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Twelve days before Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse (2024) was set to broadcast on April 15 across PBS stations nationwide as part of its strand American Masters, the filmmakers were told that a 90-second sequence—which shows the famous artist discussing an anti-Trump cartoon he created for the 2017 Women’s March newspaper—would be cut from the documentary.
The filmmakers, directors Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin, who produced the film alongside Sam Jinishian and Alicia Sams, had a choice. According to Sams, they could choose to buy back their licensing deal, or agree to PBS’s decision and move forward with the broadcast. “We were told the film still has an anti-fascist message, and the audience can connect the dots themselves,” she says. “The irony of censoring someone who is a free speech advocate is maybe lost on PBS, but certainly not lost on us.”
The deleted sequence—some of which can be seen on this Instagram post—may be short, but it explicitly ties the anti-fascist themes of the film and Spiegelman’s seminal graphic novel Maus to a timely Trumpian critique. As Spiegelman scholar Hillary Chute says in the film’s festival cut, “In this Trump and post-Trump moment, [Spiegelman] recognized how useful Maus was as a text for people explicitly reacting to and fighting fascism.” In addition to cutting the discussion of the political cartoon from the film, the PBS version also removed Chute’s words “in this Trump and post-Trump moment,” altering the meaning of her comments and removing the filmmakers’ original context.
According to the filmmakers, the decision was imposed by the programming executives at PBS national and agreed to by leadership at WNET, which is one of the largest of PBS’s network of 350 member stations and produces American Masters. A response from a WNET Group spokesperson justifies the edit “as it was no longer in context today. The change was made to maintain the integrity and appropriateness of the content for broadcast at this time.”
But it’s hard not to see the change, which was made well after the film was already licensed in its festival version, as some kind of form of self-censorship in the wake of the Trump Administration’s attacks on public media. Disaster Is My Muse co-director Molly Bernstein calls the edits “shocking,” “extremely disappointing and unnecessary.” Though she remains extremely grateful to American Masters and its executive producer Michael Kantor for their support of the film and “the fact that they tried to fight the censoring of Art Spiegelman’s comic about Trump,” she says, “I am extremely disturbed by the censorship from the leaders of PBS and WNET and do not see any justification for their actions.”
“I get the idea of ‘let’s not poke the beast’ and ‘this is for the greater good,” says Sams, referring to PBS’s editorial change. “But this is not for the greater good. It’s a death by a thousand cuts,” she adds. “If PBS isn’t going to stand up for free speech, who is?”
The cuts to Disaster Is My Muse appear to be the latest incident in an alarming pattern of anticipatory obedience at the embattled media company in the Trump age. In reporting this story, Documentary learned that another nonfiction film, recently broadcast on a different PBS strand, similarly had to make cuts that PBS leadership decided could be loosely interpreted as critical of the authoritarian policies of the current Trump administration. And earlier this year, Jane M. Wagner’s Break the Game (2023), a documentary about world-record-holding trans gamer Narcissa Wright, was indefinitely postponed from broadcast on the long-running and acclaimed PBS strand, POV, before receiving a new broadcast date two months later.
An anonymous executive within the PBS system admits, “I do believe that PBS is committed to independent documentaries, but what that commitment is going to look like, I just don’t know, because the world is changing.”
PBS stands by its editorial decisions and says they have nothing to do with responding to political threats. “We have not changed our long-standing editorial guidelines or practices this year,” a PBS spokesperson tells Documentary.
But Wagner received confirmation in emails shared with Documentary that Break the Game was pulled from broadcast because PBS didn’t want the film’s transgender themes to help fuel further political backlash against public media before the Marjorie Taylor-Greene-led DOGE hearing against PBS and NPR held on March 26.
“There’s no reading between the lines here. This is clear censorship because the film has a trans protagonist,” says Wagner. In early April, POV contacted Wagner to let her know the film was back on the schedule for a June 30 broadcast date, but in the two months in between, she didn’t know if it would ever air.
“I’ve been really alarmed by the institutional response, which has been largely silent,” says Wagner. “It's been deeply disturbing to see institutions throw our trans communities or marginalized communities under the bus to protect their organizations.” Taylor-Greene’s DOGE hearing, in fact, leaned heavily into anti-trans rhetoric, with Taylor-Greene chastising a PBS FRONTLINE documentary called Growing Up Trans (2015) as evidence of PBS being “one of the founders of the trans child abuse industry.”
“I understand that POV is facing tremendous amounts of pressure and is being given directives from PBS,” Wagner continues, “but at the same time, I am concerned by the lack of transparency and accountability.”
Missing Lesson Plans: Coordinated Suppression or Editorial Violations?
Wagner is also among several documentary filmmakers who told Documentary the supplementary educational guides for their films have been pulled from PBS sites. Wagner worked with POV and an organization called Take This that supports gamers’ mental health to produce such materials. But none of it is currently available.
These filmmakers complain that educational resources that used to exist on PBS LearningMedia, a hub for K-12 educators, have been removed, as can be seen by the several broken links on POV’s “Lesson Plan” educational resources webpage. The missing resources are particularly stinging to documentary filmmakers, because PBS, as part of its mission—“as America’s largest classroom,” as it states on its website—has had a longstanding tradition of providing free educational resources to communities, classrooms, and libraries.
For example, Documentary verified that 15–20 short clips connected to And She Could Be Next, a 2020 two-part miniseries about women of color running for office, to support the film’s lesson plans are all gone now. “It is actually a censorship issue,” the miniseries’ co-director Marjan Safinia says, “and we’re troubled by the lack of evidence that we’ve seen of anyone in those strands fighting the system to say, ‘Why are you taking down these learning materials?’”
Cecilia Aldarondo, who noticed the educational materials for her film Landfall (2020), about Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, were removed from PBS LearningMedia, says, “It might seem one film’s lesson plan disappearing from a learning website isn’t a lot, but it’s my understanding that this is a system-wide thing affecting everything that PBS touches.”
As of the time of publishing, searching the PBSLearningMedia website’s “Collections” only turns up a total of 12 films from POV and Independent Lens (9 and 3, respectively) despite the fact that the strands have produced and broadcast hundreds and hundreds of documentaries over the last four decades. Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to look up former versions of the PBSLearningMedia pages, lesson plans for such films as Landfall, Unapologetic (2020, about young female Black Lives Matter activists), and Stateless (2020, about Haitians stripped of their citizenship in the Dominican Republic) all disappeared from the site sometime between late December 2024 and January 2025.
Erika Dilday, executive director/executive producer of American Documentary (AmDoc), which produces POV, plans to move learning materials for Break the Game and all other POV documentaries to AmDoc’s own site.
“What we are looking at is doing all the learning guides separately so they won’t be part of the official POV offering; it’ll part of what we do on American Documentary, and there will be a space on the AmDoc site for it,” she explains. “This way, it doesn’t have to be a PBS-sanctioned product, because we may have different ideas than PBS LearningMedia. There are some ways we expect PBS to be everything for everybody, but maybe certain things just need to go through AmDoc.”
According to a PBS spokesperson, educational videos from POV, ITVS, and other content providers were removed from PBS LearningMedia prior to this year, because the materials were in violation of mature content standards, other editorial guidelines, or did not include FCC-mandated closed captioning. Additionally, lesson plans accompanying older films produced by POV and ITVS’s Independent Lens were removed because the materials were inaccessible to screen readers or did not align to their current templates and best practices.
Safinia remains wary of these claims. “We went back and forth with PBS extensively,” she says. “It’s not like they gave us a password to upload things directly. They literally built special infrastructure for all our clips. If [the clips] were in violation, why weren’t they flagged at the time?”
Canaries in a Coal Mine: What’s the Plan for Indie Docs on PBS?
Many documentary filmmakers see what’s happening across the PBS system as a “canary-in-a-coal mine” moment, from instances of censorship to WORLD Channel’s programming shift “away from original documentaries,” as GBH President and CEO Susan Goldberg recently told its own news station. The slimming down of WORLD threatens the existence of the 12-year-old America ReFramed strand, a co-production of WORLD and AmDoc.
“The wider issue is the fate of independent documentaries as they have existed,” says Aldarondo. “My feeling is that we’re seen as expendable.”
While PBS and its strands and stations are, of course, in the midst of a nationwide awareness campaign for their very survival—every PBS website now includes a red banner warning that “federal funding that supports Public Media is at risk of being eliminated” with a link to ProtectMyPublicMedia.org—some filmmakers don’t see a coordinated response plan.
“I live in L.A.,” says Safinia, “and we have an emergency plan all the time, because you don't know when the fire or the earthquake is going to come, and I don't get the sense that there's been much planning. And if we lose PBS, how are we going to replace them?”
But AmDoc’s Erika Dilday says things are happening behind the scenes. “Just because people don’t see us out there shaking our fists on social media, it doesn’t mean we’re not doing anything,” she says. “There was a reason that the underground railroad was underground, because if you were out there yelling about it, it wasn’t going to happen.”
Dilday is also interested in hosting a forum with POV filmmakers. “We know filmmakers have a lot of power and also investment in our work and that they need to be a part of the solution,” she says. “We have been speaking to a select group of filmmakers, but are looking at how to expand that group productively and meaningfully.”
Some filmmakers are already taking action themselves. When award-winning filmmaker Michèle Stephenson noticed the lesson plans for her film Stateless went missing from PBS LearningMedia, she immediately took action. She contacted her educational distributor, Women Make Movies, to have them post the materials. “I want to pressure PBS to be accountable, but it’s also about how we fight this by making this material available, and if it’s not available there, it’s available somewhere else,” she says. “In this time of limbo, something good might be able to come out of this, like maybe even completely shifting away from PBS.”
During the month that Jane Wagner didn’t know whether POV was going to broadcast Break the Game, she also took that step. To directly reach her gamer-oriented audience, she hosted a live broadcast of the film on Twitch, which drew some 5,000 views, with 600 concurrent and engaged audience members, who continuously chatted with her during the screening.
While Wagner acknowledges that this doesn’t come close to the reach, community engagement, and impact that a PBS broadcast affords documentaries, she’s now interested in setting up “a microcinema on Twitch for censored films,” she says. “If the platforms that we previously counted on to show and support our work aren’t there for us, this seems like a way to bypass the gatekeepers.”
Editor’s Note, May 20: An earlier version of this article reported the Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse filmmakers acquiesced to the cuts based on the edits not affecting the film’s overall message. This article has been updated and Alicia Sams’s quote has been corrected to: “We were told the film still has an anti-fascist message, and the audience can connect the dots themselves.”
Anthony Kaufman is a freelance journalist and regular contributor to his Substack; film instructor at the New School and DePaul University; and senior programmer at the Chicago International Film Festival and the Doc10 film festival.
