truefilm

The controversy about Ken Burns’ WWII doc, its lack of Hispanic viewpoints, and what people have offered/threatened to do continues. In case you haven’t been following all this, here’s a background story about the controversy from the Associated Press. And here’s a link to previous truefilm posts about all this.

While your correspondent has been traveling, moving offices, and meeting deadlines, more has happened.

Politco.com had this story:

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus has joined a campaign to include Hispanics in an upcoming PBS documentary on World War II, vowing to “put the squeeze” on top public television executives.

“We’re very much concerned about the lack of Hispanics in the documentary,” Chairman Joe Baca (D-Calif.) said. “That’s appalling. That’s a no-no to us.”

The Hispanic Caucus and other Latino interest groups have been troubled that the 14-hour series — “The War,” by renowned filmmaker Ken Burns and scheduled for broadcast in September — features no Hispanics, even as it highlights African-Americans and Japanese-Americans. They note that 500,000 Latinos served in World War II.

Garrett Moewe at the conservative National Review complained

About the editorial pages of America’s newspapers, which usually can be counted on to take note of such outrageous forms of censorship, even if it means ticking off a few special interests groups? Again, near total silence. The Boston Globe ran an op-ed that attacked PBS and Ken Burns over their “lack of connection with our increasingly multicultural society.”

Perhaps the silence can be explained by one simple fact: the censorship was coming from a group of leftist Hispanic organizations who called themselves “Defend the Honor.”

Moewe also tosses some complaints against Bill Moyers, MoveOn.org, and other “Left Censors” who aren’t, in his view, appropriately angry (in the right way) about all this.

Charlie McCollum, TV critic for the San Jose Mercury News, makes some more even-handed comments but worries that

PBS and Burns may have opened a Pandora’s box by bowing to outside pressure and making changes to programming not only after the work was finished but in a way that could fundamentally change the film’s original intent….

Rod Dreyher of the Dallas Morning News concurs:

This is not about denigrating the noble sacrifice of Latino soldiers. This is about corrupting art through politics….The point is, Hispanic veterans are absent from this documentary not because their sacrifice isn’t valued. They weren’t included because they didn’t fit the perfectly legitimate storytelling frame chosen by the artist.

Mr. Burns argues that when working in public television, one has to take the views of the public into consideration. That’s true. If taxpayers don’t want to pay for this or that kind of art, they shouldn’t have to – even Ken Burns documentaries. But once a publicly funded artwork is approved, both art and artist must be protected from political interference. Massaging history or art to assuage grievance is intellectually corrupt.

And now some up-to-date news about all this. Paul Farhi of The Washington Post writes:

Leaders of the Hispanic Association for Corporate Responsibility, an umbrella organization of 14 groups, on Tuesday asked representatives of General Motors Corp. and Anheuser-Busch to disavow their sponsorship and remove their corporate logos from Burns’s “The War,” a 14-hour documentary scheduled to be shown on PBS stations in September, coincidentally during Hispanic Heritage Month.

In Farhi’s article, Manuel Mirabal, chairman of the association is quoted as saying:

We should all be working to resolve this issue together. We understand that Ken Burns has his artistic principles, but in this case taxpayer dollars were used to make this film and it is flawed. Ken Burns can make as many films as he wants, but the buck stops here because he’s using our taxpayer dollars.