People

Commentaries from prison nixed, but —

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NPR’s decisions to air, and then not to air, Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death-row commentaries might yet take another turn. The network is committed to airing prisoners’ voices — perhaps Abu-Jamal’s, in a form different from the stand-alone commentaries originally planned, NPR Vice President Bill Buzenberg said Wednesday. “I see this as a decision to pull back” and “postpone,” he said. “We’ll make other editorial decisions down the road.”
The silence from prisons allows a public hysterical about crime to maintain its stereotyped image
of prisoners and not think about them as complex human beings, says Sussman. The NPR-distributed Fresh Air interview program, meanwhile, may hire an inmate commentator (separate story below).

Programs/Content

FDR defenders enlist TV critics to refute Holocaust film

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Weeks before the debut of an American Experience film on the U.S. response to the Holocaust, defenders of President Franklin Roosevelt undertook a quiet campaign to influence and later discredit historical analysis presented in “America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference.” In the disturbing film, aired April 6, 1994, producer Marty Ostrow argued that the Roosevelt Administration knew that the Nazis were systematically slaughtering Jews and followed a policy of not rescuing them. The critics’ complaint, in the words of William vanden Heuvel, president of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, was that the film was “one-sided and grossly unfair, indifferent to the truth and deceitful in concept.” But when series producers sat down to evaluate the advance criticism with Ostrow and his team of historical advisors, they came to a different conclusion. “We came out of those meetings with confidence that the film was not only accurate, but it said what the authors of the film wanted it to say, and that they were on good ground,” said Judy Crichton, executive producer.