{"id":1490,"date":"2017-03-02T16:00:48","date_gmt":"2017-03-02T16:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2017\/03\/02\/5ish-questions-latino-usa-producer-marlon-bishop-on-the-backstory-of-the-npr-shows-most-downloaded-episode-ever\/"},"modified":"2024-04-22T14:18:18","modified_gmt":"2024-04-22T14:18:18","slug":"5ish-questions-latino-usa-producer-marlon-bishop-on-the-backstory-of-the-npr-shows-most-downloaded-episode-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2017\/03\/02\/5ish-questions-latino-usa-producer-marlon-bishop-on-the-backstory-of-the-npr-shows-most-downloaded-episode-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"5(ish) Questions: Latino USA producer Marlon Bishop on the backstory of the NPR show\u2019s most downloaded episode ever"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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To the FBI, he was one of the most dangerous revolutionaries in the United States. To his supporters in the Puerto Rican independence movement, he was a freedom fighter.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Thirty-five years later, in an era when the politics \u2013 and the politicization \u2013 of language is a hot-button issue, the question remains a divisive one: Was Oscar L\u00f3pez Rivera a terrorist, or a hero?<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Last month, in one of his final acts in office, then-President Obama commuted the sentence of the 74-year-old L\u00f3pez, who had been convicted for his role in a group linked to a series of bombings from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Predictably, the reaction was mixed: High-profile supporters who had long called for his release praised the president. \u201cHamilton\u201d creator Lin-Manuel Miranda tweeted: \u201cSobbing with gratitude here in London. OSCAR LOPEZ RIVERA IS COMING HOME. THANK YOU, @POTUS.\u201d But there was plenty of negative reaction to L\u00f3pez\u2019s release, too, including a feature article from Politico<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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It was a moment of reporting serendipity for the NPR program Latino USA, which had been working on a piece about L\u00f3pez for more than a year. Just 10 days after L\u00f3pez was freed, the episode aired, and became the most-downloaded episode in Latino USA\u2019s 20-year history.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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A few years ago, as a \u201cFree Oscar\u201d movement began to gain momentum in Puerto Rico and New York, L\u00f3pez\u2019s case had begun to pique the interest of Marlon Bishop, a 31-year-old Peabody Award-winning journalist and producer of Latino USA.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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By 2016, Bishop was deep into researching L\u00f3pez\u2019s story, and he and the Latino USA team had decided to commit a full segment to the complicated, controversial L\u00f3pez\u2026 all this without expecting that L\u00f3pez\u2019s sentence would be commuted by Obama and that their show<\/a>\u2014nearly a year in the making\u2014would have that magic journalism moment: appearing clairvoyant about a big breaking news story.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I spoke with Bishop the day after L\u00f3pez was released from federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, and returned to Puerto Rico to be reunited with his family. We talked about the backstory of researching and reporting such a complicated and controversial story.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Answers have been slightly edited and condensed for ease of reading.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I\u2019d love to <\/strong>start by talking about how you and Latino USA decided to do a story on Oscar L\u00f3pez Rivera. Can you tell us when and how his story was raised as a possible subject for the show, and what kind of discussion was had around the decision to devote an entire episode to tell his story?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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At some point, we knew we wanted to do a story and I think it was almost a year after we first had the idea that we started reporting on it. We got in touch with a few people in Chicago \u2014 namely, Oscar\u2019s brother, Jos\u00e9 L\u00f3pez, in Humboldt Park, and his lawyer,\u00a0Jan Susler<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 and we went out to Chicago for a weekend, where Mar\u00eda [Hinojosa, the host of Latino USA] is from, and hung out in Humboldt Park, a Puerto Rican neighborhood. We met a lot of people. We didn\u2019t really know a lot about the story at that point, to be honest. We kind of got all of those interviews about who Oscar was without having this super-detailed kind of backstory. It was after that that we realized, \u201cWow, this goes extremely deep.\u201d You could write books about Oscar L\u00f3pez Rivera and the FALN.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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It\u2019s something that, for me personally \u2013 me and Mar\u00eda come from different perspectives. We\u2019re different ages. I\u2019m 31, grew up not in the time of radical bombings and radical activism in the U.S., and just to imagine this world, this giant ideological battle between capitalism and communism that was playing out\u2026 the idea that there were bombs going off all the time in the 1970s seemed so foreign and out of a movie to me, almost. And for Mar\u00eda, she had a different perspective, being more familiar with that. And so, that was what drove my interest from a storytelling perspective. It felt really relevant. It was a period of a lot of political upheaval and tumult, so to see what were the reactions and solutions and perhaps overreactions that activists in the \u201970s had in response to what they saw as the need to resist\u2026.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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From there, we started reading books, reading court documents and trying to find out as much as we possibly could about the story. We spoke with people from the FBI, we spoke with a lot of people in the Puerto Rican [independence movement] world.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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When did you make direct contact with Oscar himself, and what were the challenges and opportunities of interviewing someone who was incarcerated and building an entire episode around him?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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That was in October 2016. We did one long, two-hour telephone\u00a0i<\/strong>nterview with Oscar. His lawyer helped us to set it up. To be honest, it was pretty easy to work with the prison. They were very accommodating. We had to put in a request by letter. We did ask for an in-person interview, but we were denied. He hadn\u2019t been allowed in-person interviews for a long time.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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We had one opportunity to talk with him, so we needed to get as much as we could. We needed to make sure we developed a relationship enough to ask tough questions and get honest answers in that one interview. In an ideal world, when you\u2019re doing a documentary about someone, you want to have the opportunity to go back and build off your relationship. The other challenge was audio quality; we were doing the interview by phone, and phone audio quality is unpredictable. It\u2019s not perfect.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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In a 2013 protest demanding Oscar Lopez Rivera, Providencia Trabal stands in a mock cell in San Juan, Puerto Rico. (Ricardo Arduengo\/Associated Press)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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But I think we\u2019re all drawn to stories of people behind bars because it\u2019s this other world that, if you haven\u2019t experienced it, is so hard to fathom, especially when you\u2019re talking about 35 years in prison. We\u2019re fascinated by questions of justice and freedom.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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In terms of rapport with Oscar, he\u2019s a great talker. He opened up to Mar\u00eda quite fast. Mar\u00eda has cultivated a reputation over decades as someone who really takes care to tell Latino stories, and that reputation opens all sorts of doors all the time to people who inherently trust her with their stories. They had a great interview and I think Mar\u00eda showed that she was going to ask him the tough questions along the lines of did he build bombs, etc., but who was also willing to really draw out a sense of empathy for his life story.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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In the episode, you engage a thorny issue: There are people who view L\u00f3pez as a terrorist, and there are those who view him as a hero of Puerto Rican independence efforts. Can we talk about how these kinds of words are used by media to either elucidate or obscure stories, Lopez\u2019s in particular? As a producer, how did you negotiate those poles?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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As much as possible, the decisions that we came to were to not bring that into the reporting. These issues are inherently challenging. As journalists, what do we gain by labeling him as a terrorist versus a freedom fighter? More important is to give the facts in the most honest way possible and allow people to make their own decisions. For us, it was a choice to talk more about what people did than about what people are.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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One thing that I was thinking about a lot was \u2013 so many of the contemporary accounts of what the FALN did\u2014if you listen to the news accounts of the time, some of the ones we play\u2014they\u2019re really all from the perspective of the United States, mainstream, white America, which is one perspective. But what we wanted to do was also show \u2013 to not have this story told by the FBI. We wanted to tell this story by both: by having the people who were in the FALN, who were in the circles around Oscar, who were dealing with those feelings of alienation. We also wanted the voice of the FBI. But an important part of the mission of Latino USA is rebalancing or bringing a broader perspective to how we report the news, how we tell stories, and from what perspectives they\u2019re told. And so that was our goal: not to give just the perspective of Oscar\u2019s supporters or to the FBI, but to tell the story from a kind of Puerto Rican perspective and allow you to get to know some people who may or may not have committed some heinous acts.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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One of the issues you were dealing with, too, was the complexity of the Puerto Rico-mainland U.S. relationship. If you have an audience that\u2019s not starting out with basic understanding of the fact that Puerto Rico is essentially a territory, and your story has way more nuance, how do you provide the necessary context to tell a story like this one?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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That\u2019s something we address in the opening of the episode: Open a newspaper, and point to the story about Puerto Rico. You can\u2019t. There isn\u2019t one. Ingrained into Puerto Rico\u2019s status is its invisibility. Even if you don\u2019t agree with Oscar\u2019s choice to take up arms, you can kind of understand where he was and the kind of alienation he felt in Chicago as a young man, and the way he felt fighting for the U.S. in Vietnam when his own home was this colonialized place. That\u2019s what I\u2019m hoping to get across.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Can you tell us more about the research process for this episode? Where did it take you, literally and figuratively?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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A woman waves a Puerto Rican flag in San Juan after learning that President Obama had commuted the sentence for Puerto Rican nationalist Oscar Lopez Rivera. (Carlos Giusti\/Associated Press)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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We would have liked to go to Puerto Rico and it was part of our original plan, but we ultimately did not go there. We already had so many interviews\u2014I had some 20 or 30 hours of interviews to cut together\u2014and I realized if we were to take another trip, it was going to become impossible. We had enough characters. Both Mar\u00eda and I have reported from Puerto Rico quite a bit over the years, so we were both familiar with the context. It would have been cool to have gone to Oscar\u2019s hometown of San Sebasti\u00e1n and meet some of the other former FALN members who ended up in Puerto Rico after their sentences, but we didn\u2019t get a chance to do that. I went to Chicago twice and interviewed a bunch of people remotely: an FBI guy in California, a guy who wrote a book in Austin, and we got a lot of old television clips we had to buy from an archive at Vanderbilt University\u2026. The main bulk of the reporting was done in the two reporting trips to Chicago.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What kind of feedback have you gotten from listeners about this episode? And with the news that L\u00f3pez returned to Puerto Rico yesterday, do you have any plans to follow up with him in the future?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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This episode did really well for us. It was our biggest number of downloads ever, and I got a lot of feedback from people who reached out to me individually to say it was a great, gripping story. Interestingly, I don\u2019t feel like most of the feedback was from people who wanted to take one side or the other. Most people seemed to feel torn by the freedom fighter-terrorist question in the end. But the feedback has been positive.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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As to whether we\u2019ll follow up with him, we were definitely thinking about an Oscar sequel. I would love to. We\u2019ll see what opportunities come up, whether he\u2019ll become a public figure or not, or whether he has more of a private life. I think some kind of follow-up will definitely happen at some point.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A show that was more than a year in the making about the controversial prisoner Oscar L\u00f3pez Rivera scored journalism gold, coming out just days after the Puerto Rican was freed<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6262,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[243],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-1490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-5-questions","authors-julie-schwietert-collazo"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n5(ish) Questions: Latino USA producer Marlon Bishop on the backstory of the NPR show\u2019s most downloaded episode ever - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2017\/03\/02\/5ish-questions-latino-usa-producer-marlon-bishop-on-the-backstory-of-the-npr-shows-most-downloaded-episode-ever\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"5(ish) Questions: Latino USA producer Marlon Bishop on the backstory of the NPR show\u2019s most downloaded episode ever - 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