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Obama's War

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Frontline - By Martin Smith - Oct. 14 (Special Report) - Tens of thousands of fresh American troops are now on the move in Afghanistan, led by a new commander and armed with a counterinsurgency plan that builds on the lessons of Iraq. But can U.S. forces succeed in a land long known as the "graveyard of empires"? And can the U.S. stop the Taliban in neighboring Pakistan, where U.S. troops are not allowed and the government is weak? In Obama's War, veteran correspondent Martin Smith travels across Afghanistan and Pakistan to see first-hand how the president's new strategy is taking shape, delivering vivid, on-the-ground reporting from this eight-year-old war's many fronts. Through interviews with top generals, diplomats and government officials, Smith also reports the internal debates over President Obama's grand attempt to combat terrorism at its roots. "What we found on the ground was a huge exercise in nation building," says Smith. "The concept's become a bit of a dirty word, but that's what this is. We started with the goal of eliminating Al Qaeda, and now we've wound up with the immense task of re-engineering two nations."

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What Makes a Digital Native?

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Frontline - Aug. 30 (Interview) - What Makes a Digital Native? For starters, they take technology for granted, says author Marc Prensky.

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Women and Islam

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Frontline - Jun. 04 (Interview) - The veiling is not only just covering the head; it indicates a way of behavior, which is called to be more modest, more pure--Puritan maybe--which means you limit your presence in public life. For instance, the way you look at people. You have to cast down the eyes. The way your body occupies the space in public. That means you shouldn't be too loud--laughing, for instance. So it means a way of behaving, more modest behavior. It comes from hija, meaning being more cautious, being more modest. So I think it's not only just a kind of dress code, but a dress code which indicates a set of manners, bodily manners, in relation to the other sex, but in relation also to public behavior. Also, culturally, it means a more civilized behavior--civilized in the sense that you are more controlled. It's a kind of self-control in public life.

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inside the meltdown: watch the full program | PBS

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Frontline - Apr. 24 (Investigative Report) - "Many Americans still don't understand what has happened to the economy," FRONTLINE producer/director Michael Kirk says. "How did it all go so bad so quickly? Who is responsible? How effective has the response from Washington and Wall Street been? Those are the questions at the heart of Inside the Meltdown."

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Poisoned Waters

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Frontline - Apr. 22 (Investigative Report) - More than three decades after the Clean Water Act, two iconic waterways—the great coastal estuaries Puget Sound and the Chesapeake Bay—are in perilous condition. With polluted runoff still flowing in from industry, agriculture, and massive suburban development, scientists fear contamination to the food chain and drinking water for millions of people. A growing list of endangered species is also threatened in both estuaries. As a new president, Congress, and states set new agendas and spending priorities, FRONTLINE correspondent Hedrick Smith examines the rising hazards to human health and the ecosystem, and why it’s so hard to keep our waters clean.

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Heat

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Frontline - By Martin Smith - Oct. 21 (Special Report) - (VIDEO - 50 mins.) Melting glaciers, rising sea levels, fires, floods and droughts. On the eve of a historic election, award-winning producer and correspondent Martin Smith investigates how the world's largest corporations and governments are responding to Earth's looming environmental disaster. "I have reported on the Cold War, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the rise of Al Qaeda, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," says Smith. "But nothing matches climate change in scope and severity." The world needs to dramatically cut the carbon emissions responsible for wreaking havoc on the planet's climate, according to Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, whose organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), shared last year's Nobel Peace Prize. "If we don't take action immediately, we face a crisis," Pachauri tells Smith. "Climate change is caused by human actions, and we need to do something about it. The sooner we realize that, the better." With that sense of urgency in mind, Smith traveled to 12 countries on four continents to investigate whether major corporations and governments are up to the challenge. HEAT features in-depth interviews with top policy-makers and with leading executives from many of the largest carbon emitters from around the world, including Chinese coal companies, Indian SUV makers and American oil giants. The report paints an ominous portrait. Despite increasing talk about "going green," across the planet, environmental concerns are still taking a back seat to shorter-term economic interests. Smith's journey begins at the epicenter of new industrial development: China. In the midst of unprecedented growth, the Chinese are clearly moving in the wrong direction. He visits Shenhua Energy, one of the largest and fastest-growing power companies in the world -- a coal conglomerate with a huge carbon footprint. But its CEO, Dr. Ling Wen, tells Smith that he answers not to the public but to his shareholders. "We must create money, not lose the money," Ling says. "It's my responsibility as a CEO of this company." And when pressed whether he should make climate change a higher priority, Ling says that he would if his shareholders asked him. But, he says, "I'm afraid maybe all the shareholders, they cannot accept that concept." In the meantime, China continues to build two new coal-fired power plants every week.

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The Choice 2008

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Frontline - Oct. 15 (Special Report) - It has been called one of the most historic presidential elections in our nation's history -- Barack Obama versus John McCain. It is a race that pits the iconoclast against the newcomer, the heroic prisoner of war against the first African American nominated by a major party. FRONTLINE's critically acclaimed series The Choice returns this election season to examine the rich personal and political biographies of these two men in The Choice 2008. The Choice 2008 draws on in-depth interviews with the advisers, friends and those closest to these unlikely candidates, as well as with seasoned observers of American politics, who together tell the definitive story of these men and their ascent to their party's nominations. When FRONTLINE first aired a profile of presidential candidates during the 1988 election, The Choice redefined political journalism on television. Now, in an unprecedented election year, veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk (Bush's War, Cheney's Law) goes behind the headlines to tell a deeper political story about the candidates, the decisions they made and why their nominations may indicate a historic change in American politics. The story begins at the Democratic Convention in 2004 when Barack Obama, a little-known candidate for the U.S. Senate from Illinois, stepped forward to tell his personal story and to call for a move beyond partisan politics. "All around were people with tears in their eyes," Obama's chief political adviser David Axelrod tells FRONTLINE. "And I realized at that moment that his life would never be the same." Also that summer, the future Republican nominee John McCain, a self-described maverick and sometime adversary of the Bush administration, took the stage at his party's convention to defend the president's national security policy. In an effort to win the support of his party, the longtime senator from Arizona had decided to try to walk a fine line -- a line he had had trouble walking all his life -- between being an unconventional outsider and a team player. "I think McCain's goal was to make himself more acceptable to the party base without completely surrendering his outsider, independent persona, and that was a very complex balancing act," says Mark McKinnon, a member of McCain's inner circle and former media adviser to President Bush.

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Mexico: Crimes at the Border

Fri, 30 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Frontline - By Andrew Becker, Lowell Bergman - May. 30 (Special Report) - (Video - 60 minutes) An investigation of the rapidly expanding business of smuggling humans across the U.S.-Mexican border. This joint project with The New York Times follows the dramatic story of an American border guard tempted by money and sexual favors to join a smuggling operation, and explore what the U.S. government is doing about the problem.

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Growing Up Online

Tue, 20 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

PBS - By Rachel Dretzin, John Maggio - May. 20 (Special Report) - (Video - 60 mins. - Repeat) Jessica Hunter was a shy and awkward girl who struggled to make friends at school. Then, at age 14, she reinvented herself online as Autumn Edows, a goth artist and model. She posted provocative photos of herself on the Web and fast developed a cult following. "I just became this whole different person," Autumn tells Frontline. "I didn't feel like myself, but I liked the fact that I didn't feel like myself. I felt like someone completely different. I felt like I was famous." News of Jessica's growing fame as Autumn Edows reached her parents only by accident. "I got a phone call, and the principal says one of the parents had seen disturbing photographs and material of Jessica," her father tells FRONTLINE. "I had no idea what she was doing on the Internet. That was a big surprise." In Growing Up Online, FRONTLINE takes viewers inside the very public private worlds that kids are creating online, raising important questions about how the Internet is transforming childhood. "The Internet and the digital world was something that belonged to adults, and now it's something that really is the province of teenagers, " says C.J. Pascoe, a postdoctoral scholar with the University of California, Berkeley's Digital Youth Research project.

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Sick Around the World

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Frontline - Apr. 17 (Special Report) - FRONTLINE teams up with veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent T.R. Reid to find out how five other capitalist democracies -- the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland -- deliver health care, and what the United States might learn from their successes and their failures.

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Bad Voodoo's War

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Frontline - Apr. 03 (Special Report) - (VIDEO) Through their daily experiences, acting platoon leader Sgt. 1st Class Toby Nunn, originally from British Columbia and the father of three, and Spc. Jason Shaw, a 23-year-old from Texas, give us a firsthand look at the impact of the U.S. military's policy of multiple deployments to Iraq and how the Army's role has changed on the ground.

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Bush's War

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Frontline - By Michael Kirk - Mar. 24 (Special Report) - (VIDEO - 4.5 hours) On one side, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet squared off against Vice President Dick Cheney and his longtime ally, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The battles were over policy -- whether to attack Iraq; the role of Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi; how to treat detainees; whether to seek United Nations resolutions; and the value of intelligence suggesting a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks -- but the conflict was deeply personal.

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Fighting Over Forests

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Frontline - By No author listed - Feb. 25 (News Report) - Will a Bush Administration effort open hundreds of thousands of acres of public land to private development?

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Showdown with Iran

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 10:39:20 -0700

Frontline - By Greg Barker, Alistair Bell, Catherine Bremer - Oct. 24 (Special Report) - As the United States and Iran are locked in a battle for power and influence across the Middle East -- with the fear of an Iranian nuclear weapon looming in the background -- Frontline gains unprecedented access to Iranian hard-liners shaping government policy, including parliament leader Hamid Reza Hajibabaei, National Security Council member Mohammad Jafari and state newspaper editor Hossein Shariatmadari. In this report, Frontline examines how U.S. efforts to install democracy in Iraq have served to strengthen Iran's position as an emerging power in the Middle East. "You will not find a single instance in which a country has inflicted harm on us and we have left it without a response. So if the United States makes such a mistake, they should know that we will definitely respond. And we don't make idle threats," Mohammad Jafari tells Frontline in his first-ever television interview.

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Cheney's Law

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 23:41:05 -0700

Frontline - By Michael Kirk - Oct. 16 (Special Report) - For three decades Vice President Dick Cheney conducted a secretive, behind-closed-doors campaign to give the president virtually unlimited wartime power. Finally, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Justice Department and the White House made a number of controversial legal decisions. Orchestrated by Cheney and his lawyer David Addington, the department interpreted executive power in an expansive and extraordinary way, granting President George W. Bush the power to detain, interrogate, torture, wiretap and spy -- without congressional approval or judicial review. Now, as the White House appears ready to ignore subpoenas in the investigations over wiretapping and U.S. attorney firings, FRONTLINE examines the battle over the power of the presidency and Cheney's way of looking at the Constitution. "The vice president believes that Congress has very few powers to actually constrain the president and the executive branch," former Justice Department attorney Marty Lederman tells FRONTLINE. "He believes the president should have the final word -- indeed the only word -- on all matters within the executive branch." After Sept. 11, Cheney and Addington were determined to implement their vision -- in secret. The vice president and his counsel found an ally in John Yoo, a lawyer at the Justice Department's extraordinarily powerful Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). In concert with Addington, Yoo wrote memoranda authorizing the president to act with unparalleled authority.

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Uganda: The Condom Controversy

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 10:01:05 -0700

Frontline - By Daniele Anastasion - Jul. 13 (News Report) - "You must learn how to say no," booms Ugandan evangelical minister Martin Ssempa. "Say 'I do not want to have sex. I have chosen not to have sex.'" So begins this week's Rough Cut, which looks at the controversy over U.S. funding for AIDS relief in Africa. We meet Ssempa, preaching to a classroom of students in Uganda's capital, Kampala. He's among a growing number of voices in the country who are teaching an abstinence-only approach to combat the spread of HIV. It's a message with roots in the United States, where abstinence-before-marriage campaigns surfaced in the early 1980s, mainly among Christian evangelical groups. The issue became more politicized in 2003, when President Bush pledged $15 billion to fight the global spread of AIDS, the biggest single contribution from any nation.

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POSITHIV+: AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa

Thu, 17 May 2007 11:54:48 -0700

Frontline - By Pep Bonet, Mimi Chakarova - May. 17 (Advocacy) - FRONTLINE/World FlashPoint editor Mimi Chakarova spoke to Pep Bonet by phone at his home in Mallorca about what this project meant to him personally and the surprising number of uplifting memories he took away from Africa and its struggle to combat HIV/AIDS. Mimi Chakarova: Your photos display a lot of dignity and a certain sense of quietness. Can you tell me more about the thinking process behind the images, how you chose the subjects and why? Pep Bonet: The reality of AIDS is very, very hard. I've seen more people suffering from AIDS than people living with AIDS, and that has been my experience in Sub-Saharan Africa. But you cannot only show that. There is a hope, and this is one of the main things that I really like in Africa. People have hope, and they are very strong. Just photographing the chaos and the sick people would not show all that was happening. There were people going back to their lives because of ARV [anti-retroviral] therapy and because they had learned to accept their HIV status. I wanted to also show the other side, not to stigmatize people more than they already are, because this is the reality in Africa. People are stigmatized by their neighbors and their communities because most people don't really know about HIV.

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America at a Crossroads: Gangs of Iraq

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 19:29:25 -0700

Frontline - By Martin Smith, Marcela Gaviria - Apr. 17 (Special Report) - Day after day, month after month, scores of bodies litter the streets of Baghdad, many of them tortured and mutilated before they were killed. To staunch the violence, the U.S. has spent billions of dollars to "stand up" Iraq's new army and police forces and make them capable of bringing security to the country. Gangs of Iraq takes a hard look at how the four-year training effort has failed and how these coalition-trained forces have themselves been infiltrated by various sectarian militias. While President Bush's new "surge" strategy is sending thousands of new troops to Iraq to help control the violence convulsing the country, the effort to stand up Iraqi forces and go after the militias remains a centerpiece of America's strategy. But can it work?

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The press's role as a watchdog on government

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 07:58:50 -0800

Frontline - By Lowell Bergman - Mar. 10 (Special Report) - Drawing on more than 80 interviews with key figures in the print, broadcast and electronic media, and with unequaled, behind-the-scenes access to some of today's most important news organizations, Frontline correspondent Lowell Bergman examines the challenges facing the mainstream news media, and the media's reaction, in "News War," a special four-part series.

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Why reporters need confidential sources

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 08:09:54 -0800

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What does the Plame case add up to?

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 08:04:46 -0800

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The Bush Administration and the press

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 08:01:42 -0800

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What's Happening to the News

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 20:08:27 -0800

Frontline - By Lowell Bergman - Mar. 06 (Special Report) - (Part 3 of Frontline's "News War" TV documentary series) Changing times, new audiences, pressures for profits and the Internet revolution are upending mainstream media's old values and business models. Can anyone predict the future for news and in-depth reporting? Watch the full program online, or browse through 50+ interviews with key news media players.

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News War

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 19:40:18 -0800

Frontline - By Lowell Bergman - Feb. 17 (Special Report) - "The battle between the White House and the national media is the battle over who controls the national agenda," says commentator Patrick Buchanan. Mark McKinnon, former media adviser to President George W. Bush, agrees: "The Washington press corps for years thought that unless you talked to The New York Times and CBS, that you weren't talking to the American public. Well, that's just not the case anymore." McKinnon feels that it is a White House prerogative to choose its own communications strategy: "Presidents ... ought to determine who they want to talk to and when they want to talk to them," he says. But William Safire, author and former New York Times political columnist, fears that hostilities between the administration and the press could threaten the media's ability to hold government accountable. "The great check and balance that was built into the Constitution is under challenge," he says. "You've got to have a relationship between the government and the press that's adversarial, but not an enemy."

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The Lost Year in Iraq

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 15:29:31 -0700

Frontline - Oct. 17 (News Report) - In the first weeks after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, a group of young American bureaucrats led by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III set off to establish democracy in Iraq. "We had an ambitious goal," Bremer tells FRONTLINE, "to try to bring better government to Iraq and help them rebuild their economy [and] their country." One year later, as Bremer made a secret exit to evade insurgent attacks, the group left behind a thriving insurgency, economic collapse and much of its idealism. "Our grand initiative there [was] to bring democracy to Iraq," says Rajiv Chandrasekaran, former Baghdad bureau chief for The Washington Post. Instead, says Chandrasekaran, "we were leaving with our tail between our legs." Today, as America looks for an exit strategy, FRONTLINE examines the initial, critical decisions of the U.S.-led regime in Baghdad in The Lost Year in Iraq. From the same team that produced Rumsfeld's War, The Torture Question and The Dark Side, the film is based on more than 30 interviews, most of them with the officials charged with building a new and democratic Iraq. The Lost Year in Iraq begins on April 9, 2003, as American troops help a crowd of Iraqis topple a statue of Saddam Hussein. In Washington there was celebration, but in Baghdad the looting was beginning. Jay Garner, the retired general picked by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to lead reconstruction, was forced to wait in Kuwait for authorization to enter Iraq. He and his team had arrived from Washington without computers, telephones or a plan. "Everybody was focused on the war; they were focused on regime change," Garner tells FRONTLINE. "That took all of their energy. I wasn't the central focus." On the day Garner finally arrived in Baghdad, he received a phone call from Rumsfeld: He was being replaced by L. Paul Bremer.

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