Commanding Heights

Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy is a six-hour documentary from PBS purporting to inform the viewer about economics: what have been the different ideologies about managing the market, how did we get where we are now, and what is the nature of the modern world economy? It's certainly an interesting topic and one that's worthy of a thorough, in-depth, objective exploration. However, Commanding Heights has a fatal flaw, which can be concisely expressed in three words: conflict of interest.

How would you feel about watching a documentary on cancer, funded by cigarette manufacturers? Do you think that alternative medicine and preventive care would get a truly fair shake on a program funded by large pharmaceutical companies? Well, how about a documentary on economics funded by large global corporations?

Yes, Commanding Heights may be a PBS production, but it's far from independent or unbiased. The first thing that's shown are advertisements from the corporate sponsors of the program, including Federal Express and British Petroleum. In fact, a little digging turns up that one of the original large sponsors of the series was Enron... an uncomfortable connection that PBS downplayed after that company's scandalous demise. In other words, the money behind the program comes from sources that have a deeply vested interest in promoting a very particular, pro-big-business, pro-deregulation economic agenda. And it shows: Commanding Heights is largely a propaganda piece for global mega-corporations.

The bias evident in the program is a real shame, because the topic is an interesting and substantial one, and the documentary's makers have done a good job on the whole of presenting the material in an engaging and well-organized fashion. Each of the three two-hour episodes presents a frustrating duality: I found it informative on areas of modern world history and politics that I knew little about, but the evident bias, not just in the interpretation of the facts but also in the choice of what facts to present (and what to leave out), saps the documentary of its credibility.

Episode One, "The Battle of Ideas," takes a look at two major competing ideas about the world economy: on one hand, the "free market," favored by economic theorist Hayek, and on the other hand, the "planned economy," favored by Keynes. The episode tracks how the ideological climate shifted from one to the other over the course of a century, with corresponding effects on governmental policies. The summary of the respective positions of these two influential thinkers is the most worthwhile part of the episode; its evaluation of the merits of these positions is the least worthwhile. To begin with, the program consistently blurs the distinction between economic and political systems. Socialism, capitalism, and communism are economic systems; democracy, totalitarianism, and fascism are political systems. Certainly it's true that the "person in the street" usually conflates the two... but I'd expect more clarity of thought in a documentary specifically exploring the field of the world economy. The bias here is clear: capitalism is represented as the only true economic system of a free society, and "free market" capitalism the only acceptable flavor of capitalism. Anything resembling socialism is consistently denigrated, without any actual analysis of its merits versus free market capitalism.

How to sum up Commanding Heights? The series was interesting, but looking back, it leaves me with more questions than answers. The program purports to tackle "the inside story of our new global economy," but it never presents solid explanations as to why or how various elements of the economy work, or how different approaches to managing the market affect the economy. Even without the fatal flaw of the big-business bias in the program, this would be a serious fault. With the bias of the program, it's deadly: it's all too clear that going into greater depth would require a more critical point of view, one that would not be blindly favorable to the global corporations funding the program. And so we get breadth, but no depth; style, but little substance.