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But for some reason, CNN seems to think that just because Burns has made films about stuff like baseball or Prohibition, he’s qualified to deliver competent analysis of modern American politics. Evidently they didn’t learn anything from the time they had him on and he and anchor John Berman drew parallels between Ron DeSantis sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard and the freakin’ Holocaust, because he was back today on “CNN This Morning” with more parallels between Ron DeSantis and Nazi Germany, plus a few other things sprinkled in for good measure: Transcript: Ken Burns: “You know, what makes America great...

Focusing on America’s failures to save more Jews in the Holocaust unintentionally strengthens the forces that would threaten Jews today. Here’s how.Among those excited by the announcement that America’s leading documentary filmmaker had produced a three-part series on the Holocaust were sectors of the Jewish community that have long insisted on the need for all Americans to learn about this subject. Who better suited for this task than Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein, known for their well-crafted, carefully researched historical projects? Not only could they be expected to produce a reliable—if not definitive—treatment of the extermination of the...

If you’re going to make a documentary film about America’s response to the Holocaust, shouldn’t you at least know how many Jewish refugees were admitted to the United States during those years? Surprisingly, filmmaker Ken Burns appears to be unaware of that basic information—or is for some reason seeking to misrepresent the facts. Burns has announced that his forthcoming film will challenge the “myth” that President Franklin D. Roosevelt abandoned Europe’s Jews. That remarkable assertion flies in the face of the historical record that numerous scholars have thoroughly documented. Nonetheless, in recent interviews, Burns has claimed that during the Roosevelt...

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has sparked outrage by comparing the relocation of border crossers to idyllic Martha’s Vineyard to the rise of Nazi Germany before the horrors of the Holocaust.

Seems to be true to history so far-but given it's PBS, I am skeptical.

Ken Burns blasted Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as ‘an enemy of the state’ who ‘doesn’t give a s***’ about the United States and thinks he and his No. 2, Sheryl Sandberg, should be tried for crimes against humanity and put in prison. ‘He knows he can transcend it. He can get away to any place,’ Burns, the award-winning film documentarian and historian, told The New York Times. ‘And so it’s just about filthy lucre, that’s it.’ Burns, the 68-year-old two-time Oscar winner, made the remarks during an interview with Times podcaster Kara Swisher, who invited the filmmaker to talk to...

It's ironic that the documentarian best known for a television series about the Civil War seems to have forgotten the Civil War. That is the only conclusion one would have to make about PBS filmmaker Ken Burns because on Friday's The 11th Hour With Brian Williams, after briefly discussing Robert E. Lee and Woodrow Wilson, he declared that "this is the most fraught time I think in the history of our republic." Really, Ken? More fraught than the American Civil War that you chronicled in which over half a million died? Well, according to the sanctimonious lecture provided by Burns,...

Filmmaker Ken Burns has spent his career documenting American history, and he always considered three major crises in the nation's past: the Civil War, the Depression and World War II. Then came the unprecedented "perfect storm" of 2020 — and Burns thinks we may be living through America's fourth great crisis, and perhaps the worst one yet. "We're beset by three viruses, are we not?" he explains. There's "a year-old COVID-19 virus, but also a 402-year-old virus of white supremacy, of racial injustice. ... And we've got an age-old human virus of misinformation, of paranoia, of conspiracies."

On CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time Tuesday night documentarian Ken Burns, who made his name in 1990 with The Civil War, told the show’s host that, in his informed opinion, Confederate monuments across the country “have to go.” This comes on the same day that President Donald Trump said he will issue an executive order threatening up to 10 years in jail for “anyone who vandalizes or destroys any monument, statue or other such Federal property.” ... “I think we’re in the middle of an enormous reckoning right now in which the anxieties and the pains and the torments of injustice...

Netflix is set to lose some of the best documentaries produced in history. Four of Ken Burns’s famous PBS documentaries are set to leave Netflix in the United States in February 2020. Ken Burns, for those who don’t know already, is a master documentary maker who has stuck with PBS over the years and produced a huge amount of documentaries over the years. He’s been an influential filmmaker with over 35 producer and directing credits to his name and countless awards including two Oscar nominations. In total, Netflix is set to lose four Ken Burns series which include: The War...

“Travel to Memphis, where Sun Studios artists Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley usher in the era of rockabilly. Ray Charles crosses America’s racial divide by recording a country album. Patsy Cline shows off Music City’s smooth new Nashville Sound.” As the 1960’s began Country & Western music was being heavily influenced by the rock & roll sound. A new generation of artists, songwriters and shrewd producers would record some great American music during this transitional era.

Country music has been having an identity crisis since it crawled out of the cradle. Call it diffuse or call it elastic, but it has always run on two tracks: one was rough and one was slick, one rooted in tradition, the other more modern. Think about that serendipitous August in 1927 in Bristol, Tennessee, when, two days apart, both Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family auditioned for the Victor Talking Machine Company (which would ultimately become RCA Records). Ralph Peer, the record company’s producer and talent scout, immediately signed both acts. That was a big week for country...

ANALYSIS/OPINION: By Oliver North October 16, 2017 Richard Nixon kept his promises, Ken Burns did not When Richard Nixon was in the White House, I was in Vietnam and he was my commander in chief. When I was on Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council staff, I had the opportunity to brief former President Nixon on numerous occasions and came to admire his analysis of current events, insights on world affairs and compassion for our troops. His preparation for any meeting or discussion was exhaustive. His thirst for information was unquenchable and his tolerance for fools was nonexistent. Mr. Nixon’s...

The only positive thing I can say about Ken Burns’ documentary on the Vietnam War is this — if it is the best the left has, we may blessedly have heard the last of them. The arguments Mr. Burns presents are weak, biased, and insulting. The documentary is scripted to evoke sorrow and moral indignation over what was presented as American error, ineptness, and lack of moral purpose. The narrative counterposes happy and earnest winners (the communists) with sad and angst-ridden losers (America and the South Vietnamese). It deemed only such perspectives worthy of inclusion. Mr. Burns fails to find...

Watching the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick PBS series on the Vietnam War put me in mind of a memorable essay that Jim Webb—Vietnam war hero, novelist, secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, and most recently Democratic senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia—penned for the American Enterprise Institute seventeen years ago. In this remarkable piece, he called into question the popular idea of a “Vietnam generation.” Webb noted that those who came of age during that war are more properly regarded not as a generation but as an age group, permanently divided by different reactions to a whole range of counter-cultural...

ANALYSIS/OPINION: When Richard Nixon was in the White House, I was in Vietnam and he was my commander in chief. When I was on Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council staff, I had the opportunity to brief former President Nixon on numerous occasions and came to admire his analysis of current events, insights on world affairs and compassion for our troops. His preparation for any meeting or discussion was exhaustive. His thirst for information was unquenchable and his tolerance for fools was nonexistent. Mr. Nixon’s prosecution of the war in Southeast Asia is poorly told by Ken Burns in his new...

The recent PBS ten-episode The Vietnam War, produced and directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, and written by Geoffrey Ward, is billed as a critical reexamination of the war in Indochina that claimed more than 58,000 American lives and more than two million Vietnamese lives. It is nothing of the sort. Burns, Novick and Ward do not reexamine any of the conventional liberal perspectives on the war. The shibboleths of the Left are all reinforced. The production of this new series was, objectively, a waste of time and money, for PBS had essentially told the same story in 1983’s...

Thank you, Ken Burns, for bringing the issue of Vietnam back to our attention. Thank you for doing this before all of us who served there, and the 70% of us who would have gone back and done it all again, have been silenced by actuarial factor death. Thank you, Ken Burns, for imagining that this country can be healed and divisions overcome. But just one more thing, Mr. Burns: come help us identify the untruths and tear down "this wall" of false history.

Steve Sherman and VVFFH are reviewing each episode, pointing out the falsehoods, misrepresentations, outright lies and propaganda as they come up. Here is a summary of the first episode: Segment One: (1945-1959) Fails to mention that Ho Chi Minh was a Comintern (Soviet) agent for nearly 20 years, not a nationalist as portrayed in the documentary. If he was a true nationalist, he would have worked with the other anti-French nationalists (VNQDD, Dai Viet, Catholic, Cao Dai, etc.) instead of betraying them to the French Surete to be imprisoned or killed. He also murdered many anti-French nationalists and Vietnamese patriots...

Preview of new US PBS Vietnam War documentary TV series being screened in the US from this week. Date: Tuesday, 19 September, 2017 . Submitted by Barry Dreyer, for interest and forewarning. The preview is by Dr. Nguyen Ngoc Sang, a Vietnamese doctor who served with the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces. COMMENTS ON "THE VIETNAM WAR", an 18 EPISODE DOCUMENTARY SERIES Dr. Nguyen Ngoc Sang ====================================================== I was fortunate to be part of a joint PBS and local library panel to preview the Vietnam War Documentary by filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick who had spent ten years to...