One last post on Gates-Gate, I swear. First, I encourage you to read our original story, in which the Sony email leaks showed that Henry Louis Gates Jr.—executive producer and host of PBS’ Finding Your Roots, a show that traces the ancestry of celebrities—had capitulated to a demand from Ben Affleck and censored a segment of the show revealing that one of Affleck’s forebears was a slave-owner. The emails with Sony CEO Michael Lynton leave no doubt that Gates knew the move would be ethically dubious, and Lynton even advised him against it in no uncertain terms. When explaining the decision later, before the Sony leak undermined him, Gates compounded the mistake by lying about his motivation, saying he was simply “focusing on the most interesting aspects of [Affleck’s] ancestry.”
Next, read yesterday’s post on the findings of a PBS investigation that resulted in the show being suspended. Among the demands that PBS made before continuing the third season, much less renewing the show for a fourth, were that Finding Your Roots hire an independent fact-checker and genealogist. Which confused me, because facts and genealogy weren’t the problem—Gates going against his principles to accommodate a celebrity was the problem.
But that seemed to be that, until today, when PBS ombudsman Michael Getler released his own report making the same point I made yesterday: The only obvious problem here is Gates himself.
“Gates..clearly knew the editorial and credibility stakes involved and the potential violation it posed of PBS editorial standards,” Getler wrote. “But after consulting with Sony executive Michael Lynton, Gates dropped that factoid from the program, without telling PBS or WNET.”
After summarizing the conclusions of the PBS investigation, Getler turned to Gates: