A documentary about the slave trade premiering Thursday on cable’s History Channel was produced, it turns out, by the same company responsible for a new movie about an 1839 shipboard revolt by African slaves bound for the New World.
The close connections between the two productions raise questions that pit the presentation of harsh and sometimes debatable facts versus the promotion of a multimillion-dollar entertainment vehicle:
– The documentary, “Ships of Slaves: The Middle Passage” (9 p.m. Thursday) was produced by Triage Entertainment for DreamWorks, the independent studio that also produced “Amistad,” the movie about the 1839 uprising.
– The movie’s director, Steven Spielberg, opens the documentary with an introduction mentioning the time he has spent making “Amistad” and the importance of learning about the slave trade.
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– Debbie Allen, a producer of “Amistad,” is also an executive producer of the documentary, as well as its on-camera host and off-camera narrator.
– Finally, the History Channel documentary premieres one day before “Amistad” shows up in movie theaters nationwide.
Abbe Raven, History Channel’s senior vice president for programming and production, defended the arrangement. “This is a legitimate, well-produced program,” she said, and the channel retained editorial control.
Raven acknowledged it was DreamWorks that first proposed a slave-trade documentary. “But we made it very clear from the beginning,” she said, “that we would not be interested at all if this were a commercial or promotion for the film.”
Susan Werbe, History Channel’s executive producer, added that only 4 1/2 pages of the documentary’s 36-page script are devoted to the revolt on the Spanish ship Amistad.
Raven said she understood questions raised about a historical documentary on the slave trade being produced by a company with a financial interest in promoting a new movie about the slave trade. But in this case, she insisted, there is no conflict.
And Raven flatly rejected any comparison between this situation and History Channel’s controversial plan last year to televise a series about American corporations that would have been funded by, sponsored by and at least partly produced by the corporations themselves. The channel canceled the plan amid widespread criticism that the objectivity of such a series would be fatally compromised.
The comparison is this: The channel’s approach to the business series and the new documentary both indicate a nagging blind spot to some ethical matters, whether they’re blatantly objectionable or questionable in appearance.
Yes, History Channel is an entertainment enterprise, not a news organization. But any programming operation that uses history to connect with viewers ought to safeguard its credibility more fervently than History Channel seems to. DreamWorks should have been disqualified as the supplier of a slave-trade documentary. Too bad the cable channel couldn’t see that.