US documentary on local gaming industry shelved

A US documentary on Macau’s gaming industry was shelved by the American public service broadcaster PBS. According to the documentary’s creator, the decision to axe the production from broadcasting schedules was due to fears of litigation from US casino tycoons operating in Macau.
Initially titled “God of Gamblings,” the documentary “Bigger Than Vegas” was slated to air on PBS last year, but was postponed several times. The documentary resulted from several years of investigation led by the veteran and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lowell Bergman, who is currently a scholar at the University of California in Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, and director of UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program.
Bergman investigated the activities of organized crime figures from China and their alleged ties to American-owned casinos in Macau. The USD700,000 feature was finally scrapped from PBS’s investigative documentary series Frontline earlier this year. Frontline is an award-
winning public television series which has aired for thirty-
two years.
An article posted by “The Daily Beast” indicates that there were many disagreements between Frontline and the team led by Bergman over various edits of the film. It was initially delayed, then rescheduled, and finally cancelled permanently on January 22 of this year.
“I don’t think that that’s unusual in journalism,” Frontline’s executive producer, Aronson-Rath, commented. “Journalists and editors have editorial disagreements. You’ve been in the field long enough to know that that’s the case.”
However, Lowell Bergman has a different version of the facts. “We at the Investigative Reporting Program believe that the story was killed for two reasons: their editorial concerns; and their concerns about the legal consequences,” Bergman told an audience of fellow journalists in April.
Aronson-Rath responded to this statement by issuing a press release essentially accusing Bergman’s team of sloppy journalism.
“To be clear, our reasons for canceling the film were editorial…We tried over many iterations to reach an acceptable final edit. We post-
poned the broadcast twice because we didn’t believe it was ready, including finding out about serious factual issues less than two weeks before air last fall. (…) Despite more time, Lowell and his team were not able to provide strong enough sourcing and reporting to support key elements of the film,” the press release read.