I made it partway through his baseball series until he taught us baseball was a metaphor for everything wrong in racist America.
Jazz...more of the same.
I've surrendered on Ken Burns. I don't see how you can make Country and Western music anti-American. I s'pect he'll find a way.
Hecks bells,Tom Hanks is a frightful loony liberal. Nevertheless, he made The Pacific War and From The Earth to the Moon eminently watchable.
I don't know this first hand. It may be Hanks is a rare liberal who doesn't hate the United States. I doubt Burns or anyone speaking for him could ever make that claim.
“I haven’t been able to get through a Ken Burns offering since The Civil War.”
Baseball did it for me. America’s is a irredeemably racist country BS laced throughout.
In “How Ken Burns Murdered Jazz,” critic Jeffrey St. Clair writes, “Burns doesn’t really like music. In the 19 hours of film, he never lets one song play to completion, anywhere near completion. Yet there is a constant chatter riding on top of the music…In a film supposedly about music, the music itself has been relegated to the background.”
Burns’ “Jazz,” contains a host of shortcomings, including further demonstration of Burns’ apparent lack of affinity for Hispanics with his complete omission of Latin Jazz from the 19-hour film, over-reliance on Louis Armstrong, dismissal of jazz after 1960 and the slighting of Bill Evans, Miles Davis’ influential pianist, possibly due to Burns’ narrator Stanley Crouch’s long history of animosity toward Davis.
Alex W. Rodriguez writes, “Ken Burns’ Jazz ultimately does a disservice to the jazz community because it presents such an inaccurate, flawed, rigid, politically biased framework.”
https://www.aim.org/special-report/ken-burns-student-of-history-or-left-wing-gasbag/
Burns’ “Baseball,” includes errors such as film of a pitcher supposedly pitching in a World Series who did not play for either team. The blog, “So many mistakes in Ken Burns Baseball,” lists many more.
When PBS viewers complained about Burns’ choice of documented plagiarists Mike Barnicle and Doris Kearns Goodwin as narrators for his baseball sequel, “The Tenth Inning,” PBS ombudsman Michael Getler defended Burns’ choice: “We all, of course, make mistakes, and most of us, I think, believe in redemption and second chances.”
Boston writer Mark Leccese didn’t agree: “The ombudsman for PBS nonchalantly classifies plagiarism as a mistake most of us are ready to forgive. Not so fast…Plagiarizing is one of the most immoral things a journalist can do. It involves not only the theft of someone else’s work, but the deliberate deception of readers…I do object ‘loudly’ to the ombudsman for PBS brushing off plagiarism as a mistake we should stand ready to forgive and forget.”
https://www.aim.org/special-report/ken-burns-student-of-history-or-left-wing-gasbag/
I gave up on Burns after his WW II embarrassment, where the war was won by African Americans and Women.
Did Rosie the Riveter help? Of course, and ditto the RedBall Express. But they were one small part in a massive worldwide effort.
Sad, for Burns to have bought into the current historical narrative, where every general’s minority/female cook singlehandedly won the war or changed history.