The producer put "genocide" in the documentary's title, he said, because "not to call it genocide is to enable denial." Pictured: an Armenian woman forced to march in the desert carrying her child. (Photo courtesy of Two Cats Productions.)
Panel show riles rather than soothes genocide furor
A decision by PBS to air a half-hour panel discussion after the documentary The Armenian Genocide has generated a firestorm of viewer e-mails and petitions of protest from members of Congress and the public more than six weeks before its scheduled airdate.
In some aspects, this is déjà vu all over again for PBS: The 1988 broadcast of a first-person documentary that also touched on the conflicts between the Ottoman Turks and the Armenians, An Armenian Journey, brought bomb threats to PBS stations and death threats to filmmaker Theodore Bogosian, the independent producer said. The Turkish government lodged a formal complaint, charging “inaccuracies and gross misrepresentations.” Turkish groups threatened lawsuits and urged PBS to distribute a 22-minute film with opposing views, which it declined to do, Current reported in 1988.
Although no one disputes that massive numbers of Armenian Christians died in what was then the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923 — estimates range from many hundreds of thousands to 1.5 million — the Turkish government has claimed for decades that the Armenians were victims of a civil war in which even more Turkish Muslims died.
On April 17 the new hourlong genocide film by independent producer Andrew Goldberg will air on stations in nine of the top 10 markets, but only two — in Chicago and Houston — plan to show the follow-up program, Armenian Genocide: Exploring the Issues. Oregon Public Broadcasting, presenter of Goldberg’s film, taped the follow-up roundtable in early February with NPR’s Scott Simon as moderator.
Opponents of the follow-up are outraged that it will give prominence to two historians who deny that the Armenian deaths constitute genocide.
"This is morally wrong. It is ethically wrong. It is no different from having Holocaust deniers on, or white supremacists on following a documentary on slavery,” said Peter Balakian, a Colgate University professor who wrote The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response.
Balakian appeared in both Goldberg’s documentary and the panel discussion afterward. However, he said he participated as a panelist unwillingly after he was told by David Davis, OPB’s v.p. of national production, that the documentary wouldn’t air without the accompanying panel discussion.
“The post-show had to be done to save the documentary. The documentary was way too important. They put me in a morally difficult position,” said Balakian.
“I don’t want to address that directly,” Davis said of Balakian’s assertion. “My position would be that PBS and OPB both felt it [the panel program] was a good thing. We made that clear to Peter.”
Davis sees “a big misunderstanding” about the panel discussion. “The follow-up is not meant to address some failing of the documentary; it is only meant to further discussion” on the topic, he said. Goldberg’s documentary already presents the Turkish government’s view that the Armenian deaths were the result of a civil war, not a formal extermination campaign.
Documentary “quadruple-checked”
Goldberg, of New York-based Two Cats Productions, said PBS executives told him as they reviewed his film’s rough cuts that it would be aired with a panel discussion.
“I didn’t think it was necessary,” said Goldberg, but he said he could accept it “because I knew that for our film we had done our homework six ways from Sunday. Every fact was quadruple-checked and had been vetted by so many people—historians, journalists—that I knew there was no way that the after-show was an interpretation of our reporting.”
Coby Atlas, PBS senior v.p. and co-chief programming head, said that PBS stands behind Goldberg’s film but elected to do the panel discussion “because this is not subject matter that is well-known by Americans. It is a subject that has been ignored to a great degree. . . . Our own presidents — both Bush and Clinton — did not call it genocide. Because they have declined to call it genocide, it raises questions. The Turkish government does not call it genocide.”
Although the U.S. government has avoided use of the term “genocide” since the Reagan era (Bush has referred to it as “annihilation” and “mass killings and forced exile”), more than a dozen countries have passed resolutions characterizing the event as such, as has the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Some European politicians have stated that they will not admit Turkey into the European Union until it admits genocide occurred. In September, the House International Relations Committee passed a resolution 35-11 that would have officially recognized the Armenian deaths as genocide, but it has yet to make its way to the House floor.
The man behind the House resolution, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), has drafted
a letter to PBS urging it not to air the panel discussion. As of late last
week, he had gotten 15 House colleagues to sign it, his press secretary said.
PBS had received about 4,000 e-mails protesting the panel show and 2,000
supporting it, said spokeswoman Carrie Johnson late last week. An online
petition protesting the panel program numbered more than 16,000 as of Current’s
press time.
Genocide naysayer featured in ’88 doc
PBS’s Atlas disputed parallels between Goldberg’s work and Bogosian’s An Armenian Journey, saying the earlier work “didn’t tackle this issue. It was more about Armenia, not about the genocide, and that (possible protests by Turkish officials) did not go into our thinking.”
However, Bogosian told Current his documentary did address genocide extensively and also included an interview with Justin McCarthy, one of the scholars in the panel discussion program who dispute that genocide occurred. (In the new program McCarthy says what took place was “mutual genocide.”)
"In the past 20 years, the Turkish lobby has strengthened in terms of its scope and its connections in Washington. I think what I faced 20 years ago was very strong, but the editorial attacks that the Turkish lobby made on the network, station and my program were rebuked by PBS and WGBH,” said Bogosian, a filmmaker based in Watertown, Mass., whose last doc for PBS was The Press Secretary in 2001. He had seen neither Goldberg’s documentary nor the panel discussion program.
Bogosian said he could not criticize the panel discussion program for allowing McCarthy, a University of Louisville professor, to speak, since he had done so: “I don’t think he should be denied an opportunity to present information.”
WNET reverses stand on panel show
Of stations in the top 10 markets, only KERA in Dallas had not decided whether to air Goldberg’s documentary at Current’s press time; KQED in San Francisco had committed to the doc but had not decided whether to air the panel discussion.
Los Angeles’ KCET, the station in the city with the largest population of Armenians outside the former Soviet Republic of Armenia, is showing neither Goldberg’s documentary nor the panel discussion program. (However, Los Angeles residents will be able to catch it on KOCE in Orange County.) Instead, KCET will air Le Genocide Armenien, a French documentary. Bohdan Zachary, KCET executive director of programming, said the station had already acquired, at considerable expense, the Laurence Jourdan work before PBS announced it was feeding The Armenian Genocide. He also said the French piece “covers the subject more exhaustively and comprehensively than Andrew’s work.” KCET hasn’t ruled out airing the Goldberg film later in the year, Zachary said.
New York’s WNET announced initially it would air the panel discussion, but the station reversed itself early last week. Spokeswoman Stella Giammasi said execs changed course not because they had received a letter of protest from U.S. Reps. Anthony Weiner and Carolyn Maloney (both D-N.Y.) but because it had initially decided to air both programs before viewing them.
"When the program panel saw it, we really felt the follow-up didn’t
add anything to the documentary,” she said.
Most of the other programming execs contacted who had rejected airing the
panel program issued similar opinions.
Those who plan to air the follow-up panel give explanations like that of
Andrea McKenna, assistant programming director for HoustonPBS: “When
there’s something that controversial, with several sides to stories,
we like to air a follow-up where all opinions can be aired in a forum.”
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posted March 6, 2006
Copyright 2006 by Current Publishing Committee