PBS shelves film on moderate Muslims

Still, Mr. Gaffney’s offering has received some high-powered applause. Rep. James T. Walsh, New York Republican, screened then praised the film during a March 21 House hearing on CPB funding. Mr. Walsh also voiced his suspicions about CPB and PBS, saying producer Mr. Eaton has “family ties to a British Islamist group” and “overtly tried to change the context of the film.”

The “Crossroads” series itself has a complicated pedigree.

It was created in 2004 and funded with $20 million in federal grants while Kenneth Tomlinson was president of CPB; a total of 430 proposals from independent filmmakers were received and 21 were accepted for development. Mr. Tomlinson was forced to resign the following year after an internal CPB accused him using a “political test” to staff his top level administration and influence the content of some programming.

Mr. Gaffney, who is columnist for The Washington Times, also had a recent scrape with media-borne complications after he erroneously attributed a quote about the boundaries of wartime treason to Abraham Lincoln in a Feb. 14 column. The quote instead came from Michael Waller in a 2003 article in Insight, a publication of The Times.