Free Republic

The 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in central Pennsylvania was and remains the worst accident of its kind in the United States, but, as a new documentary shows, it could have been so much worse. In the four-part Netflix docuseries “Meltdown: Three Mile Island,” which debuted Wednesday, May 4, Rick Parks — a former leading engineer at the facility — reveals how cover-ups, falsifications of safety tests and downright dangerous corner-cutting caused the terrifying nuclear event and could have potentially triggered a second, bigger one that would have affected a huge chunk of the Eastern Seaboard. What Parks found...

[Subtitle: “I hope that my story will help you understand the methods of Russian operatives in Washington and how they use U.S. enablers to achieve major foreign policy goals without disclosing those interests,” Browder writes.]The financier Bill Browder has emerged as an unlikely central player in the ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Sergei Magnitsky, an attorney Browder hired to investigate official corruption, died in Russian custody in 2009. Congress subsequently imposed sanctions on the officials it held responsible for his death, passing the Magnitsky Act in 2012. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government retaliated, among other ways,...

The subjects of a TV documentary series about the Ku Klux Klan abruptly canceled last week by A&E allege to Variety that significant portions of what was filmed were fabricated by the producers. Some KKK leaders divulged that they were paid hundreds of dollars in cash each day of filming to compel them on camera to distort the facts of their lives to fit the documentary’s predetermined narrative: tension between Klan members and relatives of theirs who wanted to get out of the Klan. The findings are based on an exclusive Variety investigation based on interviews with over two dozen...

BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE Documentary or Fiction? -David T. Hardy- The first misconception to correct about Michael Moore's The Big One is that it is a documentary. It's not. Moore doesn't make those. James Berardinelli The Michael Moore production "Bowling for Columbine" just won the Oscar for best documentary. Unfortunately, it is not a documentary, by the Academy's own definition. The injustice here is not so much to the viewer, as to the independent producers of real documentaries. These struggle in a field which (despite its real value) receives but a tiny fraction of the recognition and financing of the "entertainment...