"The Two Towns of Jasper," an excellent documentary on the impact of the racist murder of James Byrd, Jr. on a small town in Texas, should and will reach a large audience when it airs as part of "POV" on PBS at 9 p.m. Wednesday (check local listings).
It is getting a lot of attention, much of it from ABC. "Oprah" which mostly airs on ABC affiliates is devoting today's show to the documentary. It is also the focus of "Nightline" tonight. On Thursday, "POV" will be showing a 90 minute town meeting at 9 p.m. (check local listings) with residents of Jasper moderated by Ted Koppel. "Nightline" will air an hour of the meeting that evening.
While there probably isn't a huge overlap between the audience of "Nightline" and "The Bachelorette" (which is on at the same time as "Two Towns of Jasper"), there will be at least some with Orpah's. And hopefully some of them will take a break from finding out who Trista will find true love with to look at race in America.
The only other place besides PBS that "Two Towns of Jasper" might have been shown is HBO. It is unlikely it would have been made for or shown uncut on ABC, any of the other commercial broadcast networks, or even cable.
For most of 1999, during the trials of three men for the murder of Byrd, a black crew followed the black residents of Jasper and a white crew followed the white residents. It is unlikely a network news division would have devoted the resources to shoot for a year or agree to what might have been a controversial method to make the documentary.
Article comments
1 - Mac Diva
The same filmmaker, Marco Williams, has produced a documentary which is currently airing about the phenomenon of naming streets MLK Boulevard. It is blogged
here.
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