In the third and final installment of the documentary series America and the Taliban, FRONTLINE looks at the months leading up to the Taliban takeover and the consequences of the group’s return to power — including the return of harsh restrictions for women.   In this episode of The FRONTLINE Dispatch podcast, released on World Press Freedom Day, filmmakers Marcela Gaviria and Martin Smith joined host Raney Aronson-Rath to share observations from their reporting on the ground about the reversal of women’s rights in Afghanistan. “It just feels like half the population is in hiding,” Gaviria told Aronson-Rath. “And that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but it does feel like you can sense the fear among so many women, and fear for their future and the future of their children.” This is part two of Raney Aronson-Rath’s conversation with Gaviria and Smith about America and the Taliban. You can hear more from Gaviria and Smith on the previous episode of The FRONTLINE Dispatch. Watch all three parts of America and the Taliban on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, and the PBS App.  Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

Drawing on decades of on-the-ground reporting in Afghanistan, the new three-part series America and the Taliban traces pivotal moments in America’s longest war, and how it culminated in Taliban victory. Award-winning producers Marcela Gaviria and Martin Smith join FRONTLINE editor-in-chief and executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath for a discussion on their decades of reporting in Afghanistan, and what it was like to revisit people and places from past coverage for this new series. "There's one basic thing that they all knew, and that was that the Taliban were not going to go anywhere permanently," Smith told Aronson-Rath about many of the Afghan people he met, "but the Americans were eventually going to leave." Parts one and two of America and the Taliban are available to stream on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel and the PBS App. Part three premieres on PBS and online Tuesday, April 25, 2023. Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

In the aftermath of the second and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history, correspondent James Jacoby joins the FRONTLINE Dispatch to talk about Age of Easy Money, a documentary examining the power of the Federal Reserve and our current economic uncertainty.  The film draws on over two years of reporting on the Fed’s so-called “easy money” policies, with Jaocby and team charting the start of the Fed’s economic experiment after the 2008 financial crisis and again during COVID; the Fed’s decision to start raising interest rates in 2022; and what’s happened since — including recession fears, bank market disruptions, and concerns that the fight against inflation will trigger unemployment. “In some ways there's been this kind of gravitational force at work, this invisible force, and people weren't able to necessarily recognize it,” Jacoby told host Raney Aronson-Rath. “At the root of it is what the Fed has been doing.”  Age of Easy Money is now streaming on FRONTLINE’s website, the PBS Video App, and FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel.  Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

During the early months of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, filmmakers Mani Benchelah and Patrick Tombola documented the lives of civilians and first responders trying to survive in Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city near the border of Russia. Their work became the FRONTLINE film Ukraine: Life Under Russia’s Attack, released in August of 2022. An updated version of the documentary, released in February 2023, revisits many of the Ukrainians Benchelah and Tombola first profiled and takes us to the present day — a year after Russia’s invasion began. Joining FRONTLINE editor-in-chief and executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath after their most recent reporting trip to Kharkiv, Benchelah and Tombola reflect on documenting how the region and its inhabitants have been changed by a year of war. “The new Ukraine is one where everyone is extremely conscious of how close they had come to death,” Tombola said. “Their mindset has dramatically changed, and there's a real sense of having all shared a very defining moment in their life.” The updated Ukraine: Life Under Russia’s Attack documentary is now streaming on FRONTLINE’s website, in the PBS App and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel.

As FRONTLINE celebrates 40 years on the air, editor-in-chief and executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath is hosting conversations with the journalists and filmmakers behind some of FRONTLINE’s most groundbreaking work. A.C. Thompson is a reporter for ProPublica who has been a correspondent with FRONTLINE since 2010. He joins The FRONTLINE Dispatch to discuss his years of reporting on right-wing extremism for award-winning films like American Insurrection and the series Documenting Hate in light of recent high-profile incidents of antisemitism. “Over time, if you were following the key sort of white nationalist and right wing extremist talking points, you saw more and more antisemitism coming through,” Thompson told Aronson-Rath. “What I think you've seen since then is sort of a quiet but steady uptick in antisemitism and now it's bursting onto the scene.” Thompson also reflects on the unique investigative collaborations he and FRONTLINE developed over the years, and previews what he’s working on in 2023. Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

When a leaked list of more than 50,000 phone numbers came to the attention of Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud of the journalism non-profit Forbidden Stories, along with Amnesty International, they suspected the list contained phone numbers potentially targeted for surveillance using the powerful spyware known as Pegasus, which gives its operators access to targets’ mobile devices.  Richard and Rigaud teamed up with journalists from sixteen other outlets, including FRONTLINE, to investigate. What the reporting consortium found, with technical support from Amnesty International’s Security Lab, was explosive: Pegasus had been used on journalists, human rights activists, the wife and fiancée of the murdered Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi, and others around the world.  Global Spyware Scandal: Exposing Pegasus is the new, two-part series from FRONTLINE and Forbidden Films that goes behind the scenes of the investigation, and chronicles the responses from governments and institutions seeking to govern the largely unregulated spyware industry. Richard and Rigaud, two of the series’ producers, joined FRONTLINE’s Raney Aronson-Rath to discuss the investigation, what’s happened since, and the threat spyware like Pegasus poses. Pegasus is “like a person over your shoulder who will read everything that you are reading, even your encrypted messages,” Richard says. “It's a military weapon used against civilians.” Global Spyware Scandal: Exposing Pegasus is now streaming at pbs.org/frontline, in the PBS App and on FRONTLINE's YouTube channel. Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

In the new documentary Putin’s War at Home, FRONTLINE tells the stories of Russian activists and journalists defying Russian President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on dissent – from a young woman documenting protests and propaganda on TikTok, to a duo of reporters investigating the Ukraine war’s death toll among Russian soldiers.  Director Gesbeen Mohammad joins FRONTLINE’s executive producer and editor-in-chief, Raney Aronson-Rath, to discuss what it took to gather these stories — and what the documentary’s subjects risked by speaking out about the Ukraine war, including arrest and imprisonment.  “People were very, very afraid to speak to us,” Mohammad told FRONTLINE. “But I guess that's what makes all of our interviewees and contributors so unique in their braveness.”  Putin’s War at Home is now streaming on FRONTLINE’s website, the PBS Video App and FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel. Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, FRONTLINE and the Associated Press have been investigating mounting evidence of war crimes. The two organizations’ recent documentary, Putin’s Attack on Ukraine: Documenting War Crimes, found that in many instances the violence was far from random. AP Global Investigative Reporter Erika Kinetz, the documentary’s correspondent, joins The FRONTLINE Dispatch to talk about this months-long collaborative investigation. From reporting on the ground in Ukraine, to piecing together hours of CCTV footage and audio intercepts of Russian soldiers’ conversations, Kinetz spoke with FRONTLINE’s editor-in-chief and executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath about working with FRONTLINE producers to trace the story of one woman’s loss to a larger pattern of strategic violence in Bucha and other Kyiv suburbs. “Victim after victim, survivor after survivor would ask the same question, which is: ‘Why? Why did this happen?’” Kinetz said.  “It didn't actually dawn on me until near the end of our reporting that there were actually patterns at play in the violence that we were seeing, and there were actually strategies motivating a lot of the violence.” Putin’s Attack on Ukraine: Documenting War Crimes is now streaming on FRONTLINE’s website, the PBS Video App, and FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel.  Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.

As COVID-19 swept the country in 2020, millions of people in the U.S. were out of work and at risk of being evicted. An unprecedented federal ban on evictions and billions of dollars in rental assistance helped keep people in their homes — but some people were still evicted. In FRONTLINE and Retro Report’s documentary “Facing Eviction,” director Bonnie Bertram and a team of filmmakers from across the country examined why — finding that the effectiveness of pandemic housing protections depended almost entirely on how local officials enforced them. Bertram joined FRONTLINE editor-in-chief and executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath for a conversation about where tenant protections stand now, the process of making “Facing Eviction” and filming with people on the brink of losing their housing. “We started to chronicle these people's lives and, as the months unfolded, saw the desperation and just the precariousness of their situation and this dreaded knock on the door that impacts all parts of their life,” Bertram told Aronson-Rath. Facing Eviction is now streaming on FRONTLINE’s website, the PBS Video App, and FRONTLINE’s Youtube channel.

As the midterms draw near amid continuing false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, FRONTLINE examines how American democracy reached this point. Veteran filmmaker Michael Kirk joins host Raney Aronson-Rath, FRONTLINE’s editor-in-chief and executive producer, for a special live recording of The FRONTLINE Dispatch to discuss what FRONTLINE’s season premiere, Lies, Politics and Democracy, reveals.    The two-hour documentary, structured as a countdown to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, illuminates critical decisions that have profoundly undermined faith in the electoral process, leading to what journalist Tim Alberta says in the film is an “existential crisis for the United States of America." Kirk discusses a series of "inflection points" in which Republican leaders embraced the rhetoric of Donald Trump even as warning signs mounted.  "This was the leadership agreeing to be silent,” Kirk says, “agreeing to think they were gonna manipulate him, and then being manipulated themselves." Lies, Politics and Democracy is now streaming on FRONTLINE’s website, the PBS Video App and FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel. Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.