They’re bleeping our soldiers again
: PBS’ Frontline spent months filming a report on soldiers in Iraq, A Company of Soldiers, set to air on Feb. 22. Guess what: Soldiers under fire tend to use no-no words. And this caused PBS to wimp out and bleep the words. Under pressure, they agreed to also send an uncensored version. Frontline Executive Producer David Fanning wrote a stirring memo to PBS stations:
…This is a film about young men at war, often in combat, and always in danger. As you might expect, the language of these soldiers is sprinkled with expletives, especially at their moments of greatest fear and stress. As we edited the program, we were judicious, but came to believe that some of that language was an integral part of our journalistic mission: to give viewers a realistic portrait of our soldiers at war. We feel strongly that the language of war should not be sanitized and that there is nothing indecent about its use in this context….
Our attorneys, including outside counsel, have advised us that the expletives in
