
I know it's emotional, I know it's very important to have some emotion and to show what somebody's feeling but do you need to go to the gratuitous level that a lot of media now does. Do we need to go there or can we do it in a way that's still elegant and respectful to the human experience? I know that sounds a bit naïve but what drives us is ethical decision making. We try so hard. If you looked under the hood of Frontline, we might make a mistake but you would see a lot of people trying hard to make a decision that's responsible. I think that's where we come down.
Shaunagh Connaire
Well and actually it leads to a question that I wanted to ask you about. Frontline's Transparency Project-
Raney Aronson-Rath
Yeah.
Shaunagh Connaire
Which I believe you have called, "The antidote to fake news." Do you want to tell us a little bit about that and how important that is?
Raney Aronson-Rath
Right. I mean, one of the things after the 2016 election that was starting to really dawn upon me, and it's now obvious, is that there is such a profound lack of trust in the media right now. Actually I was on a night commission and I spent a whole year studying this with other people. It was an incredible experience for me. What we found was actually the lack of trust in the media was all the way down to the roots of the media. One of the big disruptive forces in our time right now is how disrupted local media is. So it used to be that trust would begin at a local level and then that would trickle not down, but actually up, to national. As local journalism has been really disrupted and unfortunately it's falling apart right now. National media's struggling. I think to some degree we need to hold ourselves to account to this but also I think the forces at play, like social media, really have tilted us in a direction and it's a very obvious thing to say where everything is so [inaudible 00:18:10] twitch that nobody trusts anything anymore.
Raney Aronson-Rath
The president also calling us, "Fake news," over and over and over again does not help build, obviously, credibility in the press, in the press corps. What I decided to do and Phil Bennett and Andrew Metz and others of us at the table, Sarah Childress, we put our heads together to say, "What can we do that's proactive to build trust?" The thing that we have a tradition of at Frontline is publishing our transcripts. That goes back to 1995 if you can believe it. David Fanning and his team, they wanted to publish transcripts to give people the idea that you could trust Frontline. You can look at our absolute, take off your glasses, take a look. You can look very closely at Frontline. The way that you can do that is by reading the whole interview as opposed to what's just seen in a film. What we did is we decided to take it a step. Basically technology caught up with the idea. It's a great thing. We now publish our films, the films themselves, but we also publish video interviews. So the actual video, not just the text transcripts, and they're searchable. So you can search them. You can look for the sync that you saw in the film and you can actually compare it to what was in the actual conversation.
Raney Aronson-Rath
The key to this is the idea that we want you to examine us. We want you to come under the hood of Frontline and to ask us tough questions and we want the people that we're interviewing to know we're not going to edit them out of context and we have an accountability system at Frontline that's going to publish enough that that's the case. Like, look at our underlying materials. Then you can come and ask us tough questions. We're really open to that. So that's what we do now. We've called it the Frontline Transparency Project. You'd be amazed at how many millions of views we have for these videos. People love to see unedited, real conversations with our producers and it's a huge effort. It has to be legally vetted and all of the same journalism rules applies to this as applies to a published film. If you think about it, all of this is published material so it needs to be vetted editorially and legally as well for things like libel, factual errors, lies, things that happen in interviews. We edit for that only. That's a huge effort underway at Frontline now for a number of years. I'm really proud of that.
Shaunagh Connaire
I think it's brilliant. I mean, what you've essentially done is you've made your source material available to the audience.
Raney Aronson-Rath
Exactly.
Shaunagh Connaire
So they can see you haven't, as you say Raney, edited people out of context. Your team haven't been subjective in any way. What you see is what you get so nobody could accuse you guys of being fake news or what have you.
Raney Aronson-Rath
I mean, certainly what you do, your actions, really can help. Then of course there's this social media stratosphere in which things can be taken out of context still but what we have seen is people really appreciate this effort. I mean, you should see the thousands of comments on these videos thanking us for allowing people to see the underlying materials. I know as a producer in the way back machine, my ability to be able to tell someone that I was interviewing, "Your whole transcript will be online," gave them so much ease to talk to me. It was like, instant trust. I could sit down and talk to them because they knew that they weren't going to be taken out of context. As much as they might trust me personally, everybody distrusts everyone, so I think there's a moment in which we're all thinking like, "Oh, are we going to be taken out of context? Is the one part of the interview that's really spicy going to be spiced up even," right? I think this is what we're trying to do.
Shaunagh Connaire
I think it's brilliant. Raney, I'm going to squeeze one little question in before I get to my last question.
Raney Aronson-Rath
Of course.
Shaunagh Connaire
I know because I've had the honour of working with you, but I know you're very big into joint journalism projects. You've worked with the likes of ProPublica, obviously Channel 4 and the BBC and The Financial Times, of course, recently. How important is collaborative journalism in your eyes?
Raney Aronson-Rath
Well I mean, collaboration for Frontline is everything. I mean, before it was really in vogue, we were doing it because I came from ... Actually, in fact, Frontline's always collaborated. Way ahead of itself, again. I think when I came in, my desire was to fortify our investigative journalism and I was immediately struck with I didn't have the exact solution to that because I didn't have a huge increased budget for that desire and that ambition. What I thought about immediately was how can I convene resources? This is how I think constantly and I do oversee our entire budget. At this point I'm thinking, "How do I make sure that more people see our work but most importantly that we do the bravest and biggest journalism that we can do?" That actually really started in earnest with groups like ProPublica and others where we're putting our heads together. The New York Times and recently The Financial Times, an incredible example of collaboration with you and your team. Also, The Wall Street Journal and many others where we're coming together to say, "Okay, you could have one reporter for Frontline or you could have five reporters when you put your heads together and work together."
Raney Aronson-Rath
Now, collaborations aren't easy. They're never simple but the upside is so big that we go for them often and we've never been disappointed. I mean, seriously, there's only been one collaboration that went awry and that had nothing to do with the journalists in the middle of it. That had everything to do with corporate structures and different agendas.
Shaunagh Connaire
I think I know the one but we won't go into that, Raney. Let me ask you my final question, this is one I love asking, Raney, and I always encourage my guests to throw colleagues and friends under the bus and have a bit of fun but is there a crazy moment in your career that you could tell us about that has never quite made it to air that perhaps your colleagues at Frontline don't know about? Something absolutely bonkers that you'd like to delve into?
Raney Aronson-Rath
Well you know me pretty well so I don't throw people under the bus just as a rule. I don't love media gossip but I will tell you … it has everything to do with why I ended up at Frontline. These were really profound moments for me as a person and also as a journalist and really helped me understand that I needed to do something different. I needed to find a different place to work in terms of doing journalism…. I had obtained a traunch of photographs of George W. Bush and Laura Bush and his friends during the era in which they partied and they drank a lot. The pictures were really vivid and before we did the political documentary for ABC News, the management of ABC decided not to use those photographs and there were a lot of reasonings that went into that but essentially I was a young producer in a room full of people who were making this decision and I argued forcefully to have these photographs in public because I thought they could exemplify and also visualize a period of time in which George W. Bush before he really turned the corner in his life had struggled, right?
Raney Aronson-Rath
I thought it was a really important moment. They decided otherwise and those photographs were taken from me in that moment and I'll never actually forget that as a sort of turning point in my mind of, "I think I need to probably work at a place where tough journalism is going to be supported and backed. The interesting thing about that story was, looking back in my career as a turning point, was that I actually had a copy of all of the photographs and later ... I had access to them because I was the one who had actually gotten the permission from the person to use the photographs. It was personal photographs. We actually ended up using them later in a Frontline film. That was something that I've never really shared publicly but it was a really important moment for me.
Shaunagh Connaire
That is so interesting, Raney. I mean, it sounds like you were just always destined to work in public broadcasting. Just before you go, Raney, could you just sum up why public broadcasting is so important here in the US. I genuinely don't think we can overstate it and I don't think our British audience and our Irish audience will really grasp how important the work you are doing at Frontline is because we just take public broadcasting for granted.
Raney Aronson-Rath
I appreciate that difference, actually, because I work with British broadcasters all the time. We have so many collaborations with Channel 4 and the BBC and RTE in France and just really deep collaborations. For the United States I feel like one of the things I always felt, and this goes back to the very early part of my career, is that people across the economic spectrum should have access to high quality journalism. Clear eyed, vetted, high quality journalism. If they can't afford a subscription to The New York Times or The Washington Post, they should also have and be privy to really thoughtful, deep journalism like you have on the PBS News Hour or NOVA, for example or Frontline of course, right? I just really believe that the American public needs this. They need to be educated. The other thing is that I've always felt so strongly about is PBS is actually, you don't need to pay for it as a service, right? You can just turn it on. In fact, you can just turn it on in the streaming environment, as well. Frontline's in front of the paywall so you can see and stream all of our films.
Raney Aronson-Rath
We're fully digital at this point of course, right? Also, if you can't afford cable, let's say, you can't afford Netflix. That's why this is so essential to take into account that not everybody can afford to pay for their media, for their high quality media, and that there still needs to be a place for this type of thoughtful long form journalism that really is in the public interest. That's why I continue to stay at Frontline, feel inspired to work inside PBS and inside this system that has what I believe is equity at the center. That's something that I care deeply about.
Shaunagh Connaire
Brilliant, Raney. Well so well said and thank you so much for coming on the Media Tribe Podcast.
Raney Aronson-Rath
Thank you for having me.
Shaunagh Connaire
Always a pleasure to chat, Raney. Thank you so much.
Shaunagh Connaire
If you liked what you heard on this episode of Media Tribe, tune in next week as I'll be dropping new shows every week with all sorts of legendary folk from the industry and if you could leave me a review and rating, that would be really appreciated. Also, get in touch on social media. @Shaunagh on Twitter or at Shaunagh Connaire on Instagram. Feel free to suggest new guests. Right, that's it. Until next week, see you then. This episode is edited by Ryan Ferguson.
