A brilliant program, this thoughtful and analytical quartet of videos probes the moral questions that plague journalists: What is the truth and whose truth is it? Is there such a thing as true objectivity? What does it mean when the same picture can be used to illustrate opposite points of view? What distortions are introduced by the journalist’s own ego—to be first, best, most artistic, most insightful? These programs show how reporters have to contend with editors and producers who are concerned with selling their products or who want to impose a particular interpretation, and with the actors in the actual drama—who may wish to control or manipulate their story, or prevent its being told, or who distrust the journalist seeking to tell it. This four-part program offers painstaking interviews with many leading journalists: Bob Woodward, Gordon Parks, Barbara Kopple, and also many French and German reporters whose thoughtful analyses of their work as they see it are spoken in their native languages and subtitled in English. The narration throughout is in English.

The same picture, interpreted differently, with a different frame of reference. What is the truth? What makes a document the emblem of truth? Reporters interviewed include Erich Lessing, Jimmy Fox, Robert Lebeck, Christophe de Ponfilly, Peter Scholl Latour, Laurence Deonna, and Donald McCullin.

How an element is used to define the whole and how the reporter must merge into the scene to capture its truth. Reporters interviewed include Thomas Höpker, Jean Luc Porquet, Leo Hurwitz, Gordon Parks, Gunter Wallraff, and Miguel Littin.

Do reporters seek out danger because they are at heart adventurers? Do they covet the power given them by their own cameras? How can the reporter maintain his or her distance while still capturing the emotion of the event? Reporters interviewed include Jean Gaumy, Wilfred Thesiger, Gerard Gery, Marc Riboud, Robert Lebeck, and Susan Meiselas.

Where is the line between objectivity and subjectivity? The magazine story as antidote to the television news. Stories that can’t be filmed live and are reconstructed—falsified. Reporters interviewed include Frederic Laffont, Claude Torracinta, Duncan Campbell, Edwy Plenel, Robert Richter, Esther Cassidy, and Barbara Kopple.

(3 hours 38 minutes)