‘Telemarketers’ unpacks systemic scamming, CNN gets a new CEO

The Business

KCRW

Tv & Film

4.5 • 699 Ratings

🗓️ 1 September 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

First, Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav hires former New York Times executive Mark Thompson to head CNN. Will Thompson turn the struggling network around?

Then, directors Sam Lipman-Stern and Adam Lough talk with NPR TV critic Eric Deggans about their HBO documentary, Telemarketers and share how their work helped investigate fraudulent charitable organizations. They also discuss how the Safdie brothers came on board to executive produce the series, and how HBO came to be at the helm.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, I'm Kim Masters, and this is the business.
0:05.2	The new docu-series Telemarketers exposes the ugly truth about call center scams that claim to be raising money for charity.
0:13.2	How did two down-on-the-luck call center staffers who decided to make a film exposing this racket
0:18.5	get their very rough-around-the around the edges project picked up by HBO.
0:22.7	Co-director Adam Lowe explains.
0:24.9	She's going to kill me for saying this, but Nancy, the president of HBO documentary, used to be a
0:29.9	telemarketer, and she was so stoked by this story. She was like, in a way, this is kind of like
0:36.1	a public service announcement with a great story wrapped up into it. Telemark like, in a way, this is kind of like a public service announcement with a
0:38.1	great story wrapped up into it. Telemarketers' directors Adam Lowe and Sam Lipman-Stern
0:43.0	talk about the investigative series that started with home videos of a rowdy telemarketing call center.
0:49.2	And they share how the Safty brothers came on board to executive produce the project.
0:53.8	But first we banter. Stick
0:55.3	around. It's the business from KCRW. I am joined by my partner in banter, Matt Bellany.
1:03.0	Hello, Matt. Hi there. So, sadly, we have no strike updates. It's just been very quiet and it
1:10.2	doesn't appear that we're
1:11.0	moving any closer to resolutions. So in other news, CNN, which had a very public messy drama
1:19.7	when David Zaslov, the head of Warner Brothers Discovery, hired Chris Likt, who was the executive
1:25.6	producer of the Stephen Colbert's show.
1:29.0	He hired him without any kind of job search to run CNN.
1:34.1	He didn't have the kind of big news experience that you might have thought, turned into an epic well-documented disaster.
1:42.2	And Chris Lict was fired.
1:43.3	And now they've brought in this guy, Mark Thompson,
	...

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