Gary Kamiya at Salon: PBS's "America At A Crossroads" Veers To The Right

[Hissyspit]

I watched the "Operation Homecoming: Writing" episode and it was excellent, so I got sucked into the idea that this might be a worthy series, but then I watched tonight's two episodes. The first was o.k., then the Richard Perle episode came on... horrible.

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Photo: Brook Lapping Productions

Richard Perle in conversation with Stacy Bannerman, an author and an activist from Military Families Speak Out, an anti-Iraq war group, on the National Mall in Washington in May 2006.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/04/17/crossroads

"America at a Crossroads" veers to the right

By Gary Kamiya

Apr. 17, 2007 | If anyone still believes that PBS has a left-wing bias, "America at a Crossroads," the $20 million, 12-hour series about Islam, terrorism and the post-9/11 world that kicked off Sunday night, should shut them up once and for all. "Crossroads" proves yet again that five years after the 9/11 attacks, the mainstream American media still can't bring itself to talk about the real causes of Arab and Muslim rage at the West.

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"Crossroads" came to the air as a result of right-wing pressure and intellectual timidity. The project began during the tenures of Ken Tomlinson and Michael Pack, two conservatives who held top positions at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government-run nonprofit that oversees PBS and its more than 300 local affiliates. Tomlinson was a Bush hack whose mandate as CPB board chairman was to tilt PBS's programming to the right. To do that, Tomlinson paid a consultant $14,000 to vet the Bill Moyers program "Now" for liberal bias, and hired two ombudsmen to monitor PBS news programming. Outrage over these practices and a damning internal report forced Tomlinson to resign in 2005. Pack, a conservative documentarian -- his résumé includes a sympathetic doc about Newt Gingrich and a film called "Hollywood vs. Religion" narrated by Michael Medved -- was brought in as CPB's executive vice president to make PBS's programming more conservative.

"Crossroads" was Pack's brainchild. In 2004, CPB put out a call for proposals about films dealing with terrorism, Islam and the post-9/11 world. It received 440 proposals, awarding full production funding to 21. But the series immediately became engulfed in controversy. Critics charged that the Perle episode and one called "Warriors," about U.S. troops in Iraq, were biased toward the Bush administration. These charges grew even louder when it was revealed that the original producer of the Perle episode, British filmmaker Brian Lapping, was a friend of Perle's. (Lapping eventually recused himself from the film. Karl Zinsmeister, a co-producer of "Warriors," also left the project after he took a job as Bush's chief domestic-policy advisor.)

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There are two episodes of "Crossroads" that stand head and shoulders above the rest. The first and best, which airs Monday night, is a truly extraordinary film called "Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience." Featuring unforgettable writing about Iraq, including the brilliant poetry of Brian Turner and extraordinary pieces by ordinary soldiers, and searing appearances by older-generation war-lit giants like Tim O'Brien and James Salter, this film brings the dreadful reality of Iraq home more than anything else I've seen.

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Here's what "Crossroads" should have included. First, it should have devoted one film to this war of ideas, giving each side its due. Then it should have commissioned another film offering a historical survey of the Middle East starting in 1798, when Napoleon invaded Egypt, and ending today. This film would have looked at French and British colonialism and its effects on the development of Arab democracies. It would have talked about the Sykes-Picot Agreement that betrayed Arab nationalist hopes after WWI, and Great Britain's imperialist misadventures in Iraq, which so closely resemble our own. The Palestinian naqba, or catastrophe, would be covered. The film would examine the U.S.-backed coup in 1953 that removed Iranian leader Muhammad Mossadegh. The Suez crisis, the failure of Arab nationalism, America's long proxy war with the USSR in the Middle East, the Six-Day War and 1973 October war, and U.S. hypocrisy in dealing with Saddam Hussein would all be discussed. The Algerian government's fateful decision in 1991 to suspend elections when it became clear Islamists were going to win -- a decision followed by an appalling civil war that killed 200,000 people -- would be covered. And it would have looked at Israel's 2006 war against Lebanon.

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