"America at a Crossroads": $20 million for this?

When “America at a Crossroads” premieres on public television Sunday night, the week-long, 12-hour exploration of 9/11 and its aftermath it will be an unprecedented event — and one that should never be repeated.

Three years and $20 million in the making, the weeklong, 12-hour exploration of 9/11 and its aftermath  was a costly outlay of money, effort and public relations that produced a solid but mostly unremarkable week of programs. When all’s said and done, “Crossroads” simply wasn’t worth the trouble.

In early 2004 the Corporation for Public Broadcasting declared that it wanted to use the “still-unfolding after-effects of 9/11,” and 20 million dollars, to “examine and explain where we are and where we’re going as a nation.”  Outsiders like me thought, well, there's a worthy initiative, but a lot of people in public TV circles smelled a rat. For starters, what was the Corporation for Public Broadcasting suddenly doing in the production business? The CPB exists mainly to pass money from Congress to local public radio and TV stations, about $300 million a year.

Suspicion fell on the chairman of CPB, Ken Tomlinson, a Bush appointee who at the time was speaking out about making public TV more fair and balanced. Without telling anyone, he paid a consultant $14,000 to examine the Bill Moyers program “NOW” for liberal bias. (I could’ve done that for free.) Tomlinson also appointed two ombudsmen over public radio and TV, even though by law, CPB is completely separate from PBS, NPR or any other content provider.

Then there was Michael Pack, Tomlinson’s choice to oversee “America at a Crossroads.” Pack was a conservative who had spent his career making programs about Newt Gingrich and other figures on the right. Though Pack made every effort to assuage fears of a right-wing takeover (I saw him at a public TV conference in 2005 in San Francisco, where he stayed late and talked to everybody who wanted to talk), “Crossroads” created a firestorm. At a public meeting in March 2004, acclaimed producer Rory O’Connor got up and said, “This whole thing stinks. ... If this goes through, PBS won’t be about public broadcasting.”

The CPB’s president, Robert Coonrod, countered that “Crossroads” was simply trying to make public TV “relevant” to the under-60 set by looking at 9/11 and the threat of radical Islam in a “fresh” and “different” way. But the CPB’s first grant announcement, in 2005, undid that claim. As a group of station managers would soon point out in an open letter to CPB, the 24 approved projects were “completely repetitive” of ones that had aired on public television. Given the perpetual financial straits public TV is in, the managers, spending this kind of money on “Crossroads” was “a disservice to viewers and stations alike.”

Now that I’ve seen some of the finished programs, I must concur.

By early 2006, Tomlinson and Pack and Coonrod were all gone from CPB, and the new leadership had called on MacNeil-Lehrer Productions to save “America at a Crossroads.”  That they have done, I'll say that much. But as a longtime observer of public TV, I can’t help but see the irony of involving the people who do the “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” who probably had a lot better ways they could’ve spent $20 million.

Take the program that kicks off the series,“America at a Crossroads,” the two-hour “Jihad: The Men and Ideas Behind Al Qaeda” (Sunday, April 15, PBS; check local listings). It’s a surprisingly tedious overview of how a small band of Egyptian and Saudi radicals came together to form the worldwide leader in terror and how the current quagmire in Iraq bolsters al-Qaida’s goals. I say “surprisingly” because it comes from the British company Paladin InVision, which did such a fine job for “Frontline” last year with “The Age of AIDS.” But “Jihad” is a bland stew of grainy al-Qaida video, by-the-numbers storytelling and interviews with the usual experts (Lawrence Wright, Faoud Ajami, John Miller) who have been more effectively used on “Frontline” specials in the past.

That’s not to say “Crossroads” is a total loss. If there is one hour you must see, it’s “Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience” (Monday). This film is the most affecting approach I’ve seen to documenting the hellish lives of soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Actors read the writings of combatants and others impacted by the wars.  It concludes with the moving account (read by Robert Duvall) of an officer dispatched to deliver the body of a 19-year-old to his hometown in Wyoming, while a camera retraces the entire route of the coffin’s journey from the airport in Billings, Montana, to the gravesite. I saw “Operation Homecoming” at a public screening in Lawrence last month. After it ended, the whole room sat in reverent silence for a minute.

Other installments are quite good: “Faith Without Fear” (Thursday), a profile of Canadian Muslim Irshad Manji, who confronts the violence and retrograde thinking among her fellow believers; and “Struggle for the Soul of Islam: Inside Indonesia” (Thursday), a closer look at the largest Muslim country on the planet.
On the other hand, the selection of “The Case for War: In Defense of Freedom” (Wednesday) is nothing less than appalling. It’s a one-hour soapbox for Richard Perle, one of the members of the group that for years has openly advocated the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Although the filmmakers force Perle to go to Washington and confront protesters opposed to the war on camera, he still gets the last word, in the form of an authoritative-sounding voiceover.

Justifying “The Case for War” to the New York Times earlier this month, Perle said, “One of the administration’s failures has been a failure to communicate why we went there, what the thinking was behind it.” What Perle conveniently omits, however, is that he already had that chance. In the summer of 2002 a new public TV showcase for international documentaries called “Wide Angle” led off with the film “Saddam’s Ultimate Solution.” It was, to be charitable, a brief for war against the dictator of Iraq.

After the film aired, the program’s one and only guest, Richard Perle, told host Jamie Rubin, “There is collaboration between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, which means to destroy us. ... The message is very clear. We have no time to lose, Saddam must be removed from office.” What’s the old saying, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me? Shame on PBS.

More films will be aired later this year under the “Crossroads” umbrella. One of them, “Kansas to Kandahar,” will trace the lives of men from Fort Riley as they serve a harrowing tour in Pakistan and Afghanistan, then try to make sense of it back home. It’s directed by Calvin Skaggs, whose work I’ve enjoyed in the past. But Skaggs shouldn’t have to wait for something like “America at a Crossroads” to come along to make a program like this.

I’ve always wondered why public TV didn’t use its new digital capacity, that enables them to split a station’s signal into three or four signals, to build its news brand. Instead, on digital cable you’ll see a channel of PBS kids programs and the lame “Create” venture that airs weekend cooking and home repair shows 24/7. Those two could be combined into one, leaving a whole channel to reair last night’s “NewsHour” the way ESPN does “SportsCenter” (up to eight times a day), with “Frontline,” “Independent Lens” and “P.O.V.” filling the rest of the schedule. The money raised by the news channel could then be funneled back to the programs, which could then commission new work from Skaggs and dozens of other producers.

For the money CPB is blowing on this and another big-budget project on American history and civics, it could have gone a long ways toward launching the 24-hour news and documentary channel that public TV, and its viewers, both need and want.