As Aaron Barnhart writes, tonight Sundance and IFC are running special election eve programs.
Wednesday morning (or whenever the election is decided), a name that will be in almost every analysis of what happened is Karl Rove. Sundance is showing Bush's Brain which is based on the book of the same name on the political consultant.
The documentary paints a very different portrait than the smiling one that is part of Richard Avedon's final portfolio in this week's New Yorker. It isn't pretty. Many of his campaigns are chronicled (including an interview with the loser who said Rove used dirty tricks to get elected president of the college Republicans). His career is also covered in an excellent article in the Atlantic.
Towards the end, the film rather abruptly veers off into the story of a soldier who died in Iraq. While it is moving, it is out of place in Rove's story. But it is still worth watching tonight (or renting on DVD) to better understand how this campaign has become so negative.
Also, The Choice which Aaron praises and is repeating tonight on many PBS stations is available online (and there is a radio version for people with slower connections). And every voter should watch Frontline's Rumsfeld's War which aired last week and is also online.
These are the kind of programs which the networks should be doing, but aren't.
With the exception of the occasional Petter Jenning special (because he has it in his contract) long form documentaries have almost vanished from the networks which could reach millions more people than Frontline does on PBS.
You'd think with the huge audiences documentaries are drawing and the praise HBO and PBS get for their docs, one of the networks would start a documentary series on Saturday nights rather than just showing movies or reruns. Perhaps CBS which needs to regain some credibility could take some of the profits from Survivor and use them to revive CBS Reports which featured documentaries like Harvest of Shame and the Selling of the Pentagon. Or ABC which once aired documentaries like Robert Drew's Primary could turn an hour over to their Nightline unit on Saturdays instread of showing Desperate Housewives again.
Article comments
1 - Scott Butki
I watched the debut of this movie in Austin during South by Southwest and of course the local liberals loved it.
The first few seconds the screen was blank and someone shouted, "There it is! That's Bush' Brain!"
Considering the stuff with Plame that movie gives good background on his trouble staying ethically proper.