NY Times: A PBS Documentary Makes Its Case for the Armenian Genocide, With or Without a Debate.

It is impossible to debate a subject like genocide without giving offense. PBS is supposed to give offense responsibly.

And that was the idea behind a panel discussion that PBS planned to show after tonight’s broadcast of “The Armenian Genocide,” a documentary about the extermination of more than one million Armenians by the Turkish Ottoman Empire during World War I.

The powerful hourlong film will be shown on most of the 348 PBS affiliate stations. But nearly a third of those stations decided to cancel the follow-up discussion after an intense lobbying campaign by Armenian groups and some members of Congress.

The protesters complained that the panel of four experts, moderated by Scott Simon, host of “Weekend Edition Saturday” on NPR, included two scholars who defend the Turkish government’s claim that a genocide never took place. The outrage over their inclusion was an indication of how passionately Armenians feel about the issue; they have battled for decades to draw attention to the genocide.

[In] the discussion program “Armenian Genocide: Exploring the Issues,” [i]t turns out that there is only one articulate voice arguing that Armenians died not in a genocide but in a civil war between Christians and Muslims — that of Justin A. McCarthy, a history professor at the University of Louisville. His Turkish counterpart, Omer Turan, an associate professor at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, tries ardently to back him up, but his English is not good enough to make a dent. And the two other experts, Peter Balakian, a humanities professor at Colgate University, and Taner Akcam, a visiting professor of history at the University of Minnesota and a well-known defender of human rights in Turkey, lucidly pick Mr. McCarthy’s points apart.

Mr. Balakian, who is one of the experts cited in the documentary, gets the last word. “If we are going to pretend that a stateless Christian minority population, unarmed, is somehow in a capacity to kill people in an aggressive way that is tantamount to war, or civil war,” Mr. Balakian says, “we’re living in the realm of the absurd.” …

To some, this is an issue of history about a relatively obscure topic. But to those of us who have met and discussed the events of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire with actual survivors, there is no question that it was indeed a genocide, that the Turks and Kurds were responsible, and that it continues to haunt generations of Armenian-Americans.

Here are some heart-wrenching articles I wrote on the subject when I was still with the Sacramento Bee:

• The forgotten ones: The boy who was sold for a silver coin and other Armenian stories of survival

• A backgrounder: Witnesses to genocide

• Gov. George Deukmejian on the Armenian genocide

Today, 19 years after I wrote those articles, I still get emails from relatives of survivors of the Armenian Genocide, who express exasperation at the Turkish government’s refusal to come clean about the events in the Ottoman desert 91 years ago.

Here are 14 photos I took Monday at the UC Santa Barbara Forum on Digital Transitions. That’s Bruce Bimber and John Seely Brown, at top, and Micki Krimmel.

Video coming soon.

Technorati tags: SBForum, photos, photography , journalism

I’m here in Santa Barbara, Calif., for the daylong Forum on Digital Transitions, focusing on where online communities are heading. Here’s the speaker list. Author Howard Rheingold gave the keynote last night putting collective action and community-building into historical perspective (with his usual presentational flair). Rep. Lois Capps, the progressive local House representative, just gave a talk about health care and other issues where civic engagement is essential.

Among those sitting at tables here at Corwin Pavilion on the UC Santa Barbara campus: Howard, Doc Searls, Elizabeth Osder, Angela Beesley, Markus Sandy, Jay Dedman, Ryanne Hodson, Micki Krimmel, Robert Kaye, Jennifer McClure, Britt Blaser, John Seely Brown, Mary Hodder, Brad Templeton, Danah Boyd, Bruce Bimber, Dave Toole and lots of other familiar faces.

I hope to post some video from the event later.

Later: Jen McClure is blogging it on her new blog. Here’s our group SB Forum video blog on Blogger.

At Real People Network, I have a new video interview with Amber MacArthur, the co-host (with Leo Laporte) of "Call for Help," a great tech  show on G4 cable TV in Toronto.

At MediaShift, Mark Glaser has a Q&A with YouTube co-founder and CEO Chad Hurley about the meteoric rise of his video-sharing site. The startup, which launched its site less than a year ago, is now serving up 35 million videos PER DAY, with people adding 35,000 new videos per day. But the enigma is how the site will make money without alienating its large, loyal group of users.

“We are exploring ways to serve up relevant advertising that will benefit the viewing experience since we know a lot about each of the videos based on how they are tagged. We have been moving cautiously to ensure we don’t disrupt the goodness of the community. But at the end of the day it’s the viewers that decide what is entertaining whether it be user-generated content or professionally produced videos — our community is still in control and will decide what rises to the top.” — YouTube CEO Chad Hurley

I’ve been on nonstop deadlines since iSummit wrapped on Friday in Toronto, so haven’t had time for my final blog post.

Here are a few photos I took. (That’s Joe Kennedy, CEO of music recommendation service Pandora.) Just used Flickr’s bulk upload tool for the first time — worked like a charm.

A couple of highlights from the conference:

During the panel on the future of music business models, a speaker polled the audience: A dozen people (out of 200 or so) had heard of Pandora, but only one (um, me) had heard of on-demand radio station Mercora.

Loose consensus: radio is not dead, but “interruption radio” is.

Andrew Michael Baron, the founder of Rocketboom (whom I finally had a chance to spend quality time with), seemed to be the most prescient speaker at the conference on several levels. He described Rocketboom’s new approach to advertising:

“Putting the ad at the end and using our own aesthetic filter did not make the advertisers very happy. But it created more value for the audience and thus for the advertisers. People are happy that we’re not force-feeding them at the beginning. We’re creating the ads too, and they like it because it has the same integrity and spirit as the content. … We’ll never do product placement and we’ll never compromise the authenticity of the show. … Transparency is our watchword. … Rocketboom is looking at millions and millions of dollars in annual revenues with just two people. What does that say?”

By the way, last week I mentioned Steve Levy and Brad Stone’s “Putting the ‘We’ in Web” cover story in Newsweek but forgot to provide a pointer.

An hour later: Just received this: Mercora, the Internet’s largest and fastest growing user-contributed and user-programmed digital radio network, today introduced Radio 2.0 — the next generation social radio and music platform.