Peabody-Award-winning investigative journalist, best-selling author, decorated CIA officer-turned-whistleblower, U.S. Supreme Court precedent-maker, university lecturer, documentary producer, screenwriter, podcaster on espionage, the Vietnam war and contemporary political and social issues — and, most recently, a crusader against age discrimination.
Frank Snepp is probably the only recipient of broadcast journalism’s most prestigious award who has also been highly decorated by the CIA, lauded as a government whistleblower and savaged in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling, U.S. v Snepp, that severely limits free speech in America.
His two CIA memoirs Decent Interval and Irreparable Harm, and his continued work as investigative journalist describe a career extending from the spy wars of Vietnam to a controversial battle before the nation’s highest tribunal to breakthrough reporting about key events of our time, including the war in Ukraine.
He has excelled in broadcast, print and online media, appeared in countless documentaries and podcasts, taught university courses in journalism and media law, and helped scores of college interns working in broadcast journalism to hone the skills needed for fruitful careers of their own.
During his last “beat assignment” for NBC, 2005-2012, Snepp became the target of age discrimination that resulted in elimination of his job. He responded by mounting a groundbreaking three-year lawsuit against the network that illustrated the challenges of taking on big business in age discrimination cases and turned him into a whistleblower once again.
In summing up Snepp’s journalistic skills, former NBC News Vice President Robert Long, who testified on his behalf in the ageism suit, described him as a “top performer” who “has spent his professional life learning how to elicit important information from important sources, and to do so ethically and morally.”
“His depth of expertise in this field is complemented by an acute sense of where the story lies and how to tell it,” Long declared. “He undertakes the riskiest and most difficult assignments. Risky because they typically examine the machinations of the most powerful people and institutions in the city. Difficult because they require the most sophisticated research and analysis.
“His guiding principle can be borrowed with some irony from the 19th century Chicago muckraker Finley Peter Dunne: ‘The business of a newspaper is… to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable’.
“There is no higher calling for a journalist and none more difficult in the hostile and litigious world of high-stakes business and political machinations… If Frank were a soldier, we’d pin a medal of valor on him.”
CIA Officer, Whistleblower and Supreme Court Combatant:
A graduate of Columbia College and Columbia’s School of International Affairs, Snepp entered the CIA in 1968 and rose to become the Agency’s senior analyst at the US embassy in Vietnam with direct access to the CIA’s two best intelligence sources behind enemy lines, an assignment that gave him a unique perspective on enemy intentions. He served as the Ambassador’s principal intelligence briefer and was handpicked to interrogate the highest-ranking enemy commander ever captured. He personally delivered ex-President Nguyen Van Thieu to his own escape flight out of the country and three days later was sent on a dangerous two-man reconnaissance mission to locate forward enemy units. He was one of the last 17 officers to be lifted off the roof of the US embassy during the final chaotic evacuation.
Upon returning to CIA headquarters, Snepp received the Agency’s coveted Medal of Merit. In an attached commendation former CIA Station chief Tom Polgar cited Snepp’s “courage under fire” and the accuracy of his final strategic assessments which, in Polgar’s words, “have all turned out to be in accordance with the actual developments and thus served as most valuable guidelines to the policy-makers.”
“In summary,” declared Polgar, “during the most critical final days of the American presence in Vietnam, Mr. Snepp turned in a kind of performance which I have never seen equaled nor even approximated during my long years with U.S. Intelligence.”
In postwar congressional testimony, Graham Martin, the last US Ambassador to Vietnam, cited Snepp by name for uncovering and delivering to him the enemy’s final battle plan.
Notwithstanding such flourishes, the underlying story was more complicated – and darker.
While Martin and Polgar were only too happy after the war to embrace Snepp’s analyses and reporting, whose accuracy had been borne out by events, their response in real time was warped by wishful thinking, a refusal to assume the worst. The last report Snepp received from the CIA’s top source was so alarming that it caused Washington policy makers to ratchet up preparations for an emergency helicopter airlift. But the Ambassador and the Station chief remained mesmerized by diplomatic rumors of a pending political settlement and until the very end slow-walked their own evacuation planning in hopes of preserving a stable “negotiating environment.”
As a result, the Communist drive on Saigon caught them off balance and the final pullout degenerated into a case of every man, woman and child for themselves.
Two reporters who lived through the ordeal and knew of Snepp’s assessments later credited him for having called the threat just right.
“Where Martin was…misguided was in persistently believing that a political solution was possible, though he had in fact been told for weeks by his military analysts, particularly by Frank Sneff [sic], a civilian expert well qualified to judge, that the situation was deteriorating very rapidly,” Robert Shaplen wrote in The New Yorker magazine, May 19, 1975:
“From early April onward, Snepp predicted with almost uncanny accuracy every move the Communists made, including their decision to rule out negotiations and go for Saigon,” Keyes Beech reported in The Chicago Daily News, June 1, 1976. “The same intelligence was available to top embassy officials, including Ambassador Graham Martin, who apparently chose to believe otherwise and, until the bitter end, hoped for a face-saving political solution.”
Although the CIA offered Snepp a choice new assignment after the war, he could not rest. While most of official Washington wanted to bury Vietnam and move on, he knew that countless Vietnamese had been abandoned because of policy and intelligence failures and he lobbied “within channels” at the CIA for an “after-action report” to focus attention on the need for remedial action, diplomatic or otherwise, to help those left behind. Rebuffed at every turn, he quit the Agency in early 1976 and wrote his own public account in hopes of prompting official intervention on behalf of the millions of former allies now suffering in Communist re-education camps.
He was careful not to expose any secrets in his writing lest he cause further harm to our betrayed friends. But he avoided submitting his manuscript to CIA censors for fear they would suppress it and prolong the cover-up.
Decent Interval was an instant bestseller when published in November 1977.
Within weeks government prosecutors hauled Snepp into court. They never accused him of publishing any secrets, or anything confidential and stipulated to this fact under oath. But they claimed that his simple act of going public without approval had violated his security obligations and “irreparably harmed” the nation’s security by making US allies uneasy about the effectiveness of the Agency’s security procedures. Though they offered no proof for the damage claims, they demanded that Snepp be subjected to a lifelong restraining order, forced to submit all future writing to censorship, even novels, screenplays and poetry, on pain of going to prison for any violation — and that he be stripped of all his “ill-gotten gains,” forever.
The case reached the US Supreme Court in 1979 amid national hysteria over the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and following publication of a new book, The Brethren by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong, based on embarrassing leaks from the Court’s own staff. In this heated environment, six of the Justices took up the Snepp case and decided it summarily, finding for the government on all counts, without allowing his lawyers or the government’s to file any oral or written briefs.
The ruling upended Constitutional protections against “prior restraint” of free speech and sanctified the enforceability of non-disclosure agreements, government or corporate, whether or not any confidential information is at risk of exposure. It means that all past or current government employees assigned to “positions of trust” must forever submit job-related writings to censorship, even if they have signed no pledge to do so, and even if they have never exposed, or have threatened to expose classified secrets.
Soon after the ruling, Snepp went back to court to try win support for a legally enforceable 30-day deadline on all pre-publication review procedures so that government censors could not turn each vetting into a de facto vest-pocket veto. The lower courts ruled that the CIA should not be inconvenienced with deadlines and the Supreme Court declined to hear Snepp’s appeal, thus leaving the censors free to sit on a manuscript indefinitely without any prescribed legal recourse by the author.
Millions who have served in the nation’s seventeen intelligence agencies are subject to these constraints, including (to cite a recent highly publicized example) former National Security Adviser John Bolton. The current Supreme Court, in its latest term, declined to hear a case that would have overturned the Snepp precedent. The ruling, US v Snepp, thus remains the law of the land.
Journalist and Muckraker:
Having gotten a taste of broadcast journalism during his college years while working part-time as a desk assistant for Walter Cronkite and Mike Wallace at CBS News – and because of the affinity he had developed for the press as a CIA briefer – Snepp was effectively predestined for a second career as a reporter.
Though the Supreme Court ruling had left him penniless, sympathetic journalists like Wallace and Ted Koppel rescued him by loaning him money and arranging for him to begin to making guest appearances on national broadcast magazines shows like Nightline.
The fact-finding skills he had learned in the CIA soon allowed Snepp to branch out into full-time investigative reporting.
Because he generally confined himself to behind-the-scenes producer’s status, with others fronting the pieces that he researched and reported, he was able to avoid some of the strictures imposed by the Court-mandated order subjecting all his intelligence-related utterances to CIA pre-publication review.
In the past forty-five years his work has appeared throughout the media.
As a full-time member of ABC’s “World News Tonight’s” four-man investigative team, he helped blow the lid off the Iran-Contra scandal. As a staffer for ABC News’ “20/20” he produced the first network report on the spread of modern piracy, among other exclusives.
As an investigative producer for the news magazine “Extra,” he covered the Monica Lewinsky affair and unearthed one of the most important related stories, the fact that Lewinsky possessed a top-level security clearance that allowed her to access some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets.
As an on-air reporter/producer for “The Crusaders,” a syndicated Buena Vista series, Snepp oversaw preparation of the pilot (about dangerous leakage and security problems at the Hanford Nuclear Reactor) and produced numerous later segments, including one that identified an obscure law that would enable civilians injured by Agent Orange to receive VA treatment.
As a very visible “talking head,” (though always speaking extemporaneously to avoid CIA pre-publication review), Snepp has appeared in countless documentaries about national security, the First amendment and, most notably the Vietnam war, including the early Stanley Karnow series for PBS and Michael McLear’s “Ten Thousand Day War” with Peter Arnett. He was recently featured in Rory Kennedy’s “The Last days of Vietnam” and Ken Burns’ ten-part Vietnam series for PBS.
A documentarian in his own right, Snepp has produced a variety of long-form and multi-part investigative pieces, including a revelatory report for MSNBC’s “Lockup” series which he shot inside the juvenile holding facility in Chino, California. A four-part documentary he reported and wrote for KCAL-TV, Los Angeles, provided an early glimpse of drug trafficking from Mexico and garnered an Emmy Award.
Snepp’s most recent documentary effort, The Intelligence Failure that Lost Vietnam, which he produced, narrated, cleared with the CIA and posted on You Tube, features first-time revelations by a top ex-operative for US army intelligence in Vietnam who outlines lessons still unlearned from the war.
Intermingling print reporting with his broadcast work, Snepp has been a frequent (and often CIA-cleared) contributor to The New York Times, Newsweek and many other print and online platforms, including his own franksneppexclusives.com.
A multi-part investigative report which he prepared for The Village Voice in early 1990s, debunked the so-called “October Surprise” scandal and triggered a Congressional investigation by impeaching a key source who claimed wrongly that the Reagan campaign had interfered with the release of American hostages in Iran. In another Voice report Snepp introduced to the public an up-and-coming legal hustler named William Barr.
Later, on assignment for McCall’s magazine, Snepp served early warning of the cancer risk to women who hire out their bodies as surrogate baby mills. For Playboy magazine he examined the fast-emerging threats to individual privacy and in more recent op-ed pieces for The Los Angeles times he exposed inconsistencies in Edward Snowden’s disclosures, provided a personal perspective on the ineffectiveness of torture in CIA interrogations, and compared Vietnam to the US ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Amidst all this, Snepp has found time to tutor the next generation of journalists. As Otis B. Chandler Special Lecturer at the University of Southern California in the mid-1980s, he taught First Amendment law to undergraduates, co-helmed a graduate course in investigative journalism, and set up an exchange program with ABC News that allowed students to help produce segments for 20/20. In USC’s journalism magazine, he published a series of still relevant interviews that he had conducted with some of the best investigative reporters in recent history.
At the end of the three-year USC appointment, Snepp switched to California State University and spent two years there teaching courses in political science and media law. During a later stint at NBC, he became the mentor-of-choice for college interns seeking to refine their journalism skills. He continues to be an occasional guest lecturer in journalism at USC’s Annenberg School.
Because of this first-hand exposure to First Amendment law, Snepp remains a go-to source for many people seeking help with free speech issues. In recognition of his advocacy and counseling work, the Society of Professional Journalists has honored him with its National First Amendment Award. To help him complete Irreparable Harm, his memoir of his Supreme Court ordeal, the J. Roderick MacArthur foundation awarded him a writer’s grant.
Drawing on his background, Snepp has served as consultant to litigants in major national security cases, including the defense team of deposed Panamanian strongman Manual Noriega, which asked Snepp to help prove that the CIA had known all along about the defendant’s illegal drug activities and had turned a blind eye because of his importance to US security interests. It was a line of inquiry Snepp had pursued in his Iran-contra investigations for ABC. Though Snepp despised Noriega, he felt the case against the disgraced dictator reeked of the kind of hypocrisy that had characterized the government’s position in US v Snepp. By the time the trial got underway, Snepp had found evidence supporting the CIA duplicity argument. But at the last minute the defense team decided not to use it and instead to concentrate on impeaching Noriega’s accusers, most of whom were former drug traffickers. The strategy backfired and Noriega was found guilty.
Not surprisingly, with such a varied and colorful background, Snepp has frequently attracted interest in Hollywood. In the early 1990s he became staff screenwriter and technical adviser for the first dramatic television series about the CIA, “Undercover,” produced by Warner Brothers and aired on ABC. He bears the distinction of being the first screenwriter ever to submit his handiwork to CIA censors. Snepp has also been consultant to major production houses and industry leaders in Hollywood, including the late actor Marlon Brando, with whom Snepp collaborated on a spy-themed screenplay called “Jericho.”
Soon after the “Undercover” series ended, Snepp traveled with a BBC camera crew back to Vietnam to film what was to be a devastating return visit to the most nightmarish moments his life. It included a tour of his old CIA offices in the embassy, which remained largely intact except for the light fixtures, which the Communists had removed in search of listening devices. The resulting documentary, “Phoenix Rising,” can be accessed through the BBC.
Going Local:
In 2001, because of expanding family commitments, Snepp left network television and opted to become a less transient investigative reporter/producer for the CBS flagship station in Los Angeles, KCBS. Working with on-air correspondents, he prepared award-winning reports on scores of big-topic issues, including the scarcity of teacher-driven instruction in state subsidized schools for foster kids and the dangers of outsourcing commercial airline maintenance to Mexico.
In early 2005 Snepp moved to the local NBC owned-and-operated station, KNBC, and within days of taking the job, reported, wrote and produced a story about how the CIA, facing a shortage of Farsi speakers, was scouring the Persian community in Beverly Hills for recruits. The Los Angeles Times front-paged the story and credited the station. The news director, Robert Long, an old friend from earlier local news assignments, soon gave Snepp free rein to pursue any story he wanted and made him answerable to Long alone.
With Long’s support, and under the ever-watchful eye of NBC’s legal department, Snepp became the station’s leading muckraker.
His first year in harness, he reported, wrote and produced a series of investigative pieces about a lethal methane threat to 12,000 residents of a coastal community in West LA built atop poorly capped oil wells. The series earned Snepp a coveted Peabody Award, the broadcast equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize and the first such award for the station in thirty years. It also triggered an investigation by the LA City Controller and prompted refinement of the city’s methane codes.
A subsequent investigation into uncertified fire-protections at LA’s Staples Arena scored a Golden Mike and an Edward R. Murrow Regional Award and sparked a lawsuit by Staples’ owner, global-conglomerate AEG, which the company later dismissed before trial, thus implicitly acknowledging the accuracy of the story.
Snepp’s reporting on the laundering of local campaign contributions won an Emmy and prompted LA’s Mayor to surrender the dirty money he had received.
His exposé of excessive benefits-dipping by local Superior Court judges provoked a public outcry and foreshadowed a state appeals court decision outlawing the payments.
An investigation he conducted into spreading water contamination in economically depressed San Bernardino County north of Los Angeles garnered a Mark Twain Regional Award and forced a state regulatory agency to admit negligence.
When Osama Bin Laden was killed in a US stealth raid, Snepp delivered an on-air commentary for KNBC that amounted to a worldwide exclusive about the role played by Seal Team 6, whose existence he had uncovered for ABC World News Tonight in the late 1980’s.
Later, a Snepp-initiated examination of illegal efforts by California medical corporations to seize control of the lucrative physical therapy industry earned him another Murrow Award.
The story was distributed exclusively on the NBC website and marked the first time a “Murrow” had ever been awarded for a web-only presentation. This breakthrough convinced NBC executives to use the website as a launchpad for major stories, not merely as a dumping ground for re-runs. This practice has since become commonplace throughout the broadcasting industry as streaming services displace normal broadcast channels in viewer preferences.
For much of his seven-year tenure at KNBC Snepp managed a seven-member investigative team comprised of an associate producer, editorial assistant, and hand-picked interns from the nation’s best universities. His work with the interns allowed him to help launch the careers of young journalists now prominent in the industry.
By the time Snepp left KNBC in 2012, his reputation, if not his professional future, seemed assured.
“I believe Frank Snepp to be one of the best investigative journalists I ever met,” legendary USC journalism professor, Joe Saltzman, testified in a court proceeding.
“Frank’s greatest strengths fall under the rubric’s clear thinking and expertise,” NBC News Vice President Long wrote of Snepp in a first performance evaluation back in 2006. “Frank’s long experience at the highest level the craft help him sort the wheat from the chaff and protect the best interest of employer and customer alike.”
In a follow-up assessment a year later, Long lauded Snepp for “continuing to effectively go after abuses of public trust” and described his work as “the essence of what makes KNBC news unique in Los Angeles television.
“Over the past year,” he noted, “we have assigned the best of our interns to Frank so that they may learn some of the advanced arts of our profession. He has shown some flair as a teacher, and we need to give him more opportunity to shape young journalists.”
In 2008 Long elaborated on Snepp’s expanding responsibilities and importance to NBC:
“Frank is the only working journalist in the Department who reports directly to the news director, and whose work is edited directly by him. The reason for this is that he undertakes the riskiest and most difficult assignments….
“In undertaking these assignments, Frank provides the department with a ‘differentiator.’ In Los Angeles television, only KNBC, largely through Frank’s efforts, practices this delicate and honored journalism specialty. His value to the customer is in providing a pure form of journalistic truth seeking. His value to the newsroom is in demonstrating that we have the will and the way to practice our craft at the highest level. There is no doubt that Frank will continue to serve both constituencies well.”
Long also praised Snepp for having “devoted many hours in 2008 to teaching interns and other journalists the secrets of his trade.”
“This is an effort worth nurturing,” he added. “If the trend towards consolidation news content continues, Frank is an ideal candidate to lead a contingent of investigators who could provide the division with high grade journalism. Frank’s experience as a university teacher and department mentor would serve well in this case.”
In 2009, after Long’s retirement, NBC altered its personnel evaluation system to allow employees to take measure of their own goals and accomplishments. Snepp’s contribution outlined his journalistic philosophy and underscored his commitment to hard-hitting but balanced reporting.
“I take on the most challenging investigative stories and turn them in record time,” he wrote, citing an attached production record to support the claim. “I do not bend or cower before political or financial interests, no matter how powerful, and I deal fairly and honestly with all sides to a controversy.
“My reports are geared directly to the station’s mission-objective: to brand itself as the place to go for stories you won’t see anywhere else that make a difference to our community and our core viewers.
“In contrast to esteemed colleagues who work heavily with hidden cameras, my technique is to burrow from the inside out, using carefully cultivated inside sources and meticulously mined inside documentation to shed light on issues of vital public policy importance.
“Beginning in the fall, at the direction of the “new” news director, I have also resumed reporting/writing /producing enterprise pieces that focus on personalities and innovative policies and politics that enable viewers to elevate their lifestyles and well-being.
“I have concentrated on servicing our Internet needs by ‘storifying’ all of our broadcast pieces to fit the website’s format and by generating original non-broadcast pieces for the site. My brief also includes extensive hands-on training for the interns, extending to interview and script writing exercises to prepare them for active participation in story reporting and production.
“That I have been able successfully to mobilize my interns and associate producer in overcoming recent resource cutbacks and in keeping story count and quality at unprecedented levels encourages me to hope that we will continue to be a key force in shaping the station’s brand.”
In January 2011, after the owners of the Staple Sports arena in downtown Los Angeles sued NBC over one of Snepp’s stories, the network’s general counsel rallied to his defense.
“Mr. Snepp is a highly respected investigative journalist with 24 years of experience,” the attorney wrote. “He has been recognized with numerous honors and awards for his investigative reports, including … the particularly prestigious Peabody award. KNBC is confident that Mr. Snepp’s inquiry into the safety rails at Staples, like his investigation into the fire safety systems in the arena, fully comports with all standards of professional journalism.”
The plaintiff soon dropped the lawsuit, leaving the accuracy of Snepp’s story unchallenged.
Although Snepp is no longer attached to single media entity, he continues to practice active journalism by posting to various websites including his own, franksneppexclusives.com, about an array of topics from the Covid epidemic to climate change to the January 6 upheaval to the crises in Ukraine and Afghanistan. He is also an avid podcaster on a similarly wide range of topics. A Vietnam-related entry, which he recorded for Foreign Policy magazine late last year was rated by the editors as their best podcast offering in 2021.
Among Snepp’s many journalistic accomplishments, his two personal favorites remain his CIA memoirs. For him, the recognition they have received outshines all the other honors that have come his way over the years.
His first work, Decent Interval, is now deemed a classic of the Vietnam war, and continues to serve as a vital source for historians, movie makers and novelists.
“Other accounts of that time have to be measured against what Snepp, from his unique and highly informed vantage point has produced,” Kevin Buckley wrote in The New York Times Book Review right after the book was published in late 1977.
In 2000 Decent Interval was reissued in a 25th Anniversary edition. It is available in paperback and on Kindle and has been translated into French, Vietnamese and Japanese. In 2011 the Chinese edition was unveiled in Beijing amid ceremonies at the Xian Hua new agency, which Snepp attended.
Director Stephen Frears and screenwriter David Hare borrowed heavily from Decent Interval for their movie, “Saigon: Year of the Cat.”
David Park, author the recent celebrated novel, Spies in Canaan, acknowledges his debt to Decent Interval, which he describes in his post notes as “magisterial.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose Vietnam war novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016, concedes in his postscript to “being particularly indebted to Frank Snepp’s important book Decent interval.” He has also told Snepp that he modeled his principal characters after him and a prisoner Snepp interrogated and later described in Decent Interval as the “Man in the Snow White Room.”
Other novels, notably The Last Ambassador by Marvin and Bernard Kalb and Saigon by Anthony Summers, feature lead characters modeled after Snepp.
In recent years Hanoi’s own Ministry of Security, using captured documents and prisoner testimony, have reconstructed the career of the CIA’s master spy, the Vietnamese deep-penetration source whose reporting shaped many of Snepp’s own assessments. Hanoi’s published findings not only confirm the portrait of the agent conveyed in Decent Interval but even cite Snepp’s final interaction with him.
In an even more bizarre twist, the high-ranking enemy captive, the “Man in the Snow White Room,” whom Snepp interrogated in 1972, and later described in the initial edition of Decent Interval as having been killed, surfaced several years ago with a memoir of his own. Forty pages are devoted to Snepp’s interrogation of him. The former prisoner intimates that Snepp gave him the political ammunition to save himself, the argument he used to persuade his jailers not to kill him, by disclosing to him the prisoner exchange guarantees set out in the 1973 Paris accords.
As for Snepp’s second memoir, Irreparable Harm recounting his Supreme Court battle, it has become essential reading for Constitutional scholars, government whistleblowers and anyone who cares about free speech in America.
In the New York Times book review keyed to its publication, James Bamford called Irreparable Harm a “well-written, candid, modern version of Kafka’s ‘Trial.’”
In a more recent appreciation, Constitutional scholar Stanley Arkes describes it as “a vigorous, cutting, substantive argument against the people who prosecuted him” and “nothing less than a serious work of art.” (Arkes, Constitutional Illusions and Anchoring Truths, Chapter Six: “The Saga of Frank Snepp,” page 234.)
Coda – A Watershed Ageism Case:
On top of all the other challenges Snepp has embraced in his professional life, he has recently joined the ranks of “graying” workers who are battling age discrimination in Big Business America.
In 2012, after earning yet another Edward R Murrow Award for yet another journalistic coup at KNBC, Snepp, aged 69, was told that his job was being eliminated even though many younger employees with the same generic job description remained gainfully employed in the newsroom.
Over the next three years he pursued a grueling age discrimination case against NBC, at times representing himself, and accumulated substantial evidence of systemic age bias at the network by finding ways of piercing the non-disclosure agreements signed by other senior employees who had been forced out under similar conditions.
The case went to trial in late 2015 and after three weeks resulted in a hung jury, with the majority favoring Snepp but not a sufficient number to meet the legal threshold for a decision on his behalf.
Nonetheless, in the face of a new trial, and given the evidence Snepp had collected, NBC joined the plaintiff and his team in reaching a settlement. The terms are confidential, but everything else, the entire discovery and trial record are available to the public and provide the basis for a master class in how aging workers can arm themselves against discrimination in the workplace and prepare themselves for litigation if necessary.
Snepp has posted on his You Tube site a presentation he delivered to other broadcast alumni about his case, and the lessons it taught.
https://franksneppexclusives.com/?p=479