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The Man Behind Frontline
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20123 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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2 / 1992 |
1,689 Words |
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Don Kowet
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Ask a media industry expert to name the most powerful people in national television news, and the answer would probably list television news anchors Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, and Tom Brokaw. Ask them to name the four top network news executives and the answers might list ABC's Roone Arledge, CBS's David Burke, CNN's Ted Turner, and NBC's Michael Gardner.
But Public Broadcasting Service's David Fanning also deserves a place in this pantheon. Fanning is the executive producer of Frontline, public television's highest-rated public affairs program. The show, which airs Tuesdays at 9:00 P.M. eastern time, has nearly seven million viewers weekly. Since it started in 1983, the series has produced 6 of PBS's 15 top-rated shows.
Frontline, its press releases boast, has bagged 65 major prizes, including 15 Emmys, three Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards, three Alfred I. du Pont-Columbia University Awards in Broadcast Journalism, three George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Awards, and the George Polk Memorial Award. But not everyone fawns over Fanning and Frontline.
"If a liberal such as Ted Turner wanted to advance his political agenda on his own network, with his own money, that would be bad enough," says Brent Bozell, Media Watch's publisher. "But when Fanning uses the taxpayers' money to advance his own radical agenda, I think that's despicable."
PBS disagrees, as proved by the fact that Fanning's Frontline budget for this season will swell by $1.9 million, reaching $9.6 million--at a time when the documentary form is allegedly dead. He'll use that bonanza to beef up the number of new documentaries from 16 a season to 26, with total time slots (including repeats) rising to 32 hours from 23.
Fanning may be a demigod for the federally subsidized citizens of PBS World. But for conservative critics, he is just a clay-footed replica of the "radical chic" leftists whom author Tom Wolfe mocked in the 1970s. Wolfe wrote that radical chic "invariably favors radicals who seem primitive, exotic and romantic" and who are " headquartered three thousand miles from the East Side of Manhattan" so they don't "become too much underfoot."
In Frontline's case, the romantic radicals are Nicaragua's Sandinista comandantes, El Salvador's Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front guerrillas, and Guatemala's communist rebels-all of which are subjects of favorable
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