The FRONTLINE Dispatch

The Houston Astros didn’t make the World Series this year. But they’re still widely considered one of the best teams of the past decade. FRONTLINE’s documentary The Astros Edge: Triumph and Scandal in Major League Baseball examines how the team used cutting-edge techniques to rise from the bottom of the league to the top, and what happened in 2017 when they went too far in what would become one of the worst cheating scandals in MLB history. The Astros Edge correspondent Ben Reiter has covered the team extensively for Sports Illustrated and boldly predicted the Astros’ stratospheric rise at a time when they were coming off a three-year slump. His book called Astroball unpacked some of the team’s techniques, which were modeled on strategies from the business world. After The Athletic revealed that the team had used an illegal sign-stealing scheme, Reiter hosted a podcast series examining how the scandal unfolded. Reiter sat down with The FRONTLINE Dispatch to talk about the scandal and the limited accountability that followed. He told host and FRONTLINE editor-in-chief and executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath that he thinks the scandal has implications that go beyond baseball. “What does it mean when your business becomes so obsessed with efficiency and profit over everything else?” he said. “Like, yeah, there's a good chance you're going to have a lot of success, but there's a lot of problems that come with that.” You can watch The Astros Edge: Triumph and Scandal in Major League Baseball on FRONTLINE's website, FRONTLINE's YouTube channel, and the PBS App. Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

When filmmaker Patrick Forbes decided to make a documentary about Russian newspaper editor Dmitry Muratov, Muratov had just won a Nobel Prize. Over the course of the next year, Russia would invade Ukraine, and Russian President Vladimir Putin would intensify his government’s crackdown on the press – a crackdown in which Muratov and his newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, would be caught up. In this episode of The FRONTLINE Dispatch, Forbes joins host Raney Aronson-Rath, editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE, to discuss Putin vs. the Press, the new documentary that follows Muratov as he as he faces personal attacks and fights to keep his reporters safe. Forbes recounts the difficulty of filming a documentary in Russia, where he says Muratov’s story “symbolizes the increasing restriction on freedom of press in Russia” and “the slow strangling of any independent voices.” Putin vs. the Press is streaming on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, and the PBS App. Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

Two Strikes, a documentary from FRONTLINE, The Marshall Project, and Firelight Media, tells the story of Mark Jones, a former West Point cadet serving a life sentence in Florida after an attempted carjacking. The film’s director and producer Ursula Liang, a 2021 FRONTLINE/Firelight Filmmaker Fellow, and reporter Cary Aspinwall of The Marshall Project, join The FRONTLINE Dispatch to unpack the story behind Jones’ sentence — and a law that increases prison time for certain repeat offenders. Florida’s so-called “two-strikes” law allows prosecutors to seek the maximum sentence for people found guilty of felonies within three years of a prison release. In some cases, like Jones’, that can mean life in prison for crimes in which no one was physically injured. Florida has virtually abolished parole. “Florida has almost a quarter of the nation's population of life-without-parole prisoners,” Aspinwall told The FRONTLINE Dispatch host Raney Aronson-Rath, a statistic she calls “staggering.” Two Strikes is streaming on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, and the PBS App. Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

A new rule proposed by the Labor Department could help limit coal miners' exposure to a toxic dust called silica.  “The purpose of this proposed rule is simple: prevent more miners from suffering from debilitating and deadly occupational illnesses by reducing their exposure to silica dust,” Chris Williamson, assistant secretary for mine, safety and health, said in a statement. “Silica overexposures have a real-life impact on a miner’s health.” Williamson has said the proposal was inspired, in part, by FRONTLINE and NPR’s 2019 investigation, which exposed a link between silica dust and an epidemic of severe black lung disease. Our documentary Coal’s Deadly Dust highlighted the resurgence of black lung — and how federal regulators and the industry had failed to protect miners.  “Struggling for Breath in Coal Country” was originally released alongside the film in 2019. In this archival episode of The FRONTLINE Dispatch, correspondent Howard Berkes spoke with coal miners whose lives were forever changed when they were diagnosed with the disease. Coal’s Deadly Dust is streaming at pbs.org/frontline, in the PBS App and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel. Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

Now playing in select theaters and coming to PBS this fall, 20 Days in Mariupol is an unflinching, first-hand account of the early days of Russia’s invasion of the port city of Mariupol, which remains under Russian occupation to this day. Ukrainian-born director and journalist Mstyslav Chernov and his colleagues from the Associated Press were the last international journalists to remain in Mariupol as Russian troops attacked. His new film, from FRONTLINE and the AP, draws on Chernov’s news dispatches and his reflections as he documented the devastation of his home country for the world to see. Chernov sat down with FRONTLINE editor-in-chief and executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath and editor and producer Michelle Mizner earlier this year, as we marked the grim anniversary of the war in Ukraine. In this episode of The FRONTLINE Dispatch, he recounts the decision to go to Mariupol, how he and Mizner created a documentary feature from his Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism, and what he hopes people will take away from the film — today, and in years to come.  “I know that we form our understanding of the current events of the world around us by watching news and consuming news,” Chernov said. “ But [we] form our understanding of our past with documentary films… Film is a medium which carries meaning across time, for generations to come.”  20 Days in Mariupol is currently playing in select theaters. Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

Correspondent A.C. Thompson joins the FRONTLINE Dispatch to discuss America’s Dangerous Trucks, an investigation in partnership with ProPublica. The film examines a particularly devastating type of traffic accident involving trucks – underride crashes — and how for decades, federal regulators inside the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) failed to enact new safety measures to prevent them. “In the 1960s, the federal safety regulators, they start looking at this issue and they're saying, this is a problem,” Thompson recounts. “They do studies, and it then takes them more than 30 years to do anything. And that was shocking to me.” You can watch America’s Dangerous Trucks on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, and the PBS App. Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

In the year following the shooting at Robb Elementary School that killed 19 children and two adults, how has the community in Uvalde, Texas grieved — and what do they want to see happen? In the recent documentary After Uvalde: Guns, Grief, and Texas Politics, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa examined the Uvalde community’s efforts to heal, its history of activism, and where the fight over assault rifles stands today. Hinojosa, host of Latino USA and founder of Futuro Media, joins Raney Aronson-Rath to talk about her reporting in Uvalde and at the Texas Capitol as the aftermath of the tragedy — including the efforts of some Robb Elementary families to advocate for new gun restrictions — rippled through Texas politics. “It's just like you are witnessing the greatest divisions in our country right here. This is what it looks like,” Hinojosa told Aronson-Rath. You can watch After Uvalde: Guns, Grief, and Texas Politics, a collaboration with Futuro Investigates and The Texas Tribune, on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, and the PBS App. Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops?Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

FRONTLINE Film Audio Tracks are FRONTLINE documentaries, in audio form. Stream or download full-length recordings of film audio tracks on Apple Podcasts or our website.  Listen to the full-length audio from Age of Easy Money, FRONTLINE’s recent investigation into the Federal Reserve’s “easy money” policies.  Around the country and across the world, economic uncertainty continues as businesses and individuals adjust to a new reality: the Federal Reserve has been raising interest rates and pulling back on its epic monetary experiment that started with the Great Financial Crisis. From the award-winning team behind The Facebook Dilemma and Amazon Empire, the two-hour documentary investigates how the Fed’s policies have changed the American economy and what comes after the age of easy money.

In the third and final installment of the documentary series America and the Taliban, FRONTLINE looks at the months leading up to the Taliban takeover and the consequences of the group’s return to power — including the return of harsh restrictions for women.   In this episode of The FRONTLINE Dispatch podcast, released on World Press Freedom Day, filmmakers Marcela Gaviria and Martin Smith joined host Raney Aronson-Rath to share observations from their reporting on the ground about the reversal of women’s rights in Afghanistan. “It just feels like half the population is in hiding,” Gaviria told Aronson-Rath. “And that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but it does feel like you can sense the fear among so many women, and fear for their future and the future of their children.” This is part two of Raney Aronson-Rath’s conversation with Gaviria and Smith about America and the Taliban. You can hear more from Gaviria and Smith on the previous episode of The FRONTLINE Dispatch. Watch all three parts of America and the Taliban on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, and the PBS App.  Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

Drawing on decades of on-the-ground reporting in Afghanistan, the new three-part series America and the Taliban traces pivotal moments in America’s longest war, and how it culminated in Taliban victory. Award-winning producers Marcela Gaviria and Martin Smith join FRONTLINE editor-in-chief and executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath for a discussion on their decades of reporting in Afghanistan, and what it was like to revisit people and places from past coverage for this new series. "There's one basic thing that they all knew, and that was that the Taliban were not going to go anywhere permanently," Smith told Aronson-Rath about many of the Afghan people he met, "but the Americans were eventually going to leave." Parts one and two of America and the Taliban are available to stream on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel and the PBS App. Part three premieres on PBS and online Tuesday, April 25, 2023. Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

In the aftermath of the second and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history, correspondent James Jacoby joins the FRONTLINE Dispatch to talk about Age of Easy Money, a documentary examining the power of the Federal Reserve and our current economic uncertainty.  The film draws on over two years of reporting on the Fed’s so-called “easy money” policies, with Jaocby and team charting the start of the Fed’s economic experiment after the 2008 financial crisis and again during COVID; the Fed’s decision to start raising interest rates in 2022; and what’s happened since — including recession fears, bank market disruptions, and concerns that the fight against inflation will trigger unemployment. “In some ways there's been this kind of gravitational force at work, this invisible force, and people weren't able to necessarily recognize it,” Jacoby told host Raney Aronson-Rath. “At the root of it is what the Fed has been doing.”  Age of Easy Money is now streaming on FRONTLINE’s website, the PBS Video App, and FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel.  Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

During the early months of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, filmmakers Mani Benchelah and Patrick Tombola documented the lives of civilians and first responders trying to survive in Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city near the border of Russia. Their work became the FRONTLINE film Ukraine: Life Under Russia’s Attack, released in August of 2022. An updated version of the documentary, released in February 2023, revisits many of the Ukrainians Benchelah and Tombola first profiled and takes us to the present day — a year after Russia’s invasion began. Joining FRONTLINE editor-in-chief and executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath after their most recent reporting trip to Kharkiv, Benchelah and Tombola reflect on documenting how the region and its inhabitants have been changed by a year of war. “The new Ukraine is one where everyone is extremely conscious of how close they had come to death,” Tombola said. “Their mindset has dramatically changed, and there's a real sense of having all shared a very defining moment in their life.” The updated Ukraine: Life Under Russia’s Attack documentary is now streaming on FRONTLINE’s website, in the PBS App and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel.

As FRONTLINE celebrates 40 years on the air, editor-in-chief and executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath is hosting conversations with the journalists and filmmakers behind some of FRONTLINE’s most groundbreaking work. A.C. Thompson is a reporter for ProPublica who has been a correspondent with FRONTLINE since 2010. He joins The FRONTLINE Dispatch to discuss his years of reporting on right-wing extremism for award-winning films like American Insurrection and the series Documenting Hate in light of recent high-profile incidents of antisemitism. “Over time, if you were following the key sort of white nationalist and right wing extremist talking points, you saw more and more antisemitism coming through,” Thompson told Aronson-Rath. “What I think you've seen since then is sort of a quiet but steady uptick in antisemitism and now it's bursting onto the scene.” Thompson also reflects on the unique investigative collaborations he and FRONTLINE developed over the years, and previews what he’s working on in 2023. Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

When a leaked list of more than 50,000 phone numbers came to the attention of Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud of the journalism non-profit Forbidden Stories, along with Amnesty International, they suspected the list contained phone numbers potentially targeted for surveillance using the powerful spyware known as Pegasus, which gives its operators access to targets’ mobile devices.  Richard and Rigaud teamed up with journalists from sixteen other outlets, including FRONTLINE, to investigate. What the reporting consortium found, with technical support from Amnesty International’s Security Lab, was explosive: Pegasus had been used on journalists, human rights activists, the wife and fiancée of the murdered Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi, and others around the world.  Global Spyware Scandal: Exposing Pegasus is the new, two-part series from FRONTLINE and Forbidden Films that goes behind the scenes of the investigation, and chronicles the responses from governments and institutions seeking to govern the largely unregulated spyware industry. Richard and Rigaud, two of the series’ producers, joined FRONTLINE’s Raney Aronson-Rath to discuss the investigation, what’s happened since, and the threat spyware like Pegasus poses. Pegasus is “like a person over your shoulder who will read everything that you are reading, even your encrypted messages,” Richard says. “It's a military weapon used against civilians.” Global Spyware Scandal: Exposing Pegasus is now streaming at pbs.org/frontline, in the PBS App and on FRONTLINE's YouTube channel. Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

In the new documentary Putin’s War at Home, FRONTLINE tells the stories of Russian activists and journalists defying Russian President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on dissent – from a young woman documenting protests and propaganda on TikTok, to a duo of reporters investigating the Ukraine war’s death toll among Russian soldiers.  Director Gesbeen Mohammad joins FRONTLINE’s executive producer and editor-in-chief, Raney Aronson-Rath, to discuss what it took to gather these stories — and what the documentary’s subjects risked by speaking out about the Ukraine war, including arrest and imprisonment.  “People were very, very afraid to speak to us,” Mohammad told FRONTLINE. “But I guess that's what makes all of our interviewees and contributors so unique in their braveness.”  Putin’s War at Home is now streaming on FRONTLINE’s website, the PBS Video App and FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel. Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, FRONTLINE and the Associated Press have been investigating mounting evidence of war crimes. The two organizations’ recent documentary, Putin’s Attack on Ukraine: Documenting War Crimes, found that in many instances the violence was far from random. AP Global Investigative Reporter Erika Kinetz, the documentary’s correspondent, joins The FRONTLINE Dispatch to talk about this months-long collaborative investigation. From reporting on the ground in Ukraine, to piecing together hours of CCTV footage and audio intercepts of Russian soldiers’ conversations, Kinetz spoke with FRONTLINE’s editor-in-chief and executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath about working with FRONTLINE producers to trace the story of one woman’s loss to a larger pattern of strategic violence in Bucha and other Kyiv suburbs. “Victim after victim, survivor after survivor would ask the same question, which is: ‘Why? Why did this happen?’” Kinetz said.  “It didn't actually dawn on me until near the end of our reporting that there were actually patterns at play in the violence that we were seeing, and there were actually strategies motivating a lot of the violence.” Putin’s Attack on Ukraine: Documenting War Crimes is now streaming on FRONTLINE’s website, the PBS Video App, and FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel.  Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

As COVID-19 swept the country in 2020, millions of people in the U.S. were out of work and at risk of being evicted. An unprecedented federal ban on evictions and billions of dollars in rental assistance helped keep people in their homes — but some people were still evicted. In FRONTLINE and Retro Report’s documentary “Facing Eviction,” director Bonnie Bertram and a team of filmmakers from across the country examined why — finding that the effectiveness of pandemic housing protections depended almost entirely on how local officials enforced them. Bertram joined FRONTLINE editor-in-chief and executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath for a conversation about where tenant protections stand now, the process of making “Facing Eviction” and filming with people on the brink of losing their housing. “We started to chronicle these people's lives and, as the months unfolded, saw the desperation and just the precariousness of their situation and this dreaded knock on the door that impacts all parts of their life,” Bertram told Aronson-Rath. Facing Eviction is now streaming on FRONTLINE’s website, the PBS Video App, and FRONTLINE’s Youtube channel.

As the midterms draw near amid continuing false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, FRONTLINE examines how American democracy reached this point. Veteran filmmaker Michael Kirk joins host Raney Aronson-Rath, FRONTLINE’s editor-in-chief and executive producer, for a special live recording of The FRONTLINE Dispatch to discuss what FRONTLINE’s season premiere, Lies, Politics and Democracy, reveals.    The two-hour documentary, structured as a countdown to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, illuminates critical decisions that have profoundly undermined faith in the electoral process, leading to what journalist Tim Alberta says in the film is an “existential crisis for the United States of America." Kirk discusses a series of "inflection points" in which Republican leaders embraced the rhetoric of Donald Trump even as warning signs mounted.  "This was the leadership agreeing to be silent,” Kirk says, “agreeing to think they were gonna manipulate him, and then being manipulated themselves." Lies, Politics and Democracy is now streaming on FRONTLINE’s website, the PBS Video App and FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel. Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

In February 2021, a powerful winter storm led to power outages — and an official tally of more than 200 deaths — across Texas. The Disconnect, a podcast from FRONTLINE’s Local Journalism Initiative partner, the Texas Newsroom, and Austin public radio station KUT, investigatess the aftermath of the storm and the state’s response. KUT’s Mose Buchele, Senior Correspondent for Energy & Environment, joins The FRONTLINE Dispatch to talk about the state’s unique power grid, the deadly consequences when it failed and trying to hold officials accountable. “At the end of the day,” Buchele said, “this is a system that seems sometimes intentionally set up to diffuse responsibility.” Season 2 of The Disconnect, which is supported by FRONTLINE’s Local Journalism Initiative, is available at KUT and other streaming platforms. Want to be notified every time a new FRONTLINE Dispatch podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

After U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan last year and the Taliban swept into power, FRONTLINE correspondent Ramita Navai and colleagues traveled the country, investigating the Taliban regime’s treatment of women. The resulting documentary, Afghanistan Undercover, revealed the harrowing realities women faced in Afghanistan. In this episode of The FRONTLINE Dispatch, Navai talked with FRONTLINE executive producer and editor-in-chief Raney Aronson-Rath about reporting a story the Taliban didn’t want told, including secretly filming on the grounds of a prison in Herat, Afghanistan, where women said they were being held without trial. “We needed that evidence,” Navai said. “We heard what was happening. We needed to see it for ourselves.” Afghanistan Undercover is now streaming on FRONTLINE’s website, the PBS Video App and FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel. Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.