First Aired: January 17th, 1983
Status: Continuing
Network: PBS
Summary: Since it began in 1983, Frontline has been airing public-affairs documentaries that explore a wide scope of the complex human experience. Frontline's goal is to extend the impact of the documentary beyond its initial broadcast by serving as a catalyst for change.
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Season 6
Episode 1: Apartheid Part I: 1652-1948
Air Date: December 14th, 1987
Summary: Many white South Africans claim that the entire country is theirs by right. No black man, they say, occupied South Africa before the first tiny Dutch settlement in 1652. Part 1 refutes this claim and traces the country’s colonial history, the emergence early in the 20th century of the African National Congress, the rise to power of Afrikaner nationalists, and the formal policy of apartheid.
Episode 2: Apartheid Part 2: 1948-1963
Air Date: December 14th, 1987
Summary: Part 2 details the new policy which included classifying all South Africans by race, removing blacks from cities where many had lived for generations, and establishing separate and unequal schooling for blacks. Frontline focuses on the increasing black resistance in the 1950s and the rise of resistance leader Nelson Mandela.
Episode 3: Apartheid Part 3: 1963-1977
Air Date: December 15th, 1987
Summary: Independent homelands' for blacks was the centerpiece of Prime Minister Hendrick Verwoerd's vision of apartheid. Part 3 focuses on how the white government found African leaders to collaborate with them in a plan to make foreigners of black South African citizens by deporting them to independent homelands in rural areas of the country. The program looks at the increased resistance to the homeland policy as seen through the first nationwide attack by young black South Africans in the Soweto ghetto in 1976.
Episode 4: Apartheid Part 4: 1978-1986
Air Date: December 15th, 1987
Summary: When PW Botha became prime minister of South Africa two years after the Soweto uprising in 1976, he realized that apartheid must ‘adapt or die.’ Part 4 explores the reforms undertaken by Botha to maintain white supremacy, changes that have deeply divided Afrikaners and have provoked explosive reactions from many blacks.
Episode 5: Apartheid Part 5: 1987
Air Date: December 16th, 1987
Summary: Part 5 looks at an unprecedented meeting in the struggle for South Africa’s future. Two years before the release of Nelson Mandela, dissident white Afrikaners met with black leaders from the outlawed African National Congress in Dakar, Senagal, to discuss strategies for change in South Africa, presaging the reforms that would come later.
Episode 7: Operation Urgent Fury
Air Date: February 2nd, 1988
Summary: Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh investigates one of Ronald Reagan’s greatest truimphs-the rescue of American students during the 1983 invasion of Grenada. Hersh’s reporting reveals an inept US military operation and questions whether the students needed rescuing at all.
Episode 8: The Man Who Shot John Lennon
Air Date: February 9th, 1988
Summary: Frontline goes inside the mind of Mark David Chapman, the man who shot and killed John Lennon in 1980. Newly acquired records paint the chilling portrait of a celebrity stalker who meticulously planned the murder, believing it would make him famous.
Episode 9: Your Flight is Cancelled
Air Date: February 16th, 1988
Summary: Since deregulation, America's airline industry has become a nightmare of delays, cancellations, and near misses. This film probes the air traffic dilemma inside America's busiest airport -- in the control tower and behind the ticket counter.
Episode 10: Shakedown in Santa Fe
Air Date: February 23rd, 1988
Summary: Eight years after one of the most violent prison uprisings in US history, Frontline returns to the penitentiary in New Mexico to probe the contininuing struggle between the inmates and the guards, the wardens and the reformers, for control of one of our most dangerous prisons.
Episode 11: Let My Daughter Die
Air Date: March 1st, 1988
Summary: Joe and Joyce Cruzan want doctors to remove their severely brain damaged daughter from the life-support system that keeps her alive. Nearly two years before it became the US Supreme Court’s first right-to-die case, Frontline explored the complex legal and moral issues of this Missouri couple’s battle to allow their daughter to die.
Episode 12: Back in the USSR
Air Date: March 29th, 1988
Summary: In 1968, American journalist Jerry Schecter, accompanied by his wife and five young children, moved to Moscow on assignment for Time magazine. In 1987, Frontline returned with the Schecter family to the Soviet Union as they renewed old friendships and explored Russia under glasnost.
Episode 13: Poison and the Pentagon
Air Date: April 5th, 1988
Summary: The military is America’s largest producer of toxic waste. Frontline reporter Joe Rosenbloom investigates the Pentagon’s poor record of cleaning up its pollution that contaminates the ground water in communities across the country.
Episode 14: To a Safer Place
Air Date: April 12nd, 1988
Summary: When Shirley Turcotte was a child, she was sexually abused by her father. After years of therapy she takes a remarkable journey back into her past-confronting her mother and other adults who failed to protect her, reuniting with her brothers and sister who were also brutally abused, and trying to make peace with the horror story that was her childhood.
Episode 15: Murder on the Rio San Juan
Air Date: April 19th, 1988
Summary: Frontline investigates the unsolved 1984 terrorist bombing at a press conference held by contra leader Eden Pastora. Eight people, including an American reporter, died that night on the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. This report dissects the motives of possible conspirators and follows the trail of the man suspected of planting the bomb.
Episode 16: American Game, Japanese Rules
Air Date: April 26th, 1988
Summary: Can America succeed in Japan? Frontline paints an intimate portrait of Americans living and working in Japan-baseball players, businessmen, and an American bride-all confronting a society that looks Western, but operates by a very different set of rules.
Episode 17: Racism 101
Air Date: May 10th, 1988
Summary: Frontline explores the disturbing increase in racial incidents and violence on America’s college campuses. The attitudes of black and white students reveal increasing tensions at some of the country’s best universities where years after the civil rights struggle, full integration is still only a dream.
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