Hacker Cinema
Frontline
1983 · TV series · documentary · 55 min episodes · 45 seasons
Created by David Fanning
Since it began in 1983, Frontline has been airing public-affairs documentaries that explore a wide scope of the complex human experience. Frontline's goal is to extend the impact of the documentary beyond its initial broadcast by serving as a catalyst for change.
38 positive4 negative1 mixed14 neutralfrom 57 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
66 comments on Hacker News
Frontline is one of the best (if not the best) current events/documentary shows on US television. It'd be a tragedy if it went away.
> PBS in the US could be so much better.
PBS Newshour is pretty much the best/balanced news programming on US TV at this point. They take deeper dives into issues than most of the other shows out there. And then there's Frontline which is excellent and goes even deeper with a documentary format. The rest of PBS - there are a few good parts like Nova, but a lot of what plays on PBS stations these days is UK crime dramas - man, there seems to be a lot of mayhem going on in merry old England these days.
Conservative here.
I wasn't very happy with the PBS defunding. One of their best shows was Frontline and the amount of just straight down the middle documentaries they did was great. For a lot of the issues that became very politicized, I would regularly turn to them for an unbiased view of what was going on.
I agree on the educational stuff as well. How many generations of kids grew up watching PBS kids shows? My parents donated regularly and supported PBS the whole time.
Hopefully they can continue, I'm sad to see such a pillar of goodness go away.
I know PBS frontline did a documentary on this.
As the article mentions, there is collaborative documentary that was produced with this story. You can watch it, and I think most FRONTLINE documentaries free on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LyaWzOesXk
Google:
Frontline Dollars and Dentists season 2012 episode 13
and see for yourself.
Frontline did an episode a while back were dentists were performing unnecessary major dental work on poor people when the government had a program to pay the dentists for such work. Frontline was outraged at the dentists, but did not seem to recognize that this is the inevitable result of incentives the government set up.
Money Printer Go Brrr and the Scorpion and the Frog fable in a Frontline Documentary, what a time to be alive.
Frontline has such terrifying content! I couldn't imagine falling asleep to that. My choice would be David Attenborough narrated documentaries.
> the industry trying to
Perhaps, but the Frontline episode didn't play like an industry point of view. It was pretty anti-industry.
Aviation Week is more of a pro-industry publication, and their coverage of the MAX seemed pretty even-handed to me.
Cars are designed for people who don't read the manual. Airplanes cannot be that way, but I get the feeling that non-aviation people expect this to be possible. An airplane cannot just pull over and call AAA.
The Frontline episode is a mess of misinformation and omission of crucial facts. I submitted on the Frontline site a list of omitted facts and corrections supported by cited FAA documents. The moderators refused to post it.
I used to watch Frontline regularly. Although they had an obvious left wing bias, I thought they made good faith efforts to present the facts.
No more. I no longer watch Frontline nor consider them a reliable source of news.
BTW, the "Aviation Disasters" did an episode on the 737MAX that was pretty decent (although a bit shallow due to time constraints), so it is possible to do a good story on it. Recommended.
The Frontline episode on PBS is 50% teary-eyed emotional testimonials from the victim’s families, interspersed with 25% stock footage and 25% poorly summarized, and in many cases technically incorrect explanation.
The Smithsonian Channel Episode “Ten Steps to Disaster” is far more technically accurate, and also deep dives the technical, business, and regulatory decisions that lead to the disaster.
https://www.smithsonianchannel.com/video/series/ten-steps-to-disaster/73562
There is a documentary on Frontline about cannabis. A guy had a medical marijuana license from one state. Cops in another state find a small amount of marijuana with him. He gets 5 years. Put that in proportion to a possible punishment Holmes may receive.
PBS Frontline had documentary outlining this exact path. Would recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5iBxva_pm8
Happens everywhere.
I was friends/coworkers with a 19 year old Mexican American mom who had just extricated herself from a small, c-grade traveling circus in Texas. A few months after joining them, the ringmaster woke her up every morning demanding she start training on the trapeze immediately, and would punch her in the stomach every day she refused. She was 16 years old and pregnant.
Check out this Frontline documentary on labor trafficking in the us:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/inside-the-hidden-reality-of-labor-trafficking-in-america/
Frontline continues to be the best documentary series available anywhere.
> Longest running prime time show?
I'm not sure it's our job to keep adding qualifiers to the OP's bold statement that "Simpsons is not considered a sitcom, but it is the longest running show, period." until it's finally accurate.
In any case... PBS' Nova is 47 years old. Frontline is 37. I believe those are aired in prime time. And they are "not considered a sitcom" either.
"Frontline" ran an episode some years back where they investigated some dental clinics that did astonishing numbers of unnecessary major dental operations.
It turns out that the government had a program that paid for these operations when performed on poor people. So the clinics would convince their customers that they needed major dental work, then would do the work and bill the government. The clinics were totally specialized just for this.
"Frontline" pinned the blame on the clinics, sort of "how could the do that". Of course, they're right. But blaming the clinics doesn't work, because the actual problem was the government set things up so that the rise of clinics to exploit the rules was legal and inevitable.
You're now faced with the problem of crafting a bureaucratic rule to define a "necessary" major dental operation. Of course, it's impossible, and the same problem as "management by metrics".
This Frontline documentary highlights the poor conditions for farm workers and meat packing workers.
It was really just a matter of time before this started. They aren’t supplied masks, have to travel to work in crowded vehicles, etc.
https://youtu.be/_VXDqhKGBy8
>Instead, they choose Youtube TV which is US-only.
I'm an avid PBS Frontline viewer (some of the best documentaries out there). As a Canadian, I can watch most of them on the PBS website, but the odd time an episode will be rights restricted. I assume this is because of footage or music that they are unable to clear the licenses for outside of the US. And really, as a publicly funded broadcaster, why should they care about me in Canada?
>We can do better than just warehousing people in pseudo-prisons.
Interestingly, some years ago I watched a documentary (Frontline, most likely) on mentally ill people in jails/prisons. If true, it was eye opening, and changed my perception on a lot of things. They followed some of the patients around, including when they were released. The general takeaways were:
1. The mental asylums that were shut down were truly horrible places.
2. Currently the only reliable place these people get medical help for their mental issues is in prisons. And it's a much better experience than those asylums.
3. For a number of prisoners/former prisoners, life in prison was better than life outside and homeless - not because of shelter/food, but because they got treatment. Regression rates are high once they are released.
4. Providing voluntary mental health help on the outside will help some, but not many. It's just one of the problems with a number of mental illnesses that if you regress a little, you likely are not going to voluntarily seek help. The key is not to regress. When you have no family support and no help in job, housing, etc, the likelihood of regression is much higher.
Ugh, the catalog of Frontline is insanely huge. What, am I supposed to pay $24.99 per DVD of previous episodes? uh, no, I will not. Please PBS, give us real access to your catalog.
How It's Made, Nova, and Nature. To a (slightly) lesser extent, 60 Minutes and Frontline.
The term documentary covers (imho) a continuum, from academic style nonfiction on one end to a gray area between infotainment and fiction on the other.
I think the open question is how does Facebook make money and justify their expensive purchase of WhatsApp? It still seems to be an open question years after the acquisition.. i think it is fair to bring up that if Facebook wanted to maybe “parse and target” WhatsApp messages they could and also make the statement that they are encrypted end to end. It does make me chuckle a bit though that there is some debate about if zuck can be assumed to be forthright or not.. the frontline episode about Facebook definitely sort of makes you realize that Facebook and mark zuckerberg at least for a long time thought the world needed to catch up to their super smarter than everybody thinking and hey if there are consequences eh that’s the natural course of things..
Confidence in the market, and preventing panic was the highest priority, which is why no bank executive was punished in any meaningful way.
Frontline did a great piece on this, which I watched years ago. Not sure if this is it: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/meltdown/
I believe it also explains why the election hacking of 2016 wasn't and isn't being addressed fully. If the US were to admit actual votes were changed it would create panic and instability. It also doesn't help that one side literally invited the hacking, and refused to investigate because it helped them. I'm sure there were tons of people who made good money in 2008, who weren't eager for investigation or actual reform.
I actually watch Vice News Tonight every night. I'm a well off 29 year old white male for demo info. I find they often cover stories I haven't heard about and their foreign war reporting I think is fairly unique outside of like a dedicated Frontline episode.
There are definitely reporters I like more. For instance Ben Anderson always brings a lot of context to the minutiae of the many wars. Elle Reeves (charlottesville) also usually has interesting stories, lots of times focusing on kind of the opposite of my morality; Showing perspectives from the racist right and people like the 'pick up' artist who is actually more a misogynistic pimp.
I also consider myself a fairly heavy news consumer as I work in politics and read throughout the day.
Frontline did a nice story on this
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/retirement-gamble/
The advantage of television channels and networks is they provide "curation". Someone needs to wade thru the crap and find the "quality programming" you desire.
Take the average Nova or Frontline episode. It's not cheap to produce. Do you think people could afford to put the work into making shows like that if all they could count on was the crumbs that Google threw at them from page views on Youtube?
And even if the funding could be solved, how would you discover this programming? There are very few HN submissions that ever get much notice. And the HN crowd is not nearly big enough to provide enough Youtube eyeballs to actually fund "real" programming.
> If we didn't do that, we'd be completely inundated with American shows flogged off on the cheap
Absolutely. I deleted it from my post, but I was going to mention that on non-primary Australian TV stations that don't have the same content restrictions, we get 2 hours of non-stop Big Bang Theory reruns, or endless repeats of Frasier, Sex And The City, Charmed & Becker.
> What kind of tv show do you consider 'culturally significant'?
Glitch is my favorite recent Australian TV show, started on ABC but apparently Season 2 has been sold as a Netflix exclusive. Back in the 90s it would have been shows like Seachange, Frontline, Kath & Kim. Maybe Offspring & Packed To The Rafters are recent equivalents.
(Outside Australia, I'd think of shows like The Bridge, Springfloden, The Killing & Occupied, that have exported Scandinavian culture onto Australian TV.)
Thanks for the link, I'm a huge fan of Frontline. I'll give that episode a look!
The most recent episode of PBS Frontline offers an interesting view on this.
Note that anyone 15 years old or younger living in Iraq today has never even seen a version of their country that isn't an active warzone, and it's only getting worse. The US are seemingly creating new terrorists faster than they are killing existing ones.
In the US, the supplement industry is much less regulated than the pharmaceutical industry.
The concern is not excessive, at least in the US. Consider https://consumerist.com/2016/07/27/anyone-can-make-market-a-dietary-supplement-including-consumer-reports/ :
> While real drugs — prescription or over-the-counter — must demonstrate levels of safety and effectiveness before hitting store shelves, dietary supplements are effectively regulated like food products.
https://consumerist.com/2016/01/20/7-things-you-need-to-know-from-frontlines-investigation-on-supplements-safety/ gives a summary of a Frontline episode on the topic; Frontline does documentaries on public affairs topics.
Or, from 2001, http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/73/6/1101.full - "All plant products were correctly identified by botanical plant species (ie, Panax species or E. senticosus); however, concentrations of marker compounds differed significantly from labeled amounts. There was also significant product-to-product variability: concentrations of ginsenosides varied by 15- and 36-fold in capsules and liquids, respectively, and concentrations of eleutherosides varied by 43- and 200-fold in capsules and liquids, respectively."
Or from the 1990s, http://www.sportsci.org/jour/0003/lmb.html :
> Analysis of 16 commercial DHEA products revealed that only half the products contained the amount of DHEA stated on the product label; content varied from 0 to 150% of the stated content (Parasrampuria et al., 1998).
> Melatonin supplements have failed to meet quality claims or delivery profiles stated on their labels (Hahm et al., 1999).
It lists others as well.
Absolutely, if you mean the Frontline documentary from 2004. Poignant more so today than when it 1st aired. I'll double check "Hidden Persuaders", though.
Problem is, everyone seems to be emulating the advertizers, selling what they deem to be the best X. These social networks are conditioning people to be salespeople, IMO. I am guilty, too.
This is also true as a practical matter - there's no real mechanism for forcing officials of another country to provide information. Congress cannot change this.
People in Saudi who are dissidents end up jailed. This is particularly acute about the Shia/Sunni axis.
The Saudis may well have a legitimate complaint here - the result would possibly be a historical fiction made up for political gain.
Interestingly, I would think that Congress commissioning a rigorous investigative nonfiction film - of the sort Errol Morris does - would be a better solution. "Frontline" already has a start on the subject. The hard part would be defending the design of that from accusations of it being propaganda.
Frontline did something similar w/r/t/ the impact of US drone targeting for AQ in Yemen.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/frontline-fight-for-yemen/
The Frontline Yemen episode was one of the more depressing Frontlines I've ever seen.
This must be the best episode of Frontline I have ever seen. It was riveting. And in my opinion, the very best part of it is when they show Michael Hayden walking amongst the crowd right before President Bush presented his public response to the torture accusations. They made no commentary on Hayden, but they showed him very deliberately. Hayden played a key role in the NSA spying program that would eventually be revealed to the world by Edward Snowden, and seeing Hayden immediately added that entire enterprise of deception to the context of the story being told. That single shot of him added a huge amount of depth and gravity to the whole thing.
The big financial institutions were demonstrably complicit in the fraud of the underwriters and loan officers. There are emails, and plenty of people willing to testify. The problem is that the SEC and DOJ never pursued those investigations.
A while back, Frontline did their own investigation on this very topic, and interviewed multiple underwriters and loan officers who said that the higher ups on Wall Street were literally directing everyone to not abide by their own standards.
You can watch the entire documentary here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/untouchables/
Lanny Breuer from the DOJ was interviewed in this documentary, and his attempt to explain why the DOJ did not pursue any charges on executives was so laughable, and the evidence presented from Frontline's cursory investigation was so damning, that Mr. Breuer resigned days after the program was aired. After not prosecuting any banking executives, he then of course went on through the revolving door to make $4M/year by taking a position at a corporate law/lobbying firm that defends financial institutions.
This is NOT a "tough case" - the solid evidence is there. This is a case of a captured regulatory system.
Also, to say that ratings agencies simply "fucked up" is disingenuous. They were totally and knowingly complicit as well. The way the system was set up, the more they gave good ratings to crap, the more money they made. That's not just a "fuck up".
To the main point of the rant, aside from the regulatory capture, the difference between teachers and Wall Street is that Wall Street is very good at setting up a system where there's plausible deniability for executives, massive lobbying efforts to garner political influence, and if needed, gigantic legal teams to fight for every inch.
"Utterly false". How do you know that? Yes i to can link to a long wikipedia article about Christianity and Antisemitism. Long wiki lists doesn't count as arguments.
I don't believe most modern anger against jews stems from religious doctrine, i really do believe it stems from a more general sense of frustration with western foreign policy.
All religions hate on each other. I know you want to pick out islam as the root of much evil but i just do not agree with how the whole debate is being framed.
I myself am not religious and probably share a good deal of opinions with you. But i have come to despise the way the "new-atheism" conducts itself. It creates tensions and stops conversation. It focuses a beam so narrow, the public discourse has become one dimensional.
The current discourse in atheistic communities, and lately also the general consensus in the media - of deriving some sorts of inherent psychological constants from islam, is detrimental from an academic perspective. It disregards so many other factors at play other than the religion itself e.g. geography, local culture, economics, foreign policies, geopolitics, history etc. People and cultures are different, everywhere.
Do you think most muslims practice their faith based on intense historical investigation and religious reading? And do you think that they come to the same conclusions? They don't.
Most muslims get cherry picked info. They read a little, some don't, many gets lots of info from moderate imams, few get loads of material from radical imams. Some are Sunni, some are Shia, some left-wing like parts of the kurds, some are progressive like much of the youth in Iran. Many people have daily battles with the radical parts of islam all over the middle east. The Arab Spring was a strong testament to this. I have met many progressive muslims from all over the middle east over the years. Highly educated, well spoken. Many of them still cultural muslims whoms most fundamental problems with the west stems from the incessant and extremely detrimental foreign meddling in the middle east.
Several countries in the middle east were pretty progressive before war tore them apart in the mid to late twentieth century. Proxy warfare between the US and Russia. CIA funding of assorted radicals up through the decades, coups that lead to theocracies. Israels wars that lead to a radicalisation of large parts of the muslim youth. And western alliance with the largest promoter of radical islam, Saudi Arabia.
Furthermore the incredibly incompetent way the US war machine played out Shia against Sunnis, and therefore directly aided the creation of ISIS today.
the list goes on. Watch the frontline documentaries on Iraq or Isis to get a gist of how catastrophic the western countries still act to this day.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/losing-iraq/
All of these factors and more, have now created this radical, angry and war-damaged version of Islam, that now clashes increasingly with western values.
My point is that i think it is extremely detrimental to focus on Islam as some sort of absolute culprit of the atrocious acts, rather than create an explanatory model with the myriad of factors spanning a century, that has made certain groups of people come this.
There was a documentary on them just a few days ago. I didn't watch it, but heard the producers talking on the radio. In the 60s NRA was basically a sports/ gun safety organization. At some point they pivoted to be a gun rights organization.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-elections-politics/gunned-down/the-evolution-of-wayne-lapierre/
Politicians fear them, because they have money and get out the vote power. There is some thought that the NRA cost Al Gore his presidential run.
Its complex, because a lot of the US (The more rural parts mostly) have a much stronger gun culture. There is some distrust of government and any regulations.
Within 50 years quality 3-d printed guns will make a lot of regulations moot anyway.
This episode of Frontline is informative as to the situation:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ebola-outbreak/
The recent PBS Frontline documentary on the topic was excellent.
This episode of Frontline[0] from January aired for the first time (I think, DVR marked it as new) on KQED in the Bay Area this week. It profiles several defectors, as well as the editor of Asia Press[1] and is certainly worth an hour of your time.
[0] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/secret-state-of-north-korea/
[1] http://www.asiapress.org/rimjingang/english/
PBS Frontline covered this event as well as other efforts to smuggle popular media into North Korea as well as getting documentary footage out. Well worth watching. It was pretty gut wrenching and uplifting.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/secret-state-of-north-korea/
This documentary is really good. It's impossible not to gawk like a tourist at the pathological outcomes of the command econconmy, the wretched poverty, and the Orwellian anti U.S. propaganda, for example posters depicting U.S. soldiers pulling out the teeth of children with pliers, and executing Korean civilians. The film is composed largely of real footage produced by dissenters. No matter how cynical you might be of the demonization of "rouge states" by U.S. media, I promise that you will moved by this very convincing film.
I think Frontline is one of the last investigative journalism shows with real integrity that is left; did you see that embarrassing puff piece a few weeks ago where 60 Minutes licked the NSA's asshole for an hour?
The big footage of the Korean landscape is stunningly beautiful, and reminds me of Vladivastock. Must watch.
Also, if you want to learn more about North Korea (at least from a quasi-American perspective), please go watch "Crossing the Line" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Line_%282006_film%29) a film about a U.S. Army soldier who defected to N. Korea, which was still on Netfilx last time I checked. It will enlighten you, and also weird up your day :)
The PBS Frontline episode from yesterday makes it seem as if thumb-drive video playing computers are common (perhaps only among the upper class, though) in NK.
>"So anything that we do to try and kill bacteria, or anything the environment does to try and kill bacteria, bacteria will eventually discover ways or find ways around those" he is making factual statements that are plainly incorrect on their face. Bacteria don't desire anything, and they don't seek out anything or plan anything.
You are taking this too literally. But in any case just because bacteria aren't intelligent doesn't mean their behavior is purposeless. Evolution acts as an optimization process. It's not too far from the truth to ascribe it "desires".
On the frontline episode this was from talked about how pharmaceutical companies have all stopped investing in new antibiotics. It might be possible to make better ones but I don't know how much research is actually going on at the moment.
I'm kind of skeptical. We are fighting against millions of years of evolution. The drugs we have we only got by copying things evolution already found, and they became resistant in mere decades, an extremely short time from an evolutionary perspective. Any simple way of killing bacteria would probably already have been developed by evolution. Likewise pathogens have spent millions of years evolving to defeat everything thrown in their way, and they continue to do so.
We are joining into this ancient arms race as entirely new players.
One thing I learned from watching this episode of Frontline was that we aren't doing a lot of research into new antibiotics. Companies like Pfizer (the original makers of penicillin) would rather create drugs like Lipitor or Prozac, things that customers will take everyday for the rest of their lives. Antibiotics are intended to be used as sparingly as possible, which doesn't leave room for a lot of profit. Even the National Institute of Health has but antibiotic research on the back burner to pursue more pressing concerns.
The other big problem we face is that certain antibiotics are like steroids for farm animals. I believe that they kill the bacteria in the gut of a cow or big that signals when they should stop eating, resulting in larger stock (or something like that). This increases the exposure of bacteria to the antibiotics, making things less safe for all of us.
But drug companies and farmers aren't to blame for our antibiotic situation. Capitalism encourages profit and doesn't ask questions about how it's made. Corporations have a fiduciary responsibility. And doctors can't be faulted for overprrscribing antibiotics either. A sick person is the ultimate debugging task and most doctors will try anything that could help the patient. I don't know if this problem has a good solution.
If we research new antibiotics then bacteria will eventually evolve to resist them (kicking the can down the road). If we stop using antibiotics then more people will suffer, potentially unnecessarily (destroying the village to save the village). Trying to fight evolution is a losing game. I am, however, confident that someone somewhere will come up with a break through in the next few decades that will allow us to temporarily solve this problem once again.
The entire episode in question is available online here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/retirement-gamble/
It delves into a few issues worth understanding beyond fees, such as the difference between a typical Series 7 advisor and an RIA.
I saw another one just yesterday on TV for another device "at no cost to you".
"Frontline" also had an episode investigating dental clinics that have sprouted up that were specifically designed to extract max dollars from government programs to get dental services to poor people.
I'm in Tokyo, and streamed an episode of PBS' FrontLine from pbs.org only last week/the week before last.
Interesting related podcasts if you want to read more:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/03/16/148751661/the-friday-podcast-inside-the-mortgage-industry
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/405/transcript
The Frontline episode 'The Warning' is related and also good:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/
I love to watch Frontline, but as they've reported on areas where I know a bit more, it's become obvious how often they trade on outrage rather than detailed information.
For example, in order to really report on why prosecutions did not happen, you would think they would take some time to explain how federal law defines certain crimes. But, they never did that at all--instead they ask people for a sort of gut reaction as to whether something seemed fraudulent. But of course the word "fraud" has a number of very specific legal definitions in a number of different laws.
One could argue that that is ok, because the real point is that the language of the laws themselves allow people to get away with fraud (in a gut-check sense). But again, to make that point they would have had to get specific about what the law does and does not say.
So while I found this episode entertaining and interesting as always, I did not find it illuminating.
edit: forgot a word
Good point. I was approaching from a view of mostly well off Americans who get annoyed when fer'ners show up and become more successful than they are. It's completely different when you consider people who don't even know how to do academic things well being placed against extreme cram school cultures.
See: waiting for superman, the lottery, a few Frontline specials about it, and mst3k episode 816.
I agree, "free market solutions" sounds nice until you notice that capitalism has no soul. It was only a few years ago that airlines bribed the FAA to skip inspections on their planes. Watch the frontline documentary on how airlines treat their pilots, barely giving them enough sleep, paying them terribly low wages, and putting non experienced pilots in senior positions, all to make a profit. Not to mention this: http://www.defraudingamerica.com/faa_corruption.html and lets not forget that every few years a major airline files for bankruptcy.
"Oh but the airlines will want to protect their planes because in the long term it will affect their customers"
We the passengers look into the long term and assume that airlines do too. History has shown that corporate greed plans for nothing beyond the next fiscal quarter. I wouldn't trust them one bit.
I don't like the TSA either but leaving it up to the airlines... We can't go "back" to the way things were, times change, society changes, new threats emerge.
AND at the end of the day we're all just a bunch of speculators sitting in front a computer reading one sided stories off of some guy's blog. We don't have a fraction of enough real data and information to make a call that would affect millions of people.
The Frontline story was very eerie. The other famous case is the West Memphis Three:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Memphis_Three
Who were jailed partly because of a police-coerced confession from one of the three. They are still in prison, but apparently close to getting a re-trial.
The case was made famous by the excellent HBO documentary 'Paradise Lost' - which is a must see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost:_The_Child_Murders_at_Robin_Hood_Hills
They are lucky because their case has a high-profile because of the film - but there must be many, many other innocent people in prisons because of false confessions.
For example, many people believe that Cameron Todd Willingham, executed in Texas, was also innocent (he was also the subject of a Frontline story:
http://video.pbs.org/video/1618590505/
and a feature in the New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann
I came here to post this, so thanks for finding the link to share with everyone. I'm not usually a fan of crime-related TV documentaries, but this is one of the best episodes of Frontline I've seen, and was absolutely eye-opening for me. I highly recommend watching it!
Astronomy Cast -- They have a pretty big show archive that has aged very well.
In Our Time, a BBC radio podcast focusing on history.
PBS Frontline (a tv show, not a podcast) streams all their shows online. Great for current events.
The Economist Audio Edition requires subscription to magazine, but if you want to catch up on the entire world in a couple of hours, this is the way to go.
There was a Frontline documentary (I think it was them) detailing this risk and it coming to a head in a smaller community where too many people were skipping vaccinations and the herd immunity was significantly diminished. It was a really interesting piece on what could happen if too many people start skipping vaccines.
I saw a good Frontline documentary on this the other day, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/view/ apparently this whole mess started back in the 90's and the head of the CFTC then, Brooksley Born, wanted to put rules in place then to make the derivatives more transparent but was vehemently opposed by Greenspan, Rubin, and Summers. Turns out that the current head of the CFTC, Gary Gensler was one of the deputies of the three guys opposing any regulation of derivatives in the 90's. The three actually went so far as to get a law passed saying that the CFTC couldn't regulate derivatives.
Bottom line is anyone that acts surprised by the lack of regulation shouldn't be because Congress voted on and passed a law specifically prohibiting regulation of derivatives in the 90's. A law that was promoted by the same people who now run all the US government agencies like CFTC, Treasury etc...
Wikileaks link: http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010
The notion that the ISI works with the Taliban is an open secret; it's alluded to more or less directly in a Frontline episode from last year, for (one) instance.
Pakistani politics are not simple. It is probably a mistake to view Pakistan as a single, coherent state. The ISI in particular does not appear to be accountable to "civilian leadership", which who knows if that even exists.
Many people accuse public broadcasting of having a liberal bias, but in my years of listening I haven't heard that much if at all.
The liberal bias of PBS is a matter of what topics they emphasize and which facts they select. One small example of many - Frontline has done several documentaries about atrocities committed by American soldiers. But it has never done a documentary about how ultra-strict (by any standard, of any war, ever) rules of engagement have caused the death of soldiers. I could come up with dozens of similar examples. The only way to realize the extent of PBS's left-wing bias, is to actually read intelligent right wing sources, like Powerline, View from the Right, or Unqualified Reservations. Otherwise you'll never know the stories and facts that you are missing.
So what this means is that all searches to Baidu are most likely government monitored.
I remember watching a Frontline documentary about China in the 2000s. It profiled one guy who kept on moving to more egregiously luxurious apartments, as his government contracts grew (he ran an advertising agency and as the Frontline series had concluded he had landed a major contract for Beijing 2008 and was moving into the penthouse of an elite residence.)
PBS Frontline episode where "FC" is debunked.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3439467496200920717&ei=rzAMS7nxHIrOqAKI75xi&hl=en#
Example:
" PLEASE HEED MY NEED
I NEED TO HEED
OTHERS
I THIS REASON THINK
THE WORLD
THEY NEED HEED
LIKE WE HEED
BROTHERS" -- Facilitated Communication "by" a 2nd grader
12:13 in the video
There is a great Frontline documentary that addresses this on PBS:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/porn/
Basically, the widespread distribution of porn through emerging technologies has caused a huge cultural shift in the US and around the world.
It isn't a documentary to begin with, but an investigative news program (rather a sensational one at that). Can't speak for shows in non-English speaking countries, but I'm sure we all have shows like this one in our respective countries of residence. I've watched BBC Panorama episodes this year that are just as biased & fear-mongering for example. If you want serious American documentaries, sample PBS's Frontline or NOVA series (via file-sharing =]) before jumping to conclusions.
al qaeda turns up 1,670 results back in 2001, (Today is 20,400,000) and the first hit is for a Frontline episode on "Who is Bin Laden?"
http://www.google.com/search2001/search?q=al+qaeda&hl=en&btnG=Search