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Jon Alpert’s Acceptance Speech – Part III



CAUTION: Jon Alpert’s powerful films contain images, including scenes of human suffering and death, that may be disturbing to some people. This material is not suitable for children. Viewer discretion is advised.


Jon Alpert: I spent a lot of time in Nicaragua. I’d like to show you an example of one of the reports. This is three years later during the Contra war when President Reagan funded and equipped an army to attack Nicaragua from the North and this is in a place called Wiwilli and this is the Battle of Wiwilli. I’m with the Sandinista army being attacked by the Contras.

[Video plays]: The Battle of Wiwilli 1983
- [Gun Fire] [Yelling] It’s upside down! What did he do? What’s that?
- He made a mistake? (Shooting) There’s a dead guy down there?
- That’s right. One of them, Contra? Yes? How many Contras died today? [Cuanto Contra moriendo?] About?
- About 12 or 13. Twelve or 13?
- Is this a victory for you?
- We need the pencils and notebooks to learn to write and to read, you know. We need food. And all Reagan sent us is death.
Jon Alpert: There were a lot of unfortunate things going on in the world at that time and we managed to find a lot of them. It attracted the attention of a lot of the right-wing media groups. The one that was most active was a group called Accuracy in Media and they couldn’t decide who they hated more, me or Dan Rather. So, they would, for each issue of their magazine, would trade off who they were taking shots at, me or Dan Rather. They went and they bought stock in RCA Corporation that owned NBC. They organized boycotts trying to get the cereal makers and the Kleenex people to not advertise on NBC specifically because of our reports.

It’s interesting. They showed up at the stockholders meeting once and they demanded Thornton Bradshaw, who is the head of RCA, why he put our programs on the air. He said, “Well, I don’t necessarily agree with everything that Jon says, but every time one of his reports is on, I learn something. Thornton Bradshaw was sort of a Renaissance corporate executive. He was one of the first corporate executives to demand that corporations be ecologically responsible. He taught at Harvard Business School when my dad went there. It was one of the first times my dad acknowledged that I was doing something that he was proud of. Because one of his heroes, Thornton Bradshaw, had something nice to say about me. But it got really hot at NBC and so I was advised that maybe it would be a good idea to stay away from things outside the United States where I might bump into American Foreign Policy and incur the wrath of some of these organizations. Why don’t I just look around the United States and try to stay out of trouble.

So we broke the story of urban homelessness, the struggle of the family farmers. Then we decided we wanted to do something about industrial disease. It is a big problem in the United States. It’s going to be less and less of a problem in the future because we are not going to have any factories anymore.

There is something called the hard metals disease. Hard metals disease occurs when you’re grinding metal and the dust comes into your lungs, specifically cobalt dust that they use as a hardener to make very, very hard metal. It destroys your lungs. It’s like giving you coal miner’s disease, black lung disease. We found a group of workers in upstate New York who were suffering from this and began to follow them. The name of the corporation was the Valenite Corporation. We went to many of their factories and at every single one of their factories, we found sick workers. And so, this is from their factory out in California where the workers are already suffering from hard metals disease.

[Video plays]: Hard Metals Disease 1987
- Cathy: At first it was like an ordinary job until I started having breathing problems and coughing problems. Then it was just a chore just to get into work. I coughed constantly. And I coughed until I vomited.
- Cathy is back in the hospital and she is really, really bad. This is Cathy’s mom. This is her father.
- That was her graduation picture in 1976.
- And when you look at your daughter now?
- Mother: I feel sorry for her. She cannot live the life she [inaudible]. Valenite Corporation has agreed to pay all the bills for Cathy’s disease. Many of times they are not paying and it goes on and on and on.
- Father: I am paying for the medical bills out of my life savings, mine and my wife’s.
- [Inaudible] looking in the mirror because one of these days they are going to pay and I hope they pay dearly.
Jon Alpert: [The workers in the factories became my friends and] we set about not only documenting what was happening to the workers, but proving why it happened. We enlisted the cooperation of some scientists and with the help of the scientists and with these air monitoring devices, we snuck into every Valenite factory in the United States. Did we break the law? We broke the law. We trespassed. We went onto corporate property and we tested the air in every single one of these factories and here’s an example. Not only were their factories in the United States dirty, the factories in Canada as well.

[Video plays]:
- This is the type of pump that can be used to make that sort of determination.
- What do you think of your husband wearing this back to the factory?
- I know it kind of jeopardizes his job if he ever got caught, but if it helps to find out the truth, that’s what we’re interested in.
- Can we get in?
- Yeah.
- Where is everybody else? They left?
- Yeah, this is a Friday night shift. Only two of us working right now.
- What are you doing tonight?
- I’m grinding a job for GM.
  [Loud buzzing from machinery]
- Hey, is there anything to suck that dust away from your lungs?
- No, they don’t have anything for that.
- It just goes right there? There is no ventilation or anything?
- That is our ventilation.
- That hole up there?
- That’s it.
- And that is supposed to ventilate all of these machines?
- Yup. You can see all of the carbide dust just laying on top of everything here.
- So, that stuff does float through the air, huh?
- Yes, how else would it have got up here?
- (New speaker) The air in that factory contained twenty-three times more cobalt than is permitted by American and Canadian law. It will destroy their lungs. They will get the classic symptoms of hard metals disease.
- (New speaker) After receiving your results of your sampling that was done in this building, we did a little investigating on our own. We found as early as 1974 the Ontario Ministry of Labor was in this building doing air sampling. Their findings were excessive levels of cobalt dust. They were ordered to clean it up. That’s not half the battle. They came back in 1978, again in 1979, again in 1980. Each year, came back and ordered the company to clean up the dust.
- My husband has the hard metals disease and I just can’t sit back knowing what we know and knowing what we found out in the last month and a half and not try to stop, even if we just try to stop one more person from getting the disease, I’ll be happy.
Jon Alpert: [So, these reports began playing on NBC.] What was the response of the company? I got death threats, which is interesting. I had been threatened other ways before, but I hadn’t gotten death threats before. One by one, they began closing their factories in the United States and Canada and shipping all the machines two hundred feet south of the border to Mexicali, Mexico where they can pay the Mexicans a quarter of the wages and poisoned them down there. So, we went to Mexico. So, here is the next part of the report.

[Video plays]:
- We’re flying along the border between the United States and Mexico. On the left hand side is the United States which is primarily agricultural. If you look out the right hand side of the aircraft, you see one of the industrial parts of Mexicali, Mexico. That white building with the horizontal olive drab stripe, that is the Valenite building.
- Do you get dirty? You get dust on your hands.
- It doesn’t come off?
- When you blow your knows, you get the grey stuff come out of your nose.
[Translating to Spanish]
- What does that mean, Frank?
- It means the dust is getting in their lungs?
- What is going to happen to them?
- Some of them are going to get sick.
Jon Alpert: [So, we spent the rest of that day in the jail in] Mexicali, Mexico and managed to get out and broadcast these reports. As a result of these reports, the safety director of the Valenite Corporation went to jail. Unfortunately, they did something called an intermittent sentence. So, he only had to go to jail on the weekends. And because he took the hit for the company, they bought him a Porsche. So, he would get in his Porsche in suburban Detroit, drive into the jail, spend the weekend in the jail, get in his Porsche and drive back. But it was one of the first times and it was very specifically told to us by the federal prosecutor that it was our reports that caused them to prosecute and enable the conviction of this man for poisoning the workers. At this time, General Electric bought NBC.  Everybody was worried—How was this going to affect journalistic independence? General Electric is a company that has a lot of military work. It is an infamous polluter. It did just horrific things to the Hudson River. It involved nuclear energy. Who is going to dare make a report about some of General Electric’s activities?

Everybody was always looking for somebody who’s like stupid enough to get in the ring with the big bully. I’ve always been pretty stupid, so it came to our attention that General Electric was in the same exact business as Valeron. They had two or three factories in the Detroit area serving the auto industry with these cobalt tools. So, we got the OSHA reports. We had pretty old reports from the early 1950s and it showed that not only was the factory dirtier, but it was around ten times dirtier than the company we had just been chasing for the past five years. So, GE had been running death traps. Now this wasn’t something that these guys didn’t know about. There are corporate memos from the late 1940s that document that all these companies and their association knew the affect of cobalt powder and knew what caused hard metals disease.

So, everybody is going, “Great! Jon’s going to fight GE and this is going to be our test case for asserting our journalistic independence.” And I thought “these are pretty old studies. Why don’t we give GE a break? Let’s assume that this was decades ago.” If they’ve cleaned up their factories in an era where we are more conscious about safety at the workplace, let’s let this slide. Why put my head in the guillotine? So, we got the latest test results and the factories were still dirty. They were very dirty. They were around ten times over the permitted limit. We went out to the factories and we found the sick workers.—same symptoms, people couldn’t breathe. Take you to the cemeteries with the graves of the dead workers… And the doctor that treated them wanted to come on the Today Show because his dad was an automobile worker who had died of industrial disease and he wanted to tell the worker’s story.

So everything was scheduled to go on the Today Show. Everybody’s got their ringside seats. The day before the broadcast, I got a phone call from the OSHA scientist who had given us the data and he was almost crying on the phone. He said, “Jon, I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’ve reversed the numerator and the denominator in one of the equations and my numbers were all wrong and my new numbers miraculously bring in GE this much under the limit and their factories are legally clean. I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” He says, “No, no, no, no! This is true! This is true! This is true!” I didn’t believe him. I didn’t know what to do. I said well, I still have the doctor and I still have the sick workers. So I called up the doctor and I said, well, listen, will you come on the show. He said, “Who is this?” I said, “This is Jon Alpert.” He says, “I don’t know you.” I said, “Doctor, I’ve been talking to you for the last two weeks.” He says, “I’ve never heard of you. I don’t want you calling me. Never call me again.” And he hung up the phone. So somebody had gotten to OSHA. Somebody had gotten to the doctor. At that particular point, it was suicidal for us to try to take on GE when we didn’t have the evidence and we had to put the story away. I knew that they had killed people in their factories and I couldn’t do anything about it.

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