Five Good Questions for Gwen Ifill

Gwen Ifill has made a career out of asking questions.

Now she’s ready to answer yours.

Gwen, the moderator of “Washington Week” and a senior correspondent for “The NewsHour,” is the next participant in “Five Good Questions,” our new feature that allows you to engage directly with key people at PBS.

Want to ask Gwen what it’s like to chat up the nation’s top reporters each Friday night on “Washington Week?” Curious about some of the stories she’s covered for “The NewsHour?” Eager to learn more about her friendship with the late Tim Russert?  Read more 

According to one report Keith Olberman and Gwen Ifill are the top contenders for the new Meet the Press host. Now Ifill is nothing but a public embarrassment. However, if she got the MTP gig, that would open up Washington Week for Robert Parry.  Read more 

Pittsburgh Lesbian

WQED Vote 2008: A Town Hall Meeting and Broadcast with Jim Lehrer to Air Live on Sunday, April 20 at 6pm

Public is invited to be part of studio audience

PITTSBURGH - While Pennsylvania presidential campaigns usually begin in Philadelphia, they don’t end there. What do these candidates know about the Pittsburgh region? What does the public want them to know?  Read more 

Tonight, PBS’s Frontline visits the heart of darkness that is Haditha.

From PBS’s website for The Rules of Engagement:

FRONTLINE cuts through the fog of war to reveal the untold story of what happened in Haditha, Iraq—where twenty-four of the town’s residents were killed by U.S. forces in what many in the media branded “Iraq’s My Lai.” With accusations swirling that the Marines massacred Iraqi civilians “in cold blood,” the Haditha incident has led to one of the largest criminal cases against U.S. troops in the Iraq war. But real questions have emerged about what really happened that day, and who is responsible. Through television interviews with Iraqi survivors and Marines accused of war crimes, FRONTLINE investigates this incident and what it can tell us about the harrowing moral and legal landscape the U.S. military faces in Iraq.

Though much of public television has been infected by reactionary politics, I have continued to trust that Frontline producers still take their journalism and news reporting seriously. The story of Haditha deserves no less.

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Rather than my comments, please take the time to read the transcript from Bill Moyer’s Journal, September 7, 2007 from people with actual credentials:

MICKEY EDWARDS: So one of the things that’s happened is giving the— much more leeway to the president and protecting— allowing communications companies to be able to cooperate with the president, with the White House— in eavesdropping on people and taking away from the American citizens the right to sue, the right to go after these companies for cooperating. So, there have been a lot of new powers that have been given to the executive branch in this revised FISA.  Read more 

I don’t have cable and the only thing worth watching most nights is PBS. The best thing on PBS is Frontline, which I call “Can’t pee TV” because their documentaries are so intense and compelling I can’t stop watching until the show is over.

So last night, as part of the “America at a Crossroads” series, PBS decides to “balance” an amazing Frontline documentary about training the Iraqi troops with a shameless hour-long infomercial created by and for the benefit of war profiteer and neocon ideologue Richard Perle.

Here’s the NYT on the programming decision:

As Elizabeth Jensen reported in The New York Times earlier this month, Bush administration critics were suspicious of the entire 11-part series about the world after 9/11, especially the portion turned over to Mr. Perle. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which administers federal money to public television and radio, has long been under pressure by the White House to include more conservative voices. (The corporation’s chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, was forced to resign in November 2005 after it was revealed that he had monitored the political leanings of some guests on PBS.)

The contrast was stunning.  Read more