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Copyright & Fair Use Blog
Filmmaker as Voice of Civil Society: Leo Eaton on America at a Crossroads
Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Apr 29, 2008 at 3:47 PM
Our good friend Leo Eaton, a veteran public affairs and public broadcasting producer, writes in his annual letter to the field about how he sees the role of the documentarian. He also talks about the role of public broadcasting, and shares a revealing inside story that shows how embattled the notion of civil discourse on television is:
I was series producer for the epic PBS current-affairs series America at a Crossroads that took over an entire week of prime-time programming (12 hours) back in April of last year. In spite of all the political controversy surrounding the gestation of a series whose task was to examine America’s role in the world 5 years after 9/11, the series was a great success. One program won a Peabody, another was nominated for an Academy Award, and the series got major press attention across the country. The NY Times reviewed it (mostly favorably) every day during premier week, while Tom Shales in the Washington Post stated “Crossroads affirmatively answers the question ‘Is there still a purpose for public television?’” While most such series have the decency to retire from the spotlight after their premier, Crossroads became the Energizer bunny; it just kept going and going. I’m still dealing with my “orphans”, shows that either didn’t make it into the original 12 hours or weren’t completed until much later. Crossroads specials about Muslim stand-up comedians, political pressures swirling around the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein, and a musical fusion between Hollywood and Middle-Eastern musicians will roll out on PBS throughout 2008. I’m proud of my orphans; some of them as good as any of the shows that first aired in 2007. For all of its difficulties, working as Series Producer with the 19 different Crossroads producers from Canada, the US and the UK has been one of the most incredible experiences of a long career. But as I predicted in last year’s letter, Crossroads also exposed me to the slings and arrows of outrageous politics.
Because of my expressed concerns about fairness and balance in one Crossroads-funded program, I was denounced by a Republican congressman in a Congressional sub-committee as having Islamist sympathies, accused of blatant liberal bias by conservative talk show hosts on both CNN and Fox News Channel and became the object of an email hate campaign orchestrated through the right-wing blogosphere. The receiving end of such an orchestrated campaign is a fascinating, if uncomfortable, place to be. It wasn’t really about me or my colleagues; we were just surrogates through which PBS – which agreed with our decision not to air the show – could be attacked for its perceived liberal bias. It’s fascinating how “liberal” has become a 4-letter word among many conservatives. My Oxford English dictionary defines liberal as open minded and free from narrow prejudice, an attitude absent from much of our political discourse. I’ve since been informed that the campaign against PBS and the Crossroads team was orchestrated by the same group that orchestrated the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry during the 2004 election. I guess that means I’ve been Swift-Boated.
It’s made me think a lot about the role of the documentary filmmaker in today’s world where arguments tend to be won by whoever shouts the loudest. Whether it’s Bill O’Reilly or Michael Moore, what’s the point of preaching only to those who already agree with you? I have always believed that it’s our responsibility as filmmakers to open a window into the amazing world that surrounds us, provide sufficient context and information for audiences to understand what they’re seeing but then let them come to their own conclusions….I recall a woman from Lubbock, Texas, writing to British historian Michael Wood after one of our series and saying “you have shown me things I would never otherwise have seen and made me think about my world in ways I would never otherwise have thought.” That comment, to me, encapsulates our responsibility as documentary filmmakers.
Thanks, Leo, for letting us share your insights!
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