Latinos Give Ken Burns A Raw Deal

Latino interest groups are unfairly castigating documentary maker Ken Burns (pictured here), to the point of portraying him as some sort of bigot, which he surely is not.

Here's the background: Burns, whose Civil War documentary has long been among the best content on public television, has produced a WWII documentary, called "The War." Despite the sweeping title, the documentary actually focuses only on the wartime stories of four towns--a small way of telling a large story. (The four towns are Sacramento, California; Mobile, Alabama; Waterbury, Connecticut; and the rural small town of Luverne, Minnesota.)

Now, after Burns finished the documentary, which was financed largely by PBS, he screened it to various people, including Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, a Univ. of Texas journalism professor who directs the U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project. Ms. Rivas-Rodriguez protested that Latinos were not represented in the documentary and started a nationwide campaign by Latino groups against Burns' documentary.

(The film does include Japanese-Americans from Sacramento and a number of African-Americans.)

After some meetings, Burns agreed to interview some Latino veterans and add their stories in between episodes of the documentary, which had already been completed. (He also planned to add interviews with Native American veterans, too.)

While some Latino groups thought that was a reasonable compromise--they had raised the issue and Burns had graciously and thoughtfully responded--others are still out for blood. In their view, the Latino contribution would be marginalized unless Burns re-edits the entire documentary to incorporate the Hispanic soldiers. (We don't know if these groups have suggested Latinos from the four towns involved in the project--it would equally marginalize them if for some reason Burns had to include a Hispanic veteran from, say, Mesa, Arizona.)

Most recently, an umbrella group of Latino organizations (the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility) has intimidated General Motors and Anheuser-Busch into disavowing their corporate sponsorships of the Burns documentary. (See Washington Post story here.)

Furthermore, they're now off and running on a campaign to demonize Burns. This is unfair.

Burns did not set out to exclude Hispanics or anyone else from his documentary. He took on a large subject in a small way, selecting four typical small U.S. towns and following their contributions to the war. Yes, we suppose he could've selected a Hispanic town in the Southwest, an Indian Reservation, an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, an African-American town in Mississippi, a Polish section of Chicago, and on and on, making sure to get a slice of every ethnic and racial pie in the U.S. But he didn't, and if he had it really would not have been representative, either.

Furthermore, the point of Burns' documentary is not that people of any one particular heritage or ethnicity were any braver or more patriotic than anyone else. The point, based on descriptions of the film, is to illustrate the bravery and sacrifice of very ordinary people. And its the ordinariness of the people from across the country that is the unifying principle of the documentary.

That said, when the Latino groups raised the issue, Burns was willing to listen and try to accommodate them. We don't think anyone could fairly accuse Burns of being some kind of bigot. The fact of the matter is that WWII was a very big war and one documentary cannot cover the whole thing--not even close. If anything, Burns has bent over backward here.

We're sympathetic to the Latino groups who want to make sure that their contribution to WWII gets recognized. This is not a good way to do it, however. One better way would be to use their leverage to get PBS to produce a separate documentary on the Latino contribution to the war--perhaps funding an up and coming Hispanic director to do the job.

We're sorry to see GM and Anheuser-Busch caving in so quickly, but that's the state of politics and commerce these days.

What will be the bottom line? The bottom line will be the end of good, quality documentaries on PBS, replaced, instead, with crummy pieces of work geared entirely to political correctness, catering to every interest group capable of phoning a Congressperson and making their gripes known.