Word: pbs
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...with such impassioned advance notices. Even before it was aired this week, Death of a Princess, a British-American two-hour "dramatized documentary" dealing with the 1977 executions of a married 19-year-old Saudi princess and her young lover, prompted angry blasts from top Congressmen and some of PBS'S biggest corporate backers, as well as much top-level squirming in the State Department. The cause: a sharply negative review from the Saudi Arabian government, which protested that the show presented a "completely false" picture of the desert kingdom and warned that it could "undermine the internationally significant...
...Saudis had reason to feel wronged. Like so-called faction literature, the TV hybrid known as documentary drama typically consists of real-life events embedded in a marzipan of speculation and romance. In Princess, co-produced by Britain's independent Association Television network and WGBH, the PBS station in Boston, the marzipan is the message. South African-born Director Antony Thomas set out to film a straight drama on the life and death of Princess Mashall, a lively young grandniece of Saudi Arabia's King Khalid. Mashall, whose arranged marriage soured, supposedly went to study at a Beirut...
...broadcast date, May 12, approached, PBS came under public relations pressure to do the same, although much of the pleading seemed pro forma, recognizing that the First Amendment would make any real effort to censor the program not only impossible but counterproductive-a fact of life about U.S. freedom of expression that even the Saudis acknowledged. Exxon, which spends $5 million a year on public TV and is also one of the four U.S. partners in the Ara, bian American Oil Co., issued a statement that it would be "extremely unfortunate" if the show were to hurt U.S.-Saudi relations...
Acting Secretary of State Warren Christopher was wrong to forward Saudi complaints to PBS. A federal judge recognized his mistake when she ordered the Houston PBS station not to cancel the broadcast, saying that caving in to pressure would amount to political censorship by a state-owned station...
...PBS will broadcast the opera as a miniseries, one act each night following the April 13 program. The rare hour is the first one, because Opening Night is the work of people who know the opera world, relish its absurdities and are candid enough to show the temperaments that make it grand...