TV Worth Blogging
by David Thiel, Program Director for WILL-TV
An insider's view of public television programming and the issues that help determine what and how you watch
Arrest of PBS Host Sparks Controversy
As a public television program director, it's not the sort of headline you want to see: a notable PBS host arrested. But when the person in question is Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a prominent African-American scholar, the story becomes larger and stranger. And that was before President Obama weighed in.
Gates, named by Time magazine as one of the 25 most influential Americans in 1997, is Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard. His work for PBS includes America Beyond the Color Line, African-American Lives and, most recently, Looking for Lincoln. Next year he'll present Faces of America, which will use geneology and DNA research to chart the unknown backgrounds of twelve well-known Americans including Yo-Yo Ma, Eva Longoria, Kristi Yamaguchi and Stephen Colbert.
But the incident that made Gates the talk of cable news occurred last week, when the professor was arrested on his porch in Cambridge. Confronted with a stuck door after returning home from a China trip, he forced his way into the house. A worker at a nearby business mistook the break-in as an illegal act and contacted police.
What happened next is still under debate, but it's safe to say that Gates was unhappy about being confronted by officers in his own home. (I know that I would feel much the same.) Despite having shown identification, he was arrested for "exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior."
The charges were eventually dropped, but it was too late: the arrest has become an example of alleged racial profiling. President Obama addressed the incident in last evening's primetime press conference, saying "The Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home."
Reasonable people might disagree whether the officers acted appropriately to what was, at first glance, a legitimate police call, or whether Gates took his understandable anger too far. But hauling a high-profile Harvard professor out of own his home in handcuffs probably wasn't the brightest move.
back to the main {blog_title} page
Post a comment on this entry: