PASADENA, Calif. – PBS is ready to go to war on behalf of documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. That was one of the messages delivered by the public broadcasting network’s new president and chief executive officer, Paula Kerger, during her first meeting with the nation’s TV critics.
“The War,” the next Burns epic, is a history of World War II slated to air in fall 2007. A few of the veterans interviewed for the documentary use some ungentle words to describe their war experiences.
The trouble is that the Federal Communications Commission has hit some local broadcast stations with whopping fines for letting four-letter profanities slip onto the air. And Kerger said the FCC will not give her any assurance that a rough word or two will be acceptable in the historical context of a documentary about World War II.
“If you have someone telling a story about their experiences in the war, and in telling that story, a profanity is uttered, the impact of it is washed away or radically diminished if it’s just bleeped out,” Kerger told critics gathered for their semiannual press tour. “To be able to see a documentary and to be able to let people tell their own story and not censor the words that are coming out of their mouths is tremendously important.
“That’s why this is such a big issue for us, and that’s why it is important for public broadcasting not to just roll over, but to be very clear that, in order to tell some stories, we may need to use language that, at the moment, the FCC is not sure they feel is appropriate for broadcast television.”
PBS plans to air “The War” in an 8-10 p.m. ET time slot, which could put it in the gun sights for an FCC fine. There’s nothing salacious or gratuitous about the World War II veterans’ colorful language, Kerger said, and it’s certainly possible that the FCC will give the Burns film a pass. But playing a guessing game can be dangerous, particularly for a local public TV station.
About the time Kerger was replacing Pat Mitchell as PBS president, the FCC fined a San Mateo, Calif., PBS station $15,000 for airing the profanities in the interviews conducted for Martin Scorsese’s “The Blues.” But the maximum fine has been raised to $300,000.
“When you have stations whose operating budgets are only a couple of million dollars, even the old fines, once you factor in all the legal work, were daunting,” said Kerger, who took the helm at PBS in March. “The fines now would put stations out of business. … I mean, it’s paralyzing.”
Kerger, the sixth president of PBS since its founding in 1969, said she asked the FCC specifically about the language issues in “The War.”
“I mentioned it to each one of the FCC commissioners, because I felt this was a very powerful and very clear story,” she said. “No one said, “Go ahead and run it.’ They said, “Well, you know, we understand.’ I can’t read their minds. I don’t know.”
Kerger said that reading recent FCC decisions on obscenity fines doesn’t help. “It’s a moving target. It’s hard to figure how to navigate through these decisions because there’s no clear guidance. We certainly have a couple of cases coming up that I hope we as an industry will stand together on and be bold.”
PBS could avoid a battle over “The War” by airing it after 10 p.m., outside the FCC’s so-called safe harbor of early prime time.
“I think this is going to be one of the seminal works of his career, and it deserves to be seen by the broadest possible audience,” Kerger said of the Burns documentary. “This is not just about Janet Jackson. This is about filmmakers with powerful stories who are not being allowed to tell those stories on public television or on broadcast television.”
PH END DAWIDZIAK
(Mark Dawidziak is television critic for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. He can be contacted at mdawidziak(at)plaind.com.)
AP-NY-07-28-06 1408EDT
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