14 DAY TRIAL // Last year’s Sony Hack brought up a lot of nasty stuff the studio and its many, big-time associates would have kept private, from salary negotiations to mean studio gossip, and vicious personal attacks. That is, beside the private details of all Sony employees.
Among these was also an email exchange between Henry Louis Gates, the host of Finding Your Roots, and Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton, in which Gates was telling his boss that Ben Affleck had requested that an embarrassing detail about his great-great-great grandfather be edited out. His demand was met with.
Affleck’s censorship prompts internal PBS investigation
Now, whereas most shows and even documentaries we see on TV are fake to a certain extent, whether we’re talking about partial editing or actual scripting, PBS’ Finding Your Roots prides itself in being legit.
So when the email leaked, it painted both the producers and the network in a very negative light, especially since Gates was on the record as saying that the demand came from a “megastar” he felt he had no other choice but listen to.
The fact that said megastar would be making his big screen debut as Batman only added weight to his request. So, with Lynton’s approval, Gates decided to remove the bit about Affleck’s ancestor owning slaves from his episode, which was shot in January 2014 and aired towards the end of last year.
An internal investigation was launched with PBS after the email leaked, Variety reports, and it has been concluded just now.
The network has decided to suspend the show until they put together a new, more reliable team that will include new fact-checkers and an independent genealogist.
PBS puts its foot down
So a third season won’t be out until this team is brought together, the network says in a statement. It also adds that it “determined that the series co-producers violated PBS standards by failing to shield the creative and editorial process from improper influence, and by failing to inform PBS or WNET of Mr. Affleck’s efforts to affect program content.”
Gates too has issued a statement, but he’s not apologizing for allowing Affleck, the subject of the episode, direct the content that would be included on the show. He is sorry for not informing the network of his “editing rationale” and for putting PBS and member stations in a bad spot.
Gates sticks with his side of the story, that the existence of the slave-owning ancestor was not revealed because it was not relevant, even though he was singing a different tune in the leaked email exchange and even though Affleck himself admitted to pressuring him into doing it.
For his part, Affleck first tried to make a clean escape by claiming the act of censorship was done by his management and he had no idea about it until after the fact. He eventually admitted to feeling shame for having a slave owner for an ancestor.