The American Experience (from PBS)

Since its debut in 1988, THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE has brought the pivotal events and people who helped shape the destiny of this country into nearly eight million homes each week. As the only primetime historical documentary series on television, it brings to life the incredible characters and epic stories that helped form this nation. The series has produced nearly 100 programs that cut across the boundaries of race, geography, politics and time. Among the best known productions is an ever-growing volume of presidential portraits, including FDR, Eisenhower, The Kennedys, NIXON, and LBJ. Soon to appear are the biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan. THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE has served public television audiences by drawing them to the great and the untold stories of their nation: biographies like Daley, the Last Boss, Malcolm X, and Amelia Earhart; wrenching tales of natural disasters like The Johnstown Flood, and The San Francisco Earthquake; the agony of war in The Battle of the Bulge and D-Day; the struggle of native peoples in Geronimo and in the highly acclaimed mini-series, The Way West; the hype and glamour of Hollywood in The Battle Over Citizen Kane; a tale of human tragedy in The Donner Party. Woven together from archival images, photographs, home movies, and contemporary images, the programs are produced by some of the most talented filmmakers in the country with an eye to inform as well as to entertain, to be honest and thoughtful and, most importantly, to bring America's past to life. THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE has won seven Emmys, the DuPont Columbia Journalism Award, four Peabody Awards, five Writers' Guild Awards and every major film and television honor.

The Democracy Project provides viewers with innovative news and public affairs programming built upon traditional PBS programming strengths - depth, dialogue, diversity of viewpoints and duration. In this area you'll find a complete listing of The Democracy Project programs including descriptions and links to existing program web sites.

Since 1983, FRONTLINE has served as PBS's flagship public-affairs series. If critics greeted its debut with tentative praise as the last best hope for broadcast documentaries, its stature after fourteen seasons and over 320 programs is no longer in doubt. It has outlasted every comparable long-form documentary series on the commercial networks and earned its credentials through the highest broadcast journalism awards. Among TV critics and print editorialists, FRONTLINE has established itself as what the Cleveland Plain Dealer called "the most consistently important weekly hour on television, the crown jewel and standard-bearer for the mission of public television." That mission has not come without controversy. Nor could the series have grown without the continuing moral and financial commitment to FRONTLINE's journalistic independence from subscribing stations within the PBS galaxy. Such autonomy was foremost in the minds of those who helped put the series on the drawing boards back in the early 1980s--program managers, producers, and others like Lewis Freedman, then director of the CPB Program Fund. To nurture within PBS a series that aired fair-minded, but uncompromising investigations, as well as in-depth reporting of the thorniest public-policy issues, the program would have to be insulated from political pressures both within and without. FRONTLINE was born at a time when the prospects for long-form documentaries looked particularly grim. Pressure was on for news departments to become profitable. In the minds of many broadcast executives, the FCC's public-affairs mandate had been vitiated by Reagan era deregulation. In January 1983, when FRONTLINE premiered, CBS's news division had seventeen lawsuits pending against it; the spirit of outspoken, unfettered jtheirnalistic inquiry fostered at the networks in series like Edward R. Murrow's See It Now, programs like "Harvest of Shame" and the vérité-style "Primary" had given way to entertainment values, anchor superstars, and magazine shows. In the sphere of public-affairs programming, PBS was still in its salad days. It fell to public television not only to pick up the torch but to cut its jtheirnalistic teeth within this well-established broadcast news tradition. PBS had already weathered one serious firestorm over the controversial documentary "Death of a Princess, "broadcast on WORLD, the forerunner of FRONTLINE. Produced by David Fanning, it told the story of a Saudi princess and her lover executed for committing adultery. Unprecedented pressure came from the U.S. State Department, the Saudi royal family, the Mobil Oil Corporation, and even from some corners of PBS to cancel the show. "The system did not blink," FRONTLINE's former executive editor and WORLD series editor Louis Wiley recalls, "and in airing the show, PBS passed a Rubicon. It proved its integrity and showed just how much heat we might have to withstand if we were to serve as a forum for serious journalism." That commitment was part of the rationale for establishing the documentary consortium as a supervisory board for FRONTLINE, one that insured the series' editorial independence within PBS.

At this website you will find news and information on the live PBS broadcasts of performances from the Lincoln Center in New York City.

At this website you will find extended news and information on people and events featured on this PBS news program.While without doubt this one hour program, broadcast every weekday evening, beats other news programs aired on free commercial television hands down in terms of quality, it has undermined its own standards by moving to the right and adopting a more parochial news focus.

This Web site uses the reporting and analysis presented in THE PEOPLE& THE POWER GAME- a four-hour PBS documentary and discussion series which explores the relationship between four crucial power centers of American government: The Presidency, the Congress, the Media and the Lobbies. The first two-hour program, "The Unelected:The Lobbies and The Media" shows how these two unelected power centers have grown into a shadow government with great influence on American democracy. The 1996 election broke all records for political spending - nearly $2 billion was spent by parties and candidates in federal elections. Even before election day, the Clinton campaign was accused of taking illegal foreign contributions, and the Democratic party charged Republican nominee Robert Dole with exceeding the legal spending limits in his primary campaign. They have linked to several sites that are closely following the money trail. The media's role in covering elections, a subject of their documentary, continues to spur controversy. Under pressure to serve the voters during the 1996 campaign, several networks agreed to provide limited amounts of free air time to presidential candidates, though the public paid little attention. We offer several links to organizations that focus on the quality and tenor of media political coverage. These can be found on "The Unelected: The Lobbies and The Media" The second two-hour program, "The Elected:The Presidency & Congress" examines the Clinton Presidency and Speaker Newt Gingrich's "Republican Revolution," and show the two collided in an epic power struggle over the federal budget that influenced the 1996 election outcome. In the new Congress, Speaker Gingrich has been publicly reprimanded and fined by the House of Representatives after admitting an Ethics violation on campaign funding,leaving his leadership weakened. The Clinton campaign and the Democratic party also faced investigation for campaign law violations, even as the President has called for campaign reform. We offer new links to materials on the new agendas of the Republican Congress and the Democratic White House.

P.O.V. is an award-winning national public television series created to showcase independent non-fiction films that frequently reflect the "point of view" of the filmmaker. Over the last few years, they have acted as a laboratory to develop models which challenge the notion that watching television is a passive experience, and encourage viewer feedback, dialogue and engagement.