Ken Burns claims, “For nearly forty years now, I have diligently practiced and rigorously maintained a conscious neutrality in my work.”
This “neutrality” includes the following: In 2008, the Democratic National Committee chose Burns to produce the introductory video for the late Senator Edward Kennedy’s Democratic National Convention speech, which, according to Politico, presented Kennedy as “the modern Ulysses bringing his party home to port.” When Kennedy died, Burns produced a eulogy video for his funeral.
When Burns endorsed Barack Obama for the U.S. presidency in December 2007, he compared Obama to Abraham Lincoln. In 2012, Burns wrote, “Like FDR, Obama has walked us back from the brink. He averted a depression, ended one war and put us on the path ending the other, rescued the auto industry…Obama has deployed the shrewd combination of speaking softly and using a big stick. Ask Bin Laden.”
In speeches, Burns sneers at the U.S., mentioning “our spurious sovereignty” and “all the distracting jingoistic talk of exceptionalism.”
Burns hammers at left-wing mantras in his documentaries, using standard and easily recognizable left-wing media techniques. He omits the long racist history of Democrat politicians in his documentary “Congress,” presenting the period just before the Civil War to the post-Reconstruction era without ever identifying a single pro-slavery congressman or senator as a Democrat. He omits the strong anti-abortion views of Susan B. Anthony in his suffrage movement documentary “Not For Ourselves Alone,” since that did not fit the left-wing ideology he was pushing.
When a white shooter killed black churchgoers in 2015, Burns said, “As most Americans were, I was stunned, shocked, reduced to tears by what had happened in Charleston and felt like all the old ghosts were all still present with all the force they’ve always had in American life.” But when a Muslim terrorist killed 50 gays in Orlando, Florida, in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, Burns said of Donald Trump’s advocating a temporary halt to Muslim immigration to America: “Do not think that the tragedy in Orlando underscores his points. It does not.”
In an outright falsification, Burns, who is largely dependent on taxpayer-based funding from PBS for bankrolling his work, said he hoped that 2012 GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney “doesn’t get his way, and PBS isn’t eliminated.” However, in the real world Romney never suggested that PBS be eliminated; he merely urged ending its U.S. taxpayer support.
Burns hit all the obligatory left-wing mantras in his June 12, 2016 Stanford University commencement speech, attacking candidate Donald Trump: “As a student of history, I recognize this type…the prospect of women losing authority over their own bodies, African Americans again asked to go to the back of the line, voter suppression gleefully promoted…These are all virulent strains that have at times infected us in the past…Edward R. Murrow would have exposed this naked emperor months ago. He is an insult to our history.”
https://www.aim.org/special-report/ken-burns-student-of-history-or-left-wing-gasbag/
Be sure to catch Ken's "Conservatives in the Mist," in which these strange creatures are studied with conscious neutrality.
Yeah, neutrality my a$$.
Lying leftist hypocrite.
Since when does an obvious male queer worry about “women’s control of their bodies”?
He is in NO way “neutral” not historically, certainly and not with the constant “meme” he works with... right out of Zinn’s “history” lessons.
Total disregard for the REALITY of the times he “documents” adjusted to “the tut-tut” moral relativism applied from today’s “approved attitudes”.
For family— it started with the “Civil War” (which, of course it was NOT. It was a war between organized separate groups of States who came together under a Constitution, and who had supporters on either side, about the subject of secession from the Contract. Predicated on views of the time, based on... money, and the level of industry at the time in two different cultures.) Burns—All based on the Princeton History Dept’s “view” of the entire conflict. The only saving grace was the “human reality” of what the war meant for non-combatants, including slaves and freedmen, the loss of great Americans, relatives on both sides, and the horror of the slaughter.
Thank you very much for your thorough review of Ken Burns— have read all of your posts and commented on some. You are dead on correct as to “who Burns is”... and who he allows himself to delude himself to be. Like he is some great documentary creator— he is not.
His work-were it not to be subsidized by federal money and the elitists cabal— would not meet the criteria a discerning public would give it, in all truth.
This “neutrality” description you give clenches it— he is a propagandist of the worst sort. Like a kind of BBC/PBS Statist apologist for his... “rice bowl” financial types, who continue a kind of “depression” WPA project in the NPR. Nixon was sooooo wrong to create this— copying yet again the Brits (like we are being pushed to copy their Natl health system disaster socialist failure).
Thank you.