The New Season: ‘War’ at the PBS Executive Session

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After a year on the hot seat as president and chief executive of the Public Broadcasting Service, Paula Kerger admitted Wednesday that she was ‘still trembling’ as she answered questions from the nation’s television writers and critics assembled in Beverly Hills for their twice-a-year gathering.

She had this to say about the network’s most controversial issues:

-- The much-anticipated Ken Burns 14- or 15-hour (or 14 1/2-hour) documentary, ‘The War,’ is still being edited, but it will have three new stories from the Latino and Native American perspectives woven through it. Burns decided to make the changes after community complaints. But Kerger said that PBS would stand by its filmmakers, no matter what their decisions in similar situations. It will begin airing Sept. 23.

-- ‘The War,’ which has some curse words in it that the FCC might not like, will be edited for language. Local stations will be allowed to run an edited or unedited version.

-- Oregon Public Broadcasting will release ‘Islam vs. Islamists,’ a documentary that contends radical Islamists intimidate moderate Muslims around the world, and will distribute it to other stations. But PBS will not, Kerger said, unless the filmmaker agrees to make unspecified changes. The film was part of the ‘America at a Crossroads’ project, most of which aired in the spring.

Kerger announced a new animated series based on the NPR radio show ‘Car Talk,’ to air in summer 2008, and ‘African American Lives 2’ will air in February.

During lunch, Burns talked to the group specifically about ‘The War.’ Snippets after the jump.

(Photo: National Archives)

Burns had this to say about his 6 1/2- year project, what he called a ‘bottom up’ look at World War II.

About his approach to the topic:

‘We can learn so much more from this war than the two-dimensional treacle we usually learn from this war.... It comes back to ‘The Good War,’ and it wasn’t. It can’t be that sanitized, ‘Morning in America,’ Madison Avenue war.’

On Latino and Native American groups demanding that their histories be included:

‘There’s been a hot political battle. We tried to take the high road. We found the right compromise that permitted us not to alter our original vision but to honor people who for 500 years have had their story untold. We’ve done more than we were asked, which was our way of honoring our interest in doing this right.’

On why wars continue:

‘We’re attracted to war. It brings out the very worst and it brings out the very best. People get excited about going to war. I don’t know why it is that we keep returning again and again to this holocaust. In [‘The War’] there are lots of words that refer to mathematics. We have to remember the arithmetic.’

When asked what we can learn from the history of World War II:

‘That horrible cliché about people are condemned to repeat the past [isn’t true]. We’re human beings, and human nature will remain the same.’

On the ultimate aim of ‘The War’:

‘Arthur Schlesinger said there’s too much pluribus and not enough unum in America. I thought he described what we’re trying to do in our work.’

-- Lynn Smith