WTTW-Ch. 11 said Wednesday that it has gotten no viewer complaints after airing a graphic episode of “Frontline” Tuesday night about U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
“We haven’t gotten any negative calls,” said Joanie Bayhack, a spokeswoman for Channel 11. “People were happy we ran it the way we did.”
The documentary, “A Company of Soldiers,” followed Dog Company of the Army’s 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry in south Baghdad and featured several instances of battle-weary soldiers using coarse language.
Fearing that some of the expletives may run afoul of the Federal Communications Commission’s indecency standards, PBS took the unusual step of distributing an edited version of the program to its stations. It made the unedited version available only to stations that agreed to absolve PBS and WGBH, the Boston PBS station that produces “Frontline,” of responsibility for FCC fines that may arise from the broadcast.
Channel 11 was one of 48 stations out of the roughly 300 that regularly air “Frontline” to show the unedited version, PBS said. In Chicago, the show averaged 2.8 rating points and 4 percent of the viewing audience, a 40 percent increase over the average audience for “Frontline” so far this season, Nielsen Media Research said.