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Is Your Public Broadcasting Station Doing It's Job?

You don't have to wait for the Public Broadcasting Trust to enjoy better public broadcasting in your community. PBS and NPR are membership organizations, not affiliated networks. All program decisions are made locally. In fact, one-third of the average station's schedule consists of outside acquisitions purchased with its Corporation for Public Broadcasting Community Service Grant. We can show you how to introduce alternative programs into your local station's schedule.

Here are some outstanding specials carried by the PBS National Program Service recently. Were they offered by the station in your town? If not, join a CIPB Chapter and get the best of what PBS has to offer.

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RECOMMENDED SERIES:

CRINGELY
Recommended Series
In his weekly column, computer industry gadfly Robert X. Cringely addresses the issues dominating the ever-changing high tech world.

FRONTLINE 
Recommended Series - Airs Thursdays Beginning January 10, 2002 (9-10 p.m.)
This series presents compelling and engaging investigative documentaries that explore the stories and issues of the times.

SPECIALS:

ON OUR OWN TERMS: MOYERS ON DYING This four-part series presents the intimate, end-of-life journeys of more than a dozen individuals, with support from their families and caregivers, as they struggle to balance medical intervention with comfort and dignity as they face death. Filled with honesty and humor, courage and controversy, the series breaks through the culture of denial to determine ways Americans can die on their own terms. "The stories of these generous people, who let us into their lives at an extraordinarily vulnerable time, help us to understand dying not as a failure, but as a natural part of life," says Moyers.

FILMS & DOCUMENTARIES (listed alphabetically):
A FORCE MORE POWERFUL: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict
This riveting, new, three-hour documentary tells one of humanity's most important and least understood stories — how, during a century of extreme violence, millions chose to battle brutality and oppression with nonviolent weapons — and won. "These are powerful stories, about truth overcoming lies, love dissolving evil, and life eclipsing death," said former president Jimmy Carter of the documentary. "Nonviolent valor can end oppression, and the world of the 21st century will be safer, freer and more humane if it heeds the lessons of this series."

AFTER THE FALL A lyrical documentary about one of the greatest historical structures and icons, the Berlin Wall, and the effect its destruction had on those living in East and West Germany. Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this film searches for the traces of the wall within the people who lived in its shadow. The strip where the structure once stood is now Europe's largest construction site, with 50,000 new buildings completed. The Wall may be gone, but its imprint remains. Stories of frustration, fear and dreams uncover the remains of this inconceivable border, excavating memories out of a collective act of forgetting.

CONSCIENCE AND THE CONSTITUTION In World War II, a handful of young Americans refused to be drafted from an American concentration camp. They were ready to fight for their country, but not before the government restored their rights as U.S. citizens and released their families from camp. It was a classic example of civil disobedience -- but the government prosecuted them as criminals and Japanese American leaders and veterans ostracized them as traitors. CONSCIENCE AND THE CONSTITUTION delves into the heart of the Japanese American conscience and a controversy that continues today. Experience the choice faced by any group when confronted by mass injustice -- whether to comply or to resist.

CRITICAL CONDITION with Hedrick Smith takes a penetrating grass roots look at the quality, affordability and availability of health care from open heart surgery and cancer care to treatment for strokes, diabetes or children’s diseases. From Florida to California, Tennessee to Texas, New York to Utah, CRITICAL CONDITION tells compelling personal stories that go inside America’s health care system to see how it works after a decade of managed care. The program is divided into four segments: 1) The Chronically Ill: Pain, Profit and the Fight for Care, 2) The Idealistic HMO: Can Good Care Survive the Market? 3) The Uninsured: 44 Million Forgotten Americans 4) The Quality Gap: Medicine’s Secret Killer. The Institute of Medicine reports that up to 98,000 Americans die in hospitals each year from medical errors. "People are worried whether the right health care will be there when they or their mom or their kids need it most," reports Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Hedrick Smith. "We found that people who were passive tended to get shunted toward second-class care or didn’t get the treatment that experts recommend. Those who were assertive, even aggressive, in finding out about the best treatments, generally received the best care. Patients have to become their own advocates. For many, good information on health care is a life or death issue."

HOMECOMING In 1920 there were nearly one million black farmers in America; in 1999 there were less than 18,000. Traveling to her cousin’s farm in rural Georgia, filmmaker Charlene Gilbert investigates the social and political implications of African American land loss in the South. Both a historical examination and an intimate look at one rural family, HOMECOMING documents the tradition and decline of black farming, and explores the bittersweet legacy of the land, a symbol of both struggle and survival.

THE INVISIBLE SOLDIERS views one of the critical events of the 20th century, World War II, through the eyes of those whose faithful service to America has not been recorded in the mainstream historical or popular media depiction of the war — the more than one million African American men and women in uniform who gave their loyalty, their blood and their lives to protect a country that denied them the very freedoms for which they were fighting.
THE INVISIBLE SOLDIERS is more than a war story. It is a story of the racism that haunted the valiant American war effort. It is a story of the roots of a modem civil rights movement that grew from the dashed hopes of those who had risked their lives only to return to a homeland that refused to acknowledge their sacrifice. It is a story of how being ignored by history and popular culture has kept the truth from generations of Americans who grew up thinking that only Euro-Americans did their duty in World War II and deserve the entitlements that service brings.

JOE HILL presents the story of the labor organizer executed by the state of Utah in 1915. More than the story of one rebel, JOE HILL is the story of a nation struggling with issues of justice, opportunity and the American Dream. The 90-minute documentary uses archival photographs, written documents, dramatic recreations and interviews with historians, to tell the story of an immigrant-turned-union-organizer caught in a power struggle with big business and politics.

KPFA ON THE AIR "KPFA on the Air," from filmmakers Veronica Selver and Sharon Wood, goes behind the scenes of oldest and most ambitious independent, community-based media in the world, KPFA radio. Novelist Alice Walker narrates this riveting documentary through KPFA’s passionate 50-year history, including its founding by pacifists and poets, through its defiance of Cold War conformity, to the present day challenges that confront this ongoing experiment in media democracy. Rather than covering up the fractious culture of the station, the documentary illustrates that communities are by nature in constant formation, change and contention. Dramatic archival footage, a wealth of interviews with participants, and the many voices of KPFA programming through the years bring the story of this extraordinary community radio station to life.