The FRONTLINE Dispatch

Correspondent A.C. Thompson joins the FRONTLINE Dispatch to discuss America’s Dangerous Trucks, an investigation in partnership with ProPublica.

The film examines a particularly devastating type of traffic accident involving trucks – underride crashes — and how for decades, federal regulators inside the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) failed to enact new safety measures to prevent them.

“In the 1960s, the federal safety regulators, they start looking at this issue and they're saying, this is a problem,” Thompson recounts. “They do studies, and it then takes them more than 30 years to do anything. And that was shocking to me.”

You can watch America’s Dangerous Trucks on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, and the PBS App.

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In the year following the shooting at Robb Elementary School that killed 19 children and two adults, how has the community in Uvalde, Texas grieved — and what do they want to see happen?

In the recent documentary After Uvalde: Guns, Grief, and Texas Politics, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa examined the Uvalde community’s efforts to heal, its history of activism, and where the fight over assault rifles stands today.

Hinojosa, host of Latino USA and founder of Futuro Media, joins Raney Aronson-Rath to talk about her reporting in Uvalde and at the Texas Capitol as the aftermath of the tragedy — including the efforts of some Robb Elementary families to advocate for new gun restrictions — rippled through Texas politics.

“It's just like you are witnessing the greatest divisions in our country right here. This is what it looks like,” Hinojosa told Aronson-Rath.

You can watch After Uvalde: Guns, Grief, and Texas Politics, a collaboration with Futuro Investigates and The Texas Tribune, on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, and the PBS App.

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FRONTLINE Film Audio Tracks are FRONTLINE documentaries, in audio form. Stream or download full-length recordings of film audio tracks on Apple Podcasts or our website. 

Listen to the full-length audio from Age of Easy Money, FRONTLINE’s recent investigation into the Federal Reserve’s “easy money” policies. 

Around the country and across the world, economic uncertainty continues as businesses and individuals adjust to a new reality: the Federal Reserve has been raising interest rates and pulling back on its epic monetary experiment that started with the Great Financial Crisis.

From the award-winning team behind The Facebook Dilemma and Amazon Empire, the two-hour documentary investigates how the Fed’s policies have changed the American economy and what comes after the age of easy money.

In the third and final installment of the documentary series America and the Taliban, FRONTLINE looks at the months leading up to the Taliban takeover and the consequences of the group’s return to power — including the return of harsh restrictions for women.  

In this episode of The FRONTLINE Dispatch podcast, released on World Press Freedom Day, filmmakers Marcela Gaviria and Martin Smith joined host Raney Aronson-Rath to share observations from their reporting on the ground about the reversal of women’s rights in Afghanistan.

“It just feels like half the population is in hiding,” Gaviria told Aronson-Rath. “And that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but it does feel like you can sense the fear among so many women, and fear for their future and the future of their children.”

This is part two of Raney Aronson-Rath’s conversation with Gaviria and Smith about America and the Taliban. You can hear more from Gaviria and Smith on the previous episode of The FRONTLINE Dispatch. Watch all three parts of America and the Taliban on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, and the PBS App. 

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Drawing on decades of on-the-ground reporting in Afghanistan, the new three-part series America and the Taliban traces pivotal moments in America’s longest war, and how it culminated in Taliban victory.

Award-winning producers Marcela Gaviria and Martin Smith join FRONTLINE editor-in-chief and executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath for a discussion on their decades of reporting in Afghanistan, and what it was like to revisit people and places from past coverage for this new series.

"There's one basic thing that they all knew, and that was that the Taliban were not going to go anywhere permanently," Smith told Aronson-Rath about many of the Afghan people he met, "but the Americans were eventually going to leave."

Parts one and two of America and the Taliban are available to stream on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel and the PBS App.

Part three premieres on PBS and online Tuesday, April 25, 2023.

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In the aftermath of the second and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history, correspondent James Jacoby joins the FRONTLINE Dispatch to talk about Age of Easy Money, a documentary examining the power of the Federal Reserve and our current economic uncertainty. 

The film draws on over two years of reporting on the Fed’s so-called “easy money” policies, with Jaocby and team charting the start of the Fed’s economic experiment after the 2008 financial crisis and again during COVID; the Fed’s decision to start raising interest rates in 2022; and what’s happened since — including recession fears, bank market disruptions, and concerns that the fight against inflation will trigger unemployment.

“In some ways there's been this kind of gravitational force at work, this invisible force, and people weren't able to necessarily recognize it,” Jacoby told host Raney Aronson-Rath. “At the root of it is what the Fed has been doing.” 

Age of Easy Money is now streaming on FRONTLINE’s website, the PBS Video App, and FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel. 

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During the early months of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, filmmakers Mani Benchelah and Patrick Tombola documented the lives of civilians and first responders trying to survive in Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city near the border of Russia. Their work became the FRONTLINE film Ukraine: Life Under Russia’s Attack, released in August of 2022.

An updated version of the documentary, released in February 2023, revisits many of the Ukrainians Benchelah and Tombola first profiled and takes us to the present day — a year after Russia’s invasion began.

Joining FRONTLINE editor-in-chief and executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath after their most recent reporting trip to Kharkiv, Benchelah and Tombola reflect on documenting how the region and its inhabitants have been changed by a year of war.

“The new Ukraine is one where everyone is extremely conscious of how close they had come to death,” Tombola said. “Their mindset has dramatically changed, and there's a real sense of having all shared a very defining moment in their life.”

The updated Ukraine: Life Under Russia’s Attack documentary is now streaming on FRONTLINE’s website, in the PBS App and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel.

As FRONTLINE celebrates 40 years on the air, editor-in-chief and executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath is hosting conversations with the journalists and filmmakers behind some of FRONTLINE’s most groundbreaking work.

A.C. Thompson is a reporter for ProPublica who has been a correspondent with FRONTLINE since 2010. He joins The FRONTLINE Dispatch to discuss his years of reporting on right-wing extremism for award-winning films like American Insurrection and the series Documenting Hate in light of recent high-profile incidents of antisemitism.

“Over time, if you were following the key sort of white nationalist and right wing extremist talking points, you saw more and more antisemitism coming through,” Thompson told Aronson-Rath. “What I think you've seen since then is sort of a quiet but steady uptick in antisemitism and now it's bursting onto the scene.”

Thompson also reflects on the unique investigative collaborations he and FRONTLINE developed over the years, and previews what he’s working on in 2023.

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When a leaked list of more than 50,000 phone numbers came to the attention of Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud of the journalism non-profit Forbidden Stories, along with Amnesty International, they suspected the list contained phone numbers potentially targeted for surveillance using the powerful spyware known as Pegasus, which gives its operators access to targets’ mobile devices. 

Richard and Rigaud teamed up with journalists from sixteen other outlets, including FRONTLINE, to investigate. What the reporting consortium found, with technical support from Amnesty International’s Security Lab, was explosive: Pegasus had been used on journalists, human rights activists, the wife and fiancée of the murdered Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi, and others around the world. 

Global Spyware Scandal: Exposing Pegasus is the new, two-part series from FRONTLINE and Forbidden Films that goes behind the scenes of the investigation, and chronicles the responses from governments and institutions seeking to govern the largely unregulated spyware industry.

Richard and Rigaud, two of the series’ producers, joined FRONTLINE’s Raney Aronson-Rath to discuss the investigation, what’s happened since, and the threat spyware like Pegasus poses.

Pegasus is “like a person over your shoulder who will read everything that you are reading, even your encrypted messages,” Richard says. “It's a military weapon used against civilians.”

Global Spyware Scandal: Exposing Pegasus is now streaming at pbs.org/frontline, in the PBS App and on FRONTLINE's YouTube channel.

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In the new documentary Putin’s War at Home, FRONTLINE tells the stories of Russian activists and journalists defying Russian President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on dissent – from a young woman documenting protests and propaganda on TikTok, to a duo of reporters investigating the Ukraine war’s death toll among Russian soldiers. 

Director Gesbeen Mohammad joins FRONTLINE’s executive producer and editor-in-chief, Raney Aronson-Rath, to discuss what it took to gather these stories — and what the documentary’s subjects risked by speaking out about the Ukraine war, including arrest and imprisonment. 

“People were very, very afraid to speak to us,” Mohammad told FRONTLINE. “But I guess that's what makes all of our interviewees and contributors so unique in their braveness.” 

Putin’s War at Home is now streaming on FRONTLINE’s website, the PBS Video App and FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel.

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