About FRONTLINE’s Transparency Project
FRONTLINE is committed to holding institutions and officials accountable by shining a light on their decisions and actions. As a news organization, we hold ourselves to the same standard. The FRONTLINE Transparency Project gives you access to hours of original reporting and source material that goes into the making of our films.
Hundreds of interviews conducted by FRONTLINE’S filmmakers are available in video and text, published in a format designed to make them easy to navigate and to share on social media. Since 2017, the Transparency Project has published interviews that have been viewed more than 10 million times.
Our goal with these interviews is to present them in their original form while adhering to our editorial standards. We edit out repetitions, production talk and some unverifiable claims. We omit sections where an interview subject has gone off the record. We remove factual errors, or, when a fact is in dispute, annotate the transcript to reflect that dispute. We also conduct a legal review to ensure the interview content does not violate libel or privacy laws.
The Transparency Project includes interviews from these FRONTLINE investigations:
Biden’s Decision (2024): 14 new extended interviews, including seven videos, conducted between March and July 2024, plus nine archival interviews.
Democracy on Trial (2024): 13 new extended interviews, including six videos, conducted in October 2023, plus nine archival interviews
Netanyahu, America & the Road to War in Gaza (2023): 5 new extended interviews conducted in November and December 2023, plus 6 archival interviews
Putin and the Presidents (2023): 8 new extended interviews conducted in September and October 2022, plus 14 archival interviews
Lies, Politics and Democracy (2022): 28 interviews, including 9 videos, on how American political leaders made choices that have threatened U.S. democracy
Pelosi’s Power (2022): 30 original extended interviews, including six videos, from the first documentary on the first woman speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives
Putin’s Road to War (2022): 6 new interviews conducted in March 2022, after Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, plus more than 50 archival interviews
America After 9/11 (2021): 25 original extended interviews, including four videos, plus 10 archival interviews
The Jihadist (2021): extended transcripts of 5 key interviews investigating the former Al Qaeda commander Abu Mohammad al-Jolani
Trump’s American Carnage (2021): 12 original interviews following the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol
The Choice (2020): 47 original interviews about the lives of Donald Trump and Joe Biden
Amazon Empire (2020): extended excerpts of 11 video interviews
America’s Great Divide (2020): 39 interviews about the origins of political polarization and division in the United States
Supreme Revenge (2019 and 2020): 47 interviews about the battle over the Supreme Court
Zero Tolerance (2019): 38 interviews, including 17 videos, on immigration policy
The Facebook Dilemma (2018): 29 interviews with Facebook insiders, critics and others
Trump’s Showdown: The Interactive Film (2018): an experiment making it easier to navigate between the film and the source material in more than 60 original interviews
Trump’s Takeover: The Interactive Film (2018): featuring a new upgrade that lets viewers see quotations in context, by clicking an icon on the streaming video and linking to the full interview
Putin’s Revenge (2017): “The Putin Files,” an interactive archive of all 56 interviews conducted for the two-part documentary series
FRONTLINE’s commitment to publishing interviews is nothing new; we’ve been putting transcripts online since 1996, in the early days of the internet. Transparency and accountability are important parts of our journalistic guidelines.
For more information, contact Philip Bennett, FRONTLINE’s special projects editor.