David Fanning (journalist)
| David Fanning | |
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Fanning at the 70th Annual Peabody Awards
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| Born | 25 May 1946 |
| Alma mater | University of Cape Town |
| Occupation | Filmmaker |
| Title | Executive producer, Frontline 1983-2015 now at large |
| Spouse(s) | Renata Simone |
David E. Fanning (born 25 May 1946) is a South African American journalist and filmmaker. He was the executive producer of the investigative documentary series Frontline since its first season in 1983 to his retirement in 2015. He has won eight Emmy Awards and in 2013 received a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in honor of his work.
He began his filmmaking career as a young journalist in South Africa. His first films, Amabandla AmaAfrika (1970) and The Church and Apartheid (1972), produced for BBC-TV, dealt with race and religion in his troubled homeland. He came to the U.S. in 1973 and began producing and directing local and national documentaries for KOCE, a public television station in California. His film 'Deep South, Deep North' (1973) was a PBS/BBC co-production and the first in a long succession of collaborations between U.S. and European television, especially the British. In 1977, Fanning came to WGBH Boston to start the international documentary series WORLD. As executive producer, he produced and presented over 50 films for PBS in five years. With director Antony Thomas, Fanning produced and co-wrote Death of a Princess (1980). Then in 1982, again with Thomas, he produced Frank Terpil: Confessions of a Dangerous Man, which won the Emmy Award for best investigative documentary.
In 1982, Fanning began the development of Frontline. The series has worked with well over 200 producers and as many journalists, covering a wide range of domestic and foreign stories. Its signature has been to combine good reporting with good filmmaking.
With Fanning's encouragement, one of Frontline's singular achievements has been its embrace of the Internet. In 1995, Frontline developed one of the first deep content web sites in history. By putting interviews, documents and additional editorial materials on the web, the series made its journalism transparent, and changed the nature and content of broadcast journalism. Rather than an ephemeral one-time transmission, the documentaries and all their ancillary materials are now preserved on the series website. In 2013, there are over 150 hours of full-length documentaries streamed on the series website, one of the largest sites of its kind. Fanning is quoted saying, "This is the great promise of public media. This is where we hold our work for the future, our public library, our contribution to the intellectual commons."
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