The last episode of Frontline's News War airs on PBS Tuesday (it will also be online) as part of Frontline/World.
Also, Race to Execution will be on after it in many cities as part of Independent Lens (though check local listings).
Race to Execution looks at two death penalty cases and the role race played in them.
I saw the documentary at an Community Cinema screening in San Francisco. A panel included the director Rachel Lyon and Barbara Becnel who described witnessing the execution of Stanley Tookie Williams.
From the Frontline/World newsletter:
In "War of Ideas," our lead story for FRONTLINE/World this Tuesday night, reporter Greg Barker examines the media revolution that has swept the Arab world since the advent of Al Jazeera and shows how the State Department and Pentagon are scrambling to keep up with all the new Arab-language news channels. Not long ago, Arab viewers had to content themselves with staid, state-run TV stations. Now they have access by satellite to a wide range of TV news networks competing for market share and political influence -- everything from Al Jazeera to its Saudi-sponsored rival Al Arabiya to the station known as Al Manar which is run by Hezbollah, still regarded as a terrorist group by Washington. Into this mix, the U.S. has added its own outlet, Al Hurra, "the free one."
Barker, who produced part two of Frontline's award-winning "The Age of AIDS" and the haunting "Ghosts of Rwanda," takes a tour through some of the major media hubs in the Middle East to look inside the key outposts that are broadcasting competing ideas and images throughout the region. Along the way he encounters a fascinating pair of U.S. military officers whose mission is to make sure a U.S. voice is heard on these Arab news outlets. "Al Jazeera is catering to their audience just like Fox News," one of the officers tells him. Though the State Department and the Pentagon are carefully monitoring Al Jazeera's English broadcasts, they are not available to viewers in the U.S. because to date no cable provider has agreed to include them.
This episode of FRONTLINE/World concludes the 4-part Frontline series, "News War," not only by expanding the focus of the series to look at a vital aspect of global media, but by paying tribute to journalists around the world who have been threatened, beaten, imprisoned, exiled or killed in the line of duty, as they try to investigate and tell their stories.
Our program ends with "Requiem," a moving essay by Sheila Coronel, herself an investigative journalist and member of the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists. As she surveys the extraordinary sacrifices reporters made this past year in countries from Russia to Turkey to Iraq, Coronel says, "What makes us humans is because we can express ourselves. If we are unable to speak out, we cannot be fully human, and these journalists remind us of that."
If you cannot watch Tuesday night, visit our Web site where "War of Ideas" and "Requiem" will be video streamed for your convenience. And also check out our latest "Rough Cut" video, "Everyone's a Journalist," in which Vanessa Hua, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, travels to South Korea to see how "OhmyNews," the world's largest "citizen journalist" online newspaper, works, and why it has become so popular and politically influential.