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(Change Layout)Frontline (US)  
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Season 23
452 :23x01 - Sacred Ground (Sep/17/2004)
“Sacred Ground” chronicles the tortuous design process for the World Trade Center site, a contentious collaboration between architect Daniel Libeskind, the winner of a competition to design the site's master plan, and site developer Larry Silverstein and his favored architect, David Childs, all of whom are interviewed. New York governor George Pataki favored Libeskind's “iconic” 1776-ft. tall “Freedom Tower” plan, but Silverstein stood on his “absolute right” to choose an architect, and the battle---as much about money and power as aesthetics---was joined. Sums up architecture critic Paul Goldberger: “Do you ask Matisse and Dali to collaborate on painting a picture together?”
 
453 :23x02 - The Choice 2004 (Oct/12/2004)
“The Choice 2004” profiles George W. Bush and John Kerry, side by side. Producer Martin Smith and correspondent Nicholas Lemann trace the lives of these two very different Yale graduates through some 40 interviews (subjects include the candidates' wives). “It's a tale of two wars, of two Americas, over a 35-year period,” says Smith. “And it's a contrast of someone who relishes nuance and another person who drives toward clarity.”
 
454 :23x03 - Rumsfeld's War (Oct/26/2004)
Is the Army broken? That question, posed by “Frontline” producer Michael Kirk, is at the heart of “Rumsfeld's War,” an exploration of the status of the U.S. Army as it fights in Iraq. The program also profiles the secretary of defense, recalling his first stint at the Pentagon in the 1970s, and tracing his efforts to make the Army “quicker and more nimble” since he returned to the office in 2001. But in doing so, Kirk wonders, “Has he plunged it back to the state it was at the end of Vietnam?”
 
455 :23x04 - The Persuaders (Nov/09/2004)
“The Persuaders” explores how marketers try to sell products---and political candidates---in an increasingly cluttered advertising landscape, using increasingly “spiritual” and “big concept” approaches. Assessing what it all means is CBS and NPR media watcher Douglas Rushkoff, who wades through a thicket of psychobabble and manages to make sense of most of it. As for conclusions, however, all he can do is quote an industry aphorism: “I know I'm wasting half my ad dollars. I just don't know which half.”
 
456 :23x05 - Is Wal-Mart Good for America? (Nov/16/2004)
“Is Wal-Mart Good for America?” Correspondent Hedrick Smith assesses the impact of the retail giant's “everyday low prices” on the U.S. economy as he visits Circleville, Ohio, where a factory that made components for TV sets sold at Wal-Mart recently closed, and Shenzhen, China, where those components are now made. “It cuts both ways,” Smith says, pointing to both lower U.S. inflation and a “tectonic shift in production” away from the U.S. Smith also visits Wal-Mart's Bentonville, Ark., headquarters, and traces the company's 30-year relationship with Chinese manufacturers. And he goes full circle (sort of), visiting the site of a planned Wal-Mart right next to the closed Circleville factory, where the jobs will pay barely half of the lost manufacturing jobs. “It's the two models, side by side,” he says.
 
457 :23x06 - Secret History of the Credit Card (Nov/23/2004)
In “The Secret History of the Credit Card,” correspondent Lowell Bergman surveys the credit-card industry to explore reasons why cards are so easy to get and hard to pay off. The hour examines issues like interest rates, data-sharing and the industry's clout in Washington, but the short answer, as Bergman puts it, is that “the most profitable part of the industry is when they get people into debt.” A coproduction with the New York Times.
 
458 :23x07 - Al Qaeda's New Front (Jan/25/2005)
“Al Qaeda's New Front” surveys Islamic militancy in Europe, visiting Britain, France and Germany, as well as Spain, where last March's train bombings affected the country's election. “Al Qaeda has mutated and metastasized into a social movement,” says producer Neil Docherty, who adds that merely capturing leaders won't stop it. While many cells have been broken up, “the war in Iraq is serving as a recruitment tool,” says Docherty, “and that just means that there are going to be more of them.”
 
459 :23x08 - House of Saud (Feb/08/2005)
Producer Martin Smith looks back over the seven decades that “The House of Saud” has ruled Saudi Arabia and explores the oil-rich kingdom's relations with the U.S. What makes the country tick? Smith points to tension stemming from the “unholy alliance” between the ruling family and the conservative clerics who help keep them in power. It's “barely controlled inside the kingdom,” Smith says. “Once it gets outside the kingdom it could be deadly.”
 
460 :23x09 - A Company of Soldiers (Feb/22/2005)
The Iraq War---as seen by “A Company of Soldiers” with whom a “Frontline”-BBC crew was embedded during November and December 2004. The unit: a 10-person component of the U.S. Army's 8th Cavalry Regiment. One soldier is killed in an ambush, and the crew's car is damaged by a roadside bomb, but, says producer Ed Jarvis, the film is more about the confusion and frustration that beset the group---and Iraqis they encounter---in the face of unremitting danger and uncertainty.
 
461 :23x10 - The Soldier's Heart (Mar/01/2005)
“The Soldier's Heart” profiles Iraq War veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and examines the military's approach to it. The Defense Department takes PTSD seriously, but one of the hour's main points is that this sensitivity hasn't seeped easily into the military's macho culture, and this can make things all the worse for vets. “We're trained not to hurt,” says Jacob Martin, a marine who's in therapy between tours in Iraq. “That's the big deal: Just suck it up.”
 
462 :23x11 - Israel's Next War? (Apr/05/2005)
“Israel's Next War?” explores problems posed by Zionist hard-liners who want all Arabs out of Israel. The fear is that their provocations could lead to wider conflict. The hour includes interviews with hard-liners and Israeli officials, and profiles of Shlomo Dvir and Yarden Morag, who were convicted of attempting to blow up an Arab school in Jerusalem. This “enemy within,” as producer Dan Setton calls the militants, “is in many ways a mirror image” of Islamic terrorists.
 
463 :23x12 - Karl Rove -- the Architect (Apr/12/2005)
“Karl Rove---The Architect” profiles the Bush strategist and policy adviser. He's “an amazing political geek [who] knows every detail about everything,” says producer Michael Kirk, who prepared this profile with reporters from the Washington Post. And his method---“attack, attack, attack”---serves his “master plan” for conservative domination for the foreseeable future. Success in that remains to be seen, but for now, Kirk says, he's “the second most powerful man in America, maybe.”
 
464 :23x13 - Death of a Princess (Updated) (Apr/19/2005)
“Death of a Princess,” a “Rashomon”-like 1980 docudrama about the 1977 public execution of a Saudi princess and her lover for adultery, explores what “Frontline” executive producer David Fanning (a writer on “Princess”) calls “the private center of the Arab world.” The film incorporates interview transcripts (actors play the interviewees) with re-creations of the executions and events leading up to them. Also: a review of the controversy generated by the original film.
 
465 :23x14 - The New Asylums (May/10/2005)
A case-study report examining how the state of Ohio has dealt with an influx of mentally disturbed inmates in recent years. Many of them would have been sent to state mental hospitals in the past. But many of those institutions have closed and, says Ohio Corrections chief Reginald Wilkinson: “I became a de-facto director of a major mental-health system.”
 
466 :23x15 - A Jew Among the Germans (May/31/2005)
Filmmaker Marian Marzynski, a Holocaust survivor, is a wary “Jew Among the Germans” as he visits Berlin, where a Holocaust memorial was dedicated in May 2005. Marzynski opposed it and he sorts out his reasons why during this philosophical hour. He also samples young Germans' feelings about the Holocaust and finds a desire to rid themselves of their grandparents' guilt. He demurs, contending that sense of guilt is a necessity. But “an honorable one. And within it a proud guardianship of memory.”
 
467 :23x16 - Private Warriors (Jun/21/2005)
“Private Warriors” assesses the implications of the presence of thousands of private security guards in Iraq, where they protect U.S. generals and diplomats, not to mention military bases. Reporter Martin Smith toured Iraq in April 2005 for the report, accompanied by private guards (one of whom was killed). Many of these “guys with guns” do fine work---for their bosses, but not U.S. policy makers, Smith says. “They're not accountable in any chain of command.”
 
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