December 23, 2023

“It’s only financially, that’s my only motivation here. It’s like, you know, look, I’ll make you look good, just keep paying me.”

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These are not lines from a shadowy scene in The Godfather or some other fictional mobster movie. Rather, this is a direct quote from a real-life PBS Frontline editor presenting to a live audience in a Boston, Massachusetts auditorium, as he describes how Frontline documentaries are made.

Viewers have long known that taxpayer-funded PBS Frontline exhibits extreme bias against Republicans like Donald Trump, attempting to smear him and his supporters in documentaries like “Trump’s American Carnage.” There’s a reason why most Americans don’t consider the likes of PBS or NPR to be objective.

But, in August, I discovered a video in which a longtime editor at PBS Frontline named Steve Audette explicitly admits to outright corruption in Frontline’s journalistic practices. When I brought this discovery to the attention of Jeff Clark, U.S. Assistant Attorney General from 2018 to 2021, Clark observed that “PBS’s Frontline is completely for sale.”

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In his presentation to members of a Boston filmmaking and editing club, Audette — whose credits as an editor at Frontline run from at least 1993 until 2022 — shows the crowd how he shortens a video clip and covers up (in editing) an apparent factual error made by political consultant and pollster Frank Luntz in an interview for the 2017 Frontline documentary, “Trump’s Road to the White House.” He tells the crowd, “As an editor, your job is to fix this stuff and make them [certain interviewees, in this case, Luntz] look great, because if they look great, they hire you back. Right? It’s only financially, that’s my only motivation here.”

Later in the presentation, Audette shows how he uses shocking footage of a shirtless, tattooed, and shouting man in the street as a stand-in for what Audette falsely claimed that Trump represents. The same ugly footage of this man in the street, who presumably was not given an opportunity to pay Audette to make him “look good,” has been used in multiple Frontline documentaries in which Audette is credited as the editor, apparently for the purpose of painting Trump supporters with a negative brush.

Worth noting: Apart from illicit payments — explicitly cited by Audette — from certain interviewees, PBS Frontline is officially funded with U.S. taxpayer money through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

In the same video, Audette confirms the chain of command at PBS Frontline: “We show it to the executive producer, Raney [Aronson-Rath] and Andrew Metz, the executive editor. Right? Then it becomes their film. Right? And then we’re making whatever they want, we do.”

Also worth noting: Deans and faculty members at Columbia Journalism School (CJS) — long considered a standard-setter in the field of journalism — have been direct and vocal supporters of PBS Frontline executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath (a CJS alumnus) and her outfit, despite Frontline’s explicit corruption under Aronson-Rath’s leadership. 

To cite one example among many, in 2019, CJS faculty member and then-dean Steve Coll presented a once-in-a-decade duPont-Columbia “Gold Baton” award to Aronson-Rath for Frontline documentaries that specifically include, among others, “Putin’s Revenge” Parts I and II, which again attack Trump. When presenting the award to Aronson-Rath, Coll falsely called Frontline “a standard bearer for investigative reporting in the very best traditions of broadcast and documentary filmmaking,” making no mention of its explicitly corrupt practices.