PBS Backs Away From Palestinian Documentary

“Total astonishment.”

That was her reaction, Jo Franklin-Trout said, upon learning this week that her sure-to-be-controversial documentary, “Days of Rage: The Young Palestinians,” had again been postponed by PBS.

Showing the uprising in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip from a strong Palestinian perspective (the Israeli government’s view is excluded), her 90-minute program was completed for PBS almost eight months ago and has already aired abroad.

But not on PBS.

“It was originally scheduled for December, then rescheduled for January, then rescheduled several other times,” Franklin-Trout said from her Washington office.

The latest air date was June 5. PBS had even distributed publicity about the program, calling it part of the network’s “fresh breeze” of summer and an “unprecedented opportunity to hear Palestinians’ reasons for the uprising and their point of view concerning reported Israeli repression.”

On Wednesday night, however, Franklin-Trout was informed that the program had been postponed again, this time to Sept. 6. She thought about that and then made a decision.

“It goes June 5 or we forget it,” she said Friday.

“Why on a program they have seen the rough cuts on, that I’ve made revisions on based on their requests--and the last set of revisions through the Easter weekend--why does it sit all this time? There is nothing here that hasn’t been substantiated again and again. Why are they so afraid of this thing?”

Franklin-Trout is an experienced journalist who was senior Washington producer for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” for six years before leaving to make documentaries. Her program “The Great Space Race” and multi-part documentaries “Saudi Arabia” and “The Oil Kingdoms” have all aired on PBS.

Her “Days of Rage” is a powerful, well-made program that conveys a message expressed in fragments on newscasts but never before presented on American TV as a documentary-length statement without rebuttal.

It’s a catalogue of Palestinian horror stories, of broken bodies and broken villages, of deep emotional scars, of squalid refugee camps, of collective punishment, of charges of Israeli brutality.

The relatively few Israelis she interviews, including some former high-ranking military men, seem opposed to Israeli government policy in the occupied territories. Aggression and terrorism against Jews--which is behind the hard-line attitude of other Israelis--are hardly mentioned.

“Days of Rage” again evokes the eternal debate over what constitutes balance--whether fairness requires it of individual programs or only within the overall flow of programming.

Discord over Franklin-Trout’s program also illustrates an ongoing dilemma of a tenuously financed public-TV system that has become so beholden to its money suppliers that it sometimes recoils from controversial or unconventional programs that could offend potential donors.

“We are not trying to kill Jo’s program,” Gail Christian, director of news and special projects for PBS, said from Washington. “I think it’s provocative and there will be an audience for it. There will be conversation about this program and I think it’s what we should be doing.”

Christian said that the June 5 air date ran into a snag when WNYC, a public-TV station in New York, withdrew as the documentary’s so-called “presenting station” after Chloe Aaron took over as vice president in charge of television.

In public TV, a presenting station is one that agrees to become a sort of godfather to a program or series, getting credit when things go right, but also taking the heat when viewers are mad. Presenting stations are not a requirement, however, and some programs are aired without them.

Aaron’s decision triggered speculation that she feared WNYC’s association with “Days of Rage” could undermine the station’s fund-raising efforts in the New York area, home to 1.7 million Jews. Aaron’s office said Friday that she was out of the country and could not be reached for comment.

Christian said that no major public-TV station or regional network she contacted would agree to carry “Days of Rage” without a presenting station as a buffer, and that only New York’s WNET would agree to be a presenting station.

“They said, ‘Fine, we’ll present it, but we can’t keep the June 5 date because we have too many things going on here,’ ” she said. WNET told her it would need the time to plan an opening and a follow-up panel discussion similar to the one WNYC had arranged to air after the program.

“And they need until September to do that?” a doubting Franklin-Trout asked mockingly about WNET. “On ‘MacNeil/Lehrer,’ we used to do that in two hours. I find this so ridiculous that it’s downright shocking.”

After initially failing to raise money for a program on Palestinians, Franklin-Trout financed the $180,000 “Days of Rage” entirely from sales of videos of her previous documentaries. She filmed, mostly in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, last June, completing the program in September, except for those few minor revisions.

Although Franklin-Trout rejected what she said was a suggestion from PBS that she send the finished tape to the Israeli embassy, the embassy got one anyway, according to Jonathan Kwitny, who hosts a public-affairs program on WNYC and was the designated moderator/planner of the panel discussion that WNYC was intending to air if had been the presenting station. Kwitny said from New York that after requesting the embassy to name an Israeli to participate in the discussion, he routinely sent the embassy a copy of the program as a courtesy so that the designated panelist could see it beforehand.

Christian said that even if WNET could have arranged it, she would not have wanted “Days of Rage” to be aired in July or August because that would send an erroneous message that it was too weak for the fall schedule.

“If we wanted to in some way dump on this show,” she asked, “what would we gain?”

A slow death for “Days of Rage,” said Franklin-Trout. Delay after delay until it is overtaken by events and labeled musty and invalid.

Franklin-Trout said that a remark to her by retired Israeli Maj. Gen. Mattiyahu Peled after their interview in Israel has taken on special significance. “As I was packing up to go, he said, ‘You know, they will never let you broadcast this.’ I said, ‘But of course they will.’ ”

Now she wonders.