After this documentary, PBS commissioned a follow up, which included the American and Turkish scholars in the documentary discussing if they was a genocide or not. This became controversial because it seem that PBS had took a public stance that the Armenian Genocide did occur. Interesting enough, only 60% of the PBS affiliated programs aired this, and in major city with bigger stations and markets such as LA, NYC, Boston, Washington DC, etc did not air this follow up discussion. The viewer audience rate for this also went down by 50%.
There was two Ombudsman column before this current one I'm commenting on right now. In the April 14 column, one of the letters was from David Saltzman, the Counsel for the Assembly of Turkish American Associations. Saltzman reminded PBS in his letter that PBS must follow CPB's mandate to ensure "strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature." He talked about how PBS's standards is to assure "that its overall content offerings contain a broad range of opinions and points of view, including those from outside society's existing consensus, presented in a responsible manner. . ." However, in his opinion, PBS failed to met the standards "in the case of controversial Armenian allegation of genocide"
You can read more about this here: http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/2006/04/documenting_and_debating_a_genocide.html
The April 14 Column is also very interesting if you want to read about actual people's opinion and response to the column. http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/2006/04/the_ombudsmans_mailbag_2.html
That's weird how the amount of people airing it just decreased dramatically. I wonder some of the reasons behind that. Never really considered it from that point of view.
ReplyDelete