“Big Boys” Plays Washington

Nov 14, 2012

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The West End Cinema will host a screening of “Big Boys Gone Bananas,” which documents the efforts of the Dole fruit company to block release of a film on the company’s use of a pesticide banned in the United States on banana plantations in Nicaragua. This special screening includes a brief introduction to the film by Alex Gibney, and an interview with the director of the film Fredrik Gertten.

Following the film, 100Reporters will host a brief panel discussion at the West End featuring Ken Silverstein, a member of 100Reporters and contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine, and Theodore Frank, a partner at Arnold & Porter who has litigated First Amendment cases. Diana Jean Schemo, executive editor of 100Reporters, will moderate.

What: Big Boys Gone Bananas, a film by Fredrik Gertten, followed by panel discussion and Q & A sponsored by 100Reporters.

When: Monday, November 26, at 7:30 p.m.

Where: West End Cinema, 2301 M Street, N.W.

Washington, D.C.

Who: Ken Silverstein

Theodore Frank

Diana Jean Schemo

How: Tickets available at the West End Cinema website, or by clicking here.

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Ken Silverstein, a freelance writer, was the former Washington editor for Harper’s magazine and is currently a contributing editor for the magazine. He has profiled Barack Obama and led major investigations into arms trafficking, money laundering and corruption in the international oil business for the magazine. He was a former reporter for The Los Angeles Times, and has also written for Foreign Policy, Mother Jones, Wallpaper, Slate, and Salon. From 1989 to 1993 he was a correspondent for the Associated Press in Brazil. His stories on ties between the government of Equatorial Guinea and major U.S. companiesâ€”including Riggs Bank, ExxonMobil and Marathon Oilâ€”led to the convening of a federal grand jury, and to investigations by the Senate and the Securities and Exchange Commission. His report, co-written with Chuck Neubauer, on a lobbying business opened by Karen Weldon, daughter of Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, led to a federal investigation. Silverstein’s 2004 series in The Los Angeles Times, “The Politics of Petroleum,” won an Overseas Press Club Award. He received his B.A. from The Evergreen State College.

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Ted Frank is a Senior Counsel at Arnold & Porter. He is a graduate of the University of Texas School of Law, where he was an editor of the Law Review. Upon graduation from law school, he clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and then took a teaching fellowship at Harvard Law School, where he earned an LL.M.

Ted has been practicing communications law for over 40 years. He has represented both broadcasters and telecommunications companies before the FCC and in the Court. His broadcast work has included advising broadcasters on a wide variety of matters, including First Amendment issues, defamation, invasion of privacy, and related issues outside the jurisdiction of the FCC. He represented PBS in connection with its broadcast of the Death of A Princess and Choosing Suicide programs and First Amendment challenges to PBS’s ability to select the programming it distributes. He has also successfully defended First Amendment challenges to the ability of public broadcasters licensed to State entities to select participants in election debates and related programming. He has successfully defended broadcast clients charged with broadcasting indecent material.

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Diana Jean Schemo is executive editor and co-founder of 100Reporters. She is an author and award-winning veteran national and foreign correspondent, with more than twenty-five years at The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun. She has covered poverty and child abuse, religion and culture. The Times nominated her coverage of education for a Pulitzer Prize in 2003.

As bureau chief for the Times in Rio de Janeiro from 1995 to 1999, Schemo tracked the drug war in Colombia, and that country’s brutal conflict between leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitaries. Her stories chronicled the rise of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, counterfeiting in Paraguay, indentured servitude in Brazil, and journeys to the heartland of Brazil, where she wrote of previously uncontacted native tribes.

Before joining the Times, Schemo became the first woman assigned overseas for The Baltimore Sun, heading the paper’s West European bureau in Paris and, upon the fall of the Berlin Wall, opening a second bureau in Berlin. She covered the trial of Klaus Barbie, the infamous “Butcher of Lyon,” nuclear arms negotiations, the Kurdish exodus from Iraq following the first Gulf War, and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. She has reported from more than twenty-five countries and regions, from Somalia to Israel, Iraq to the Amazon. She is a three time winner of the Times Publisher’s Awards, and other prizes.

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Diana Jean Schemo

Diana Jean Schemo is president and executive editor of 100Reporters, and the founder and co-director of the Double Exposure Film Festival and Symposium, the United States' only investigative film festival.