While the Democrats are insisting that Trump’s depiction of Baltimore of being infested by rats is both false and racist, it has come out that PBS thought it was so serious that they did a documentary on it two years ago.
The documentary told the story of the city’s decades-old fight against the rodents. The cover picture which we used on this story cover shows that not only did Baltimore have a huge rat problem but that they had huge rats.
That begs the question, “Is it racist to point out a problem a city has just because the man or woman representing that district is Black?” Or Hispanic? Or a woman? Sounds condescending to me.
The Baltimore Sun reported on February 26, 2018, that the documentary “about Baltimore’s rodent fight” was scheduled “to air on PBS” that evening:
Across walls, fences, and alleys rats not only expose our boundaries of separation but make homes in them. “Rat Film” is a feature-length documentary that uses the rat—as well as the humans that love them, live with them, and kill them–to explore the history of Baltimore. “There’s never been a rat problem in Baltimore, it’s always been a people problem.”
“Rat Film,” a documentary that takes the decades-long fight waged against Baltimore’s rat population and uses it as a lens through which to look at how the city has addressed myriad social issues over the decades, airs tonight on PBS.
The hour-long documentary from Baltimore filmmaker Theo Anthony, a crowd favorite at last May’s Maryland Film Festival, airs at 10 p.m. on Maryland Public Television as the latest episode of PBS’s “Independent Lens” series. It repeats at 1 a.m. and 4 a.m.
A longer version of Anthony’s film played festival, as well as at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Parkway in September. In chronicling Baltimore’s decades-long battle against its unwelcome rodent population, Anthony details some disturbing parallels with the ways city leaders have tried to deal with various urban situations