- Born
- Died
- Birth nameGavin Hall Galter
- Gavin MacFadyen is an Investigative Journalist, Film Director-Producer and Teacher. He's a Visiting Professor at City University London and the Director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ), an international training charity founded in 2003. MacFaydyen has been a Senior producer-director of many World in Action, Channel 4 Dispatches, BBC's Fine Cut, 24 Hours, Panorama, The Money Programme, Multi Cultural Birmingham, PBS Frontline programmes from 1970 to the present.
These investigations were researched, directed and produced in Britain, Ecuador, Guyana, South Africa, Mexico, Hong Kong, Thailand, the USSR, the US, Sweden, India and Turkey. Subjects ranged from nuclear proliferation, child labour, the torture of political prisoners in Turkey and Bolivia, UK industrial accidents, UK neo-Nazi violence, Chinese criminal societies, the history of the CIA, Guyana election fraud, Watergate, maritime safety, sanctions-busting and the Iraq arms trade, as well as Frank Sinatra & The Mafia, the Diamond Empire, and Regional Cuisines of India. Undercover filming abroad was conducted in Hong Kong, Macau, Thailand, New York, Washington, Turkey, Greece, Nicaragua, Portugal, and the Netherlands.
MacFadyen is also the Director of the International Journalism Summer Schools in the UK and a mentor at the Fact/Fiction Workshops run by Performing Arts Labs.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous
- SpousesSusan Benn(? - October 22, 2016) (his death)Virginia Daum (divorced, 1 child)
- [on journalistic online research] If somebody put something up on the Web five years ago and it's long gone, can you find it? I think you probably know: You can. Nothing is gone from the Web. That's the astonishing thing. You have to find the little engine that will get you there. And in this case it's called the Internet Archive or the Way Back Machine. And the Way Back Machine will tell you everything you ask for about something that happened in the past. You've got to be very specific in what you enquire, like the site for Nestlé cocoa October of such and such a date. And it will take you there. If they logged that day, it will be there. They miss some things, but on the whole it's very accurate. We have a website in the group that I run which has nothing but information of this kind. So if you go on the website, which is called www.tcij.org [The Center for Investigative Journalism], and look for resources and books and things like that, we publish all that stuff. It's free.[2013]
- [on representation] You could make a case that all the biggest American failures, which are pretty significant - like the war in Vietnam, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan - all these are failures. And yet no one makes any films about failures. I mean it's really quite astonishing. I'm sure you know this, but the Gulf of Tonkin - the famous incident which started and legitimized President Lyndon B. Johnson's war in Vietnam - was a total fiction. Just like WMD. And nobody at any time questioned it until very recently. Under the Freedom of Information Act, we've got the documents now that prove they invented that, too. As described, it never happened. And the captain signed a deposition saying: It's not in my recollection. This is the thing that started a war that killed three million people, and he has no recollection. It's astonishing. Then they wonder why people question the integrity of all these institutions that promote this kind of nonsense. So we have an unusual obligation then in telling the truth, to try to tell not the respectable truth, but what the truth really might be in the best reading we can give it. And that's something very difficult. Very difficult.[2013]
- [on interests that shape media] For example, one of the big films that I wanted to make and didn't make was a film called "The Henry and Adolf Show". And it was to be a fictionalized account of Henry Ford's support for Adolf Hitler, which was significant. He was the largest foreign contributor to the Nazis. In the very early days, it has to be said as well. His financial support began in 1921, when most people in Germany had very little knowledge of Hitler. By 1923-24, he was getting known. But Ford was giving huge sums of money through the German Ambassador in the States, who had been invited to Detroit, which was the headquarters of the Ford Empire, and received the money in the Detroit Opera House. They shared a box, and the envelopes would change hands. And the Ambassador would get back to Germany with a big check. I've tried to tell that story many times, but I've gotten absolutely nowhere. "A good next story, please." [audience laughter] They have no interest in telling what we know to be true now. So it's very tricky to tell a story that isn't a respectable story, which is the obverse of All the President's Men (1976), where sections of the establishment really wanted that story told because they wanted to get rid of Richard Nixon. I'm glad they decided to get rid of him. But nonetheless, it wasn't an open and closed case at all. It wasn't two intrepid reporters risking all hell on earth to tell this fantastic story. I mean they were supported by the biggest newspaper tycoon in America and virtually the operational head of the FBI. That's a hell of an ally to have if you're telling any story.[2013]
- [on 'blind spots' in journalism] I should say, too, that the real question about All the President's Men (1976) was not how they told the story. It's about who paid for the story. Why was that film made? It's very unusual for a major newspaper in any country to attack the president of the United States or a major official with a volley of enormous power, over and over again, every day. Front page stories. I mean, that's a policy. That's not a breaking story; that's a policy. You take that decision. And they took that decision. One woman took that decision. The woman, Katharine Graham, who owned the Washington Post. Nobody ever thought to ask her: Why did you do that? She didn't care about Nixon or anybody else for that matter. She was more important in some respect. But clearly the decision had been taken, which the audience was unaware of, that it was okay to attack the president of the United States and drive him from office, which she succeeded in doing. That central fact, which is much more important than what these two reporters did, is not even mentioned. It[the film] never even raises the question.[2013]
- I worked a lot [as a technical advisor] on The Insider (1999) - the Michael Mann film with Al Pacino about the tobacco scandal. I found it to be the only honest [feature] film that I've ever had anything to do with. Right or wrong, it didn't matter. I agreed with everything in it. But it was also a very honest film about the dilemmas that all these people faced and had to deal with. In that respect, it's quite unique.[2013]
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