IMHO [and no, we're not talking party politics] Frontline is a is a sneaky one, so be careful. It purports to be an objective documentary, but it has a way of landing on the side of "conventional wisdom."

I was first struck by this years ago when it did a program on the decision to drop the Atomic Bomb, totally ignoring the scholarship of people like Gar Alperovitz and Gabriel Kolko, who had been through Henry Stinson's diaries etc., and painted a pretty convincing picture that Japan was on the eve of surrender as a result of the firebombings, they were just down to the status of the Emperor, but the problem was, for years the West had been begging Stalin to invade from the East after the fall of Germany, and he said he would do it, three months to the day, but by that time, Japan was so weak and the territorial concessions that Stalin wanted (and took) were so significant, that time alone became of the essence in securing a Japanese surrender . . . .

Yet none of this - stuff I spent much of a semester studying in college - made it into the Frontline documentary. Ditto JFK in Dallas, and although I can't say I took that one for credit, I did live it.

Mike