Global Watch pilot surfaces in April
A fast-moving, half-hour pilot for an international news program called Global Watch is on the PBS schedule April 9 [2007].
The project, assigned to KCET and KQED in 2006, during Pat Mitchell’s time as PBS president, surfaces from the Los Angeles station after changes of conception and producer. KCET hopes to gear up a full weekly series for the PBS World multicast channel — if funding can be found. The Orfalea Family Foundation backed the pilot with a grant to the PBS Foundation.
Hosted by Daljit Dhaliwal — formerly with Wide Angle and now with Foreign Exchange — the pilot looks at international perceptions of America, Britons’ view of the “war on terror,” foreign journalists’ reactions to the U.S. presidential race, and whether the U.S. has a right to criticize China’s environmental problems.
Global Watch is an outgrowth of Public Square, Mitchell’s persistent but frustrated effort to develop and find funds for a PBS public affairs channel. Outgrowths of the initiative also include PBS Engage, the social media site launched in beta last fall with funds from the Knight and Ford foundations. PBS began planning for a digital public affairs channel in 2004 with Knight seed money.
In May 2006, KCET and KQED hired former CNN exec Sid Bedingfield to head up production of a daily public affairs block for the PBS World channel, which largely repeats the PBS primetime schedule. Bedingfield, who had helped lauched CNN International, was brought in to create something new with a global scope.
Bedingfield says the project experimented with various formats—at one point with the plan to launch it on the Web—but the producing stations, PBS and the funders had different opinions of how international the initiative should be. “We really tried to find a compromise,” he says, “but we really never did.” In summer 2007, he left to take a visiting professor position at University of South Carolina.
KCET gave the project to Bret Marcus, a former NBC and ABC producer who headed the award-winning state newsmag California Connected until its cancellation in April.
Marcus sees a dearth of continuous, in-depth TV coverage of the U.S. role in the world. “The conventional wisdom always was that people weren’t very interested in international news,” he says, but with the increased blurring of the line between national and international issues, he thinks people—especially pubTV viewers—want to learn about global perspectives.
“Tonight we turn the camera on ourselves and ask the question, ‘What does the rest of the world think of us?’” says Dhaliwal, introducing the pilot.
Gordon Corera, BBC security correspondent, reports from London on British doubts about the U.S. approach to fighting terrorism, and then appears on a vast plasma screen to talk with Dhaliwal. Judy Muller, NPR commentator and former ABC News correspondent, follows 17 foreign reporters around the country as they cover the presidential race and elicits their reactions. In another segment, Mark Mullen, NBC Beijing correspondent, reports on the connections between China’s pollution and America’s low-cost imports.
When KCET raises enough money for the series and sister website, Marcus plans to feature citizen journalists, bloggers and vloggers from around the world on both platforms. “For example, you can do a story on Iraq, but there’s a certain access that’s hard to get on television,” he says, “and yet there are lots of people blogging about it.” KCET talked with more than 100 bloggers while producing the pilot, he says.
The international contacts made during pilot production are excited about the show’s concept, Marcus says. “We wanted this show to have a very different feeling,” he says. “it’s not another show produced inside the Beltway.”
Web page posted March 31, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Current LLC