Ken Burns, Latinos, Announce Victory In The War

Last week we commented on the dispute between documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and a number of Latino organizations who contend that Burns slighted Hispanic-American soldiers of WWII in his upcoming PBS documentary "The War."

The Washington Post reports that Burns has now made peace with the most powerful of those groups, who had begun targeting Burns' corporate sponsors.

As best we can tell, the new agreement is simply the old--and we thought quite gracious--offer by Burns: that to add balance to the documentary, he would interview some Hispanic-American war veterans and include their stories within the bounds of the documentary. He won't re-edit the documentary to splice them in--indeed, it wouldn't make sense to do so since the documentary focuses on veterans from just four towns--but he will include them "before the credits". In other words, at the beginning or end of at least some episodes, their will be additional interviews of Hispanic (and Native American) vets.

As we said before, this is reasonable. Burns did not set out to slight anyone, and he certainly is no bigot. We're glad the Latino interest groups have reached satisfaction on the issue.