CPTV Show Earns A Rebuke

The new ombudsman for PBS wasn't going to start his work until later this month. But criticism of a nationally distributed documentary, co-produced by Connecticut Public Television this fall, got him started early.

"Breaking the Silence: Children's Stories," which aired in October, "was a flawed presentation," Michael Getler concluded in his first report as Public Broadcasting Service ombudsman Dec. 2. He hadn't intended to write his first report until Dec. 20 but he wanted to respond "while the events are still reasonably fresh."

Before the one-hour special that tread on the minefield of child custody aired Oct. 20, CPTV described it as a "powerful new documentary" that "chronicles the impact of domestic violence on children and the recurring failings of family courts across the country to protect them from their abusers."

Critics say fathers were demonized in the show and not given a chance to respond.

"Breaking the Silence," which mostly featured interviews with victims of abuse, including New York Yankees manager Joe Torre and Parade Magazine Chairman and CEO Walter Anderson, was broadcast on 235 stations nationwide, about 69 percent of all PBS stations.

A senior editor at the Times-Union in Albany wrote in an op-ed piece that the film "deserves a Nobel Prize for honesty." But other commentators noted its lack of balance, including a Boston Globe writer who said it "presents a skewed and sensationalist picture."

Since then, criticism of the documentary has grown - PBS reports receiving almost 4,000 e-mails, most of them negative - which led Getler to weigh in with his first ombudsman report. (He was named PBS' first ombudsman in October; he previously held the same position at The Washington Post.)

PBS' own internal report on the documentary's fairness has been delayed to consider additional material, its officials said Tuesday.

Critics of the program say it lacks objectivity and balance and does not provide evidence to back up the show's assertions, and note "the complete absence of fathers and their perspective in the documentary," Getler said.

Not only is an opposing view not offered, he said, there isn't evidence that an opposing view might exist.

Critics particularly railed against the documentary's dismissal of parental alienation syndrome as "junk science." The syndrome is one in which one parent poisons a child's opinion of the other in custody cases.

A CPTV press release asserted that "despite being discredited by the American Psychological Association and similar organizations, [parental alienation syndrome] continues to be used in family courts as a defense for why a child is rejecting the father."

The American Psychological Association fired back in its own statement, saying it "does not have an official position on Parental Alienation Syndrome, pro or con. The Connecticut Public Television press release is incorrect."

The co-producers of the documentary, at their website, have offered a clarification: "We do not make the assertion that the phenomenon of alienation does not exist, simply that PAS seems to be wrongly used as scientific proof to justify taking children away from a protective parent."

The documentary was co-produced by filmmakers Catherine Tatge and Dominique Lasseur, who had previously made "The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud" for public television.

"I have no doubt that this subject merited serious exposure and that these problems exist and are hard to get at journalistically," Getler wrote. "But it seemed to me that PBS and CPTV were their own worst enemy and diminished the impact and usefulness of the examination of a real issue by what did, indeed, come across as a one-sided advocacy program."

By not recognizing opposing points of view, he wrote, "there was a complete absence of some of the fundamental journalistic conventions that, in fact, make a story more powerful and convincing because, they - at a minimum - acknowledge that there is another side."

While PBS' objectivity guidelines may not have been "clearly breached," he said, "Breaking the Silence" "came across as quite tilted to me."

The program got a similar response from one of the two newly installed ombudsmen at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the private, nonprofit entity that seeks funding for programming on PBS.

"There is no hint of balance in `Breaking the Silence,'" Ken Bode wrote in a CPB report late last month. "The producers apparently do not subscribe to the idea that an argument can be made more convincing by giving the other side a fair presentation."

What is going to stink for PBS is when the political motivations for producing this are stripped bare for all to see. The arrogance initally displayed by these snotty self-satisfied twits when folks first complained about the program has been laid bare.

It is NOT going well for the Public Television people involved in this program. But, like CBS first tried to do when it was caught - the liberal cabal within PBS will try to stonewall, stonewall, stonewall.

Sounds like next time they'll include unconvincing opposing points of view so they'll appear less biased while still getting the viewer to reach the conclusion they wish.

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