Paid Provocateurs

You longtime readers will no doubt recognize the name Grant Crowell. He’d be the so-called documentarian who’s spent the last two years compiling film of Ward Churchill. He periodically shows up around the internet, throwing snippets from interviews he’s conducted with the likes of Alan Dershowitz, who, hold onto your seat, doesn’t like Mr. Churchill very much.

But what you probably don’t know about Mr. Crowell, is that he hails from the Borat school of documentary making.

What am I talking about? Well, it starts with the following, a craigslist entry Mr. Crowell posted in anticipation of Ward Churchill’s recent speech at the New School. (You can find the original here, at least until Grant Crowell deletes it.)

New School student (or with New School ID) needed to attend Mon event! (Greenwich Village)

Reply to: gigs-246179505@craigslist.org
Date: 2006-12-08, 7:20PM EST

There is an event at 6 pm Monday at

New School’s Women of Color student group will be presenting the following event:

Former professor of Ethnic Studies at U. of Colorado-Boulder Ward Churchill:
“Sterilizing History: The Fabrication of ‘Innocent Americans’.”

The event will be taking place at 6 pm at:
65 5th Avenue, Swayduck AuditoriumSeating is limited to 150 attendees. Attendance is free, but those with New School IDs are let in first.

I am looking for someone who has a New School ID who can attend this event and record it. (I will provide a recording device). You will be paid extra if you also ask the speaker a prepared question on my behalf. I will be at the event and you will get paid after the event is over. (I can also do PayPal.) Please include your name and phone # and I will contact you over this weekend with more info.

* It’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

* Compensation: $100, plus $50 extra for every question you ask and get answered by speaker

246179505

I’d long known that Mr. Crowell was attempting to illegally record Ward Churchill’s speeches. But I wasn’t aware he was using his plants to ask scripted questions, thus providing the appearance there’s some grassroots opposition to Ward Churchill. (Which, given the fact he’s having to pay off college students and the unemployed, it seems fair to assume there ain’t.) One can’t but be reminded of the gentleman at The National American Indian Movement drafting homeless drug addicts to protest outside of Mr. Churchill’s talks.

But, now that I’ve piqued your interest, how’d you like to see Mr. Crowell’s last round of scripted questions?

Here they are, unedited, straight from an anonymous tipster.

#1) Ever since your controversial essay nearly 2 years ago comparing the victims of 9/11 to “Little Eichmanns,” you’ve done many speaking engagements on college campuses, a lot of them paid for with student fees (like this one). I’ve heard that you receive up to $5K per speaking engagement. Can you tell us if you have ever donated any speaker money to a charity, like for the families who lost loved ones in 9/11, or for Iraqi children, or for a Indian charity? If not, would you be willing to give some of what you’ve already made from being here?

#2) You have said that you believe “white is a state of mind,” and that “Condoleezza Rice is the whitest person I (you) know.” Do youalso believe that all ethnicity is a state of mind, like claiming to be an Indian?

#3) You have said that you believe “white is a state of mind,” and that “Condoleezza Rice is the whitest person I (you) know.” Since you’ve said that white people shouldn’t judge whether or not you have any Indian ancestry, do you think its appropriate for you to judge a person of color on their own ethnicity?

#4) Do you believe that taking a DNA test could prove whether or not you have an Indian ancestry? If so, why aren’t you willing to take it and silence the critics?

#5) There is a press release out today by your ex-sister in law, Rhonda Kelly, an Ojibway woman claiming that you were extremely abusive to her sister and your 3rd wife, Leah Kelly, including cheating on her. Your ex wives have said that you were the same to them as well and some of them now do work with domestic violence groups, which they say was based on their experience with you. Do you find it ironic that this event is being sponsored by a women’s group?

#6) When you were investigated by the University of Colorado’s Standing Committee on Research Misconduct, you said something to your defense that you had plagiarized yourself’ – meaning, you wrote academic papers for other people and let them put their name on so it could seem like they were quoting you. You said it was acceptable to do this because the person you did it for agreed with what you wrote. My question is, if I turned in a paper for class that someone else wrote, Can I say to the teach that they should count it towards my grade because professor Ward Churchill does it, too?

Even better, according to my tipster, Mr. Crowell wasn’t content to just pay off his student to ask questions.

He was paying them to provide staged interviews after the speech.

Y’know, to appear in his, ahem, “documentary.”

Which leads me to wonder, assuming this monstrosity ever hits the cinemas, which interviews are we to assume actually reflect the views of the interviewee, and which scripted by Mr. Crowell?

Seems like a fair question. (Though, of course, given that he’s still filming two years into the project, and has now resorted to bribing the unemployed for comment, I’m not convinced it’ll ever see light of day.) Also, given the, shall we say, less than forthrightness of Mr. Crowell’s process, what the hell are we supposed to believe about any of the folks standing up to ask questions at any of Mr. Churchill’s speeches?

After all, I think it’s fair to assume that if Mr. Crowell did this once, there’s no reason not to think he’s been doing it all along. (And, please, if you recognize any of these questions from a show you were at or have heard footage of, email me at benjamin.whitmer@gmail.com)

In other words, not only is every moment of his documentary about as genuine as a Don Rumsfeld handshake, so is every one of those (admittedly few and far between) Churchill antagonists who show up at his speeches, and so is every interview included in Mr. Crowell’s movie.

There’s a reason, after all, that professional journalists refuse to pay interviewees. I just finished reading AK-47: The Weapon That Changed The Face of War, for instance, and the author refused to include an interview with Mikhail Kalashnikov, the weapon’s inventor, because Kalashnikov wouldn’t be interviewed without compensation.

You see, as every journalist understands, when you pay for interviews, there’s a fairly obvious qui pro quo involved.

Furthermore, there are additional questions raised by Mr. Crowell’s tactics.

1. Where’s Mr. Crowell getting the money for this? Se’s been at it for 2 years, nonstop, and that’s gotta be pricey, so who’s underwriting him?

2. These talks are performances. They’re contracted as such, just like a rock concert (or whatever). So, both the material presented and the presentations themselves are Mr. Churchill’s property in exactly the same sense that a Rolling Stones concert is the property of the Rolling Stones. The fact that the performance is delivered in public does not license any yo-yo with a tape recorder to record and peddle the results for whatever purpose s/he decides. That’s called “bootlegging,” and it’s not only unethical, it’s illegal (both civil and criminal penalties may apply).

3. Mr. Churchill has every right to make disposition of his property as he sees fit. This includes the right to decide who, if anyone, records his performances: e.g., that WBAI, working in conjunction with the sponsoring students, would be allowed to record the New School event, but that NBC would not (unlike Fox, by the way, NBC complied with the rules).

4. It was clearly announced at the beginning of the program that WBAI alone had permission to record it, and that anyone else in the room with recording equipment should turn it off immediately. So there can be no question as to whether the violation of Ward Churchill’s rights—as well as those of the sponsoring students and WBAI—by those who surreptitiously recorded the event and then used the results for their own purposes was deliberate. It was.

5, In so-doing, the offenders, among other things, materially damaged Ward Churchill’s ability to convert his performance (property) into a longer-term product such as a spoken word CD or DVD (both of which Churchill’s got on the market). This is not simply a question of personal profit. Perhaps the resulting CD would be used for charitable purposes: i.e., to raise relief funds for Katrina victims. Or as a fundraiser for an organization (WBAI, for example, or the Women of Color group at the New School). He does such things on a regular basis, as can be easily verified. The point is, it’s Ward Churchill’s choice to make, not Grant Crowell’s, or Sean Hannity’s, or Jim Paine’s (funny how situational these rightwingers’ “bedrock commitment” to property rights turns out to be in practice, ain’t it?).

6. Crowell’s enlistment of paid surrogates to engage in illegal activities is beginning to smack of what’s referred to as a “criminal enterprise.” And, rumor has it that it is only because Ward Churchill’s plate has been rather full with CU horseshit for the last little while that he’s not yet dealt with the Crowell situation in the manner it deserves. His encumberance in that regard is ultimately transient, however. And Crowell’s fairly high on Mr. Churchill’s list of flies to swat in the immediate aftermath.

Whatever happens in the courts, we think that, given all of the above, it only makes sense to consign Mr. Crowell and his “documentary” to the same heap of con-men that constitute the anti-Churchill bloc, including William Bradford, David Yeagley, and the Rocky Mountain News’ professional genealogist, Jim Paine.

With this caveat. While each of the above have played their fair share of filthy tricks in the interest of discrediting Churchill, none have come within spitting distance of Crowell.

Paying hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to the unemployed to get staged footage of someone (anyone) attacking Mr. Churchill, and then passing it off as an unscripted, natural reaction, suggests one of two possibilities. Either Mr. Crowell is being heavily backed by a second party, as noted above, or his old crankcase is firing with just about the same precision as Snapple’s.

Update: My encounter with one of Crowell’s cronies at a student-sponsored teach-in here.