War and independent filmmaker - Hollywood and corporate leaders' control of the distribution and presentation of films limits the work of independent filmmakers

Humanist, Sept-Oct, 1998 by Barbara Trent, Shelton Waldrep

Television in the United States is much more painful. None of our movies have been broadcast nationally by PBS. The real scandal is what PBS does at the national level, beginning with its POV (Point of View) series, a show thrown to the progressive community like a bone (a bone progressive groups must pay for directly). In order to defend its decision to not air our film, PBS basically had to smear it. How else could it defend not televising an Academy Award-winning documentary broadcast in twenty-five other countries that has received fabulous reviews in all the major papers in the country and has been shown in a hundred cities and cinemas? I have a letter from Jennifer Lawson, executive vice-president of national programming for PBS, which says: "The Panama Deception covers an important topic but does not meet our standards for fairness. In our view, some of the assertions about the intent of U.S. policy and the conduct of U.S. troops are not adequately substantiated." The only people who were the primary leads for us, in terms of our assertion of U.S. foreign policy in Panama, were people like Maxwell Thurman, the four-star general who led the invasion. He was the first person (who obviously had not been debriefed) to say that the purpose of the invasion was to destroy the Panamanian defense forces (a purpose never publicly stated by the Bush administration). Pentagon spokesperson Pete Williams backed up Thurman's assertion in an interview, saying that it was the "essence of the operation." We did not even put Williams' comments in the film because we felt they would be repetitious--that we would be hitting the public over the head. Perhaps we forgot that the public includes television programmers.

What PBS means by dismissing some of the film's testimony in its statement--"the conduct of U.S. troops are not adequately substantiated"--is that poor, black, often non-Englishspeaking victims on the ground cannot compare to Dan Rather in terms of knowing what really happened in Panama. PBS's stance is racist and classist. The letter goes on to say that "PBS has already extensively reported on U.S. relations with Noriega, the invasion of Panama, and the conditions in post-invasion Panama." But its coverage actually consisted of two Frontline documentaries: "The Noriega Connection" (as if that were the issue) and "War and Peace in Panama." The latter analyzed the logistics of the invasion--did the troops have good maps, was the mission planned well, did more people die than was anticipated? The program begins by ticking off the four official reasons given for the invasion, as if these stated reasons were the truth. The whole point of our film was to expose the fact that the reasons given by President Bush had nothing to do with the invasion. If something is not shown on PBS, the progressives (or at least the liberals) in the United States think the film must not be valid; they think it must be some kind of conspiracy film. The public has an enormous amount of respect for PBS's official position, which I think is particularly damaging. I know people who have done Frontline pieces. These films do make a contribution, but they stop short of giving us the names or showing the faces. I say we must show the faces, name the names, and follow the story all the way to the end.