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PBS News Hour

PBS News Hour, previously stylized as PBS NewsHour, is an American evening television news program broadcast on over 350 PBS member stations since October 20, 1975. It airs seven nights a week, and is known for its in-depth coverage of issues and current events. Since January 2, 2023, the one-hour weekday editions have been anchored by Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett. The 30-minute weekend editions that premiered on September 7, 2013, branded as PBS News Weekend, have been anchored by John Yang since December 31, 2022.

The broadcasts are produced by PBS member station WETA-TV in Washington, D.C., and originates from its studio facilities in Arlington County, Virginia. Since 2019, news updates inserted into the weekday broadcasts targeted for viewers in the Western United States, online, and late at night have been anchored by Stephanie Sy, originating from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Additional production facilities for the program are based in San Francisco and Denver. The program is a collaboration between WETA-TV and PBS member station WNET in New York City, along with KQED in San Francisco, KETC in St. Louis, and WTTW in Chicago.

The program debuted in 1975 as The Robert MacNeil Report before being renamed The MacNeil/Lehrer Report one year later. It was anchored by Robert MacNeil from WNET's studios and Jim Lehrer from WETA's studios. In 1983, the show was rebranded as The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, and then The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer following MacNeil's departure in 1995. It was then renamed to its current PBS NewsHour title in 2009, two years before Lehrer left in 2011. Originally, the program only aired on weekdays before weekend editions began in 2013. Production of the weekend broadcasts were solely produced by WNET, before the New York City station transferred all of its PBS NewsHour involvement to WETA in April 2022.

Ownership
In September 1981, production of the program was taken over by MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, a partnership between Robert MacNeil, Jim Lehrer, and Gannett; the latter sold its stake in the production company in 1986. John C. Malone's Liberty Media bought a 67% controlling equity stake in MacNeil/Lehrer Productions in 1994,

but MacNeil and Lehrer retained editorial control. In 2014, MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, owned by MacNeil, Lehrer, and Liberty Media announced its donation, as NewsHour Productions LLC, to WETA-TV as a nonprofit subsidiary.

The Robert MacNeil Report and The MacNeil/Lehrer Report (1975–1983)
In 1973, Robert MacNeil (a former NBC News correspondent and then-moderator of PBS's Washington Week in Review) and Jim Lehrer teamed up to cover the United States Senate's Watergate hearings for PBS. They earned an Emmy Award for their unprecedented gavel-to-gavel coverage.

This recognition led to the creation of The Robert MacNeil Report, a half-hour local news program on WNET, which debuted on October 20, 1975; each episode of the program covered a single issue in depth. On December 1, 1975, the program began to air on PBS stations nationwide. It was renamed The MacNeil/Lehrer Report on September 6, 1976. Most editions employed a two-anchor, two-city format, with MacNeil based in New York City and Lehrer at WETA's studios in Arlington, Virginia. Charlayne Hunter-Gault joined the series as a correspondent in 1978, serving as a substitute host for MacNeil and Lehrer whenever either had the night off. She became the series' national correspondent in 1983.

The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer (1983–2009)
Having decided to start competing with the nightly news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC instead of complementing them, the program expanded to one hour on September 5, 1983, incorporating other changes, such as the introduction of "documentary reportage from the field"; it became known at that time as The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Lester Crystal was its founding executive producer. MacNeil/Lehrer Productions twice planned to launch late-night newscasts in 1995 and 1999; in both instances, the proposed expansions—which, respectively, were to have involved production and newsgathering partnerships with Wall Street Journal Television and The New York Times—were canceled mid-development.

MacNeil retired from the program on October 20, 1995, leaving Lehrer as the sole anchor. Accordingly, the program was renamed The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on October 23. (Hunter-Gault left in June 1997.) On January 16, 1996, The NewsHour announced the creation of its official website at PBS Online. The NewsHour won a Peabody Award in 2003 for the feature report Jobless Recovery: Non-Working Numbers. On May 17, 1999, The NewsHour adopted a new graphics package with refreshed music from 1983, plus the new studio with a blue globe in the middle. On October 4, 1999, Gwen Ifill joined The NewsHour team as a new correspondent. She was a female anchor of a national nightly news program on broadcast television. Effective January 17, 2000, The NewsHour added "America Online Keyword: PBS" to its ending screen for a three-year agreement through April 22, 2003. For only the website, the program took effect on April 23, 2003. On March 3, 2003, the program added dates from the 1999 graphics in the beginning. On November 17, 2003, The NewsHour added music in the beginning with dates.

On May 17, 2006, the program underwent its first major change in presentation in years, adopting a new graphics package and a reorchestrated version of its theme music (originally composed by Bernard Hoffer). On December 17, 2007,  the NewsHour became the second nightly broadcast network newscast to begin broadcasting in high definition (after NBC Nightly News on March 26, 2007), with broadcasts in a letterboxed format for viewers with standard-definition television sets watching via either cable or satellite television. The program also introduced a new set and converted its graphics package to HD.

Departure of Jim Lehrer and switch to co-anchors (2009–2013)
On May 11, 2009, PBS announced that the program would be revamped on December 7 of that year under a revised title, the PBS NewsHour. In addition to increased integration between the NewsHour website and nightly broadcast, the updated production returned to a two-anchor format. Lehrer described the overhaul as the first phase in his move toward retirement.

On September 27, 2010, PBS NewsHour was presented with the Chairman's Award at the 31st News & Documentary Emmy Awards, with MacNeil, Lehrer, Crystal, and former executive producer Linda Winslow receiving the award on the show's behalf.

Lehrer formally ended his tenure as a regular anchor of the program on June 6, 2011. He continued to occasionally anchor on Fridays, when he usually led the political analysis segment with Mark Shields and David Brooks, until December 30, 2011.

Transfer of production, expansion to weekends and the west (2013–present)
On August 6, 2013, Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff were named co-anchors and co-managing editors of the NewsHour. They shared anchor duties on the Monday through Thursday editions, with Woodruff anchoring solo on Fridays due to Ifill's duties as host of the political discussion program Washington Week, which was also produced Friday evenings.

For much of its history, the PBS NewsHour aired only Monday through Friday, but in March 2013, plans to expand the program to include Saturday and Sunday editions were under development. Weekend editions of the NewsHour premiered on September 7, 2013, with Hari Sreenivasan serving as anchor. Although they aired for a half-hour, the weekend broadcasts were branded PBS NewsHour Weekend for the duration of WNET's involvement with the program. From the weekend broadcasts' debut until the March 27, 2022 edition, the Saturday and Sunday editions originated from the Tisch/WNET Studios at Lincoln Center in Manhattan, as opposed to the program's main production facilities at the Arlington, Virginia, studios of WETA-TV.

MacNeil/Lehrer Productions announced in a letter to the show's staffers on October 8, 2013, that it had offered to transfer ownership in the PBS NewsHour to WETA. In the letter, Lehrer and MacNeil cited their reduced involvement with the program's production since their departures from anchoring, as well as "the probability of increasing our fundraising abilities." WETA's board of trustees approved the transfer on June 17, 2014, and it took effect on July 1. At that time, NewsHour Productions, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of WETA, took over production of the program. WETA also acquired MacNeil/Lehrer Productions' archives, documentaries, and projects, though not the company's name. PBS NewsHour Weekend was not affected by the ownership transfer and continued to be produced by WNET.

On July 20, 2015, the PBS NewsHour introduced an overhauled visual appearance for its weekday broadcasts, debuting a new minimalist set designed by Eric Siegel and George Allison that heavily incorporates PBS's longtime "Everyman" logo. The program also introduced a new graphics package by Troika Design Group and original theme music by Edd Kalehoff, which incorporates a reorchestration of the nine-note "Question and Answer" musical signature that has been featured in the program's theme since its premiere in 1975 and a musical signature originally incorporated into the Kalehoff-composed theme for the Nightly Business Report used from 2002 to 2010. PBS NewsHour Weekend retained its original graphics package and the theme music by David Cebert and Bernard Hoffer until August 29, 2015, when it transitioned to the same theme music and a reworked version of the graphics package used for the weekday broadcasts.

Ifill took brief breaks from her NewsHour anchor duties in the late spring and in November 2016 (and was also absent from the program's presidential election coverage on November 8), as she had been undergoing treatment for advanced stage breast and endometrial cancer. After her death was announced on November 14, 2016, that evening's edition of the PBS NewsHour was dedicated to Ifill and her influence on journalism, featuring tributes from Woodruff, Sreenivasan, former colleagues and program contributors (news content was relegated to the standard news summary, which aired during the second half-hour). Although the program initially featured guest anchors on some editions between January and March 2017, Woodruff went on to become sole anchor.

In 2018, The Plastic Problem aired, which then went on to win a Peabody Award, presented at the 2019 awards ceremony.

On October 14, 2019, PBS NewsHour launched "PBS NewsHour West", a Western United States bureau at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in Phoenix. Anchored by Stephanie Sy, the bureau produces its own news summary with up-to-date information on events that develop after the original broadcast. A version of the program with this summary is shown to viewers in the Western United States and to online and East Coast viewers watching re-broadcasts.

On April 2, 2022, WETA assumed production responsibilities for the NewsHours Saturday and Sunday editions, which concurrently began originating from the studio at the station's Washington facility used for the weekday broadcasts. The broadcasts were retitled PBS News Weekend, omitting "NewsHour" in view of their shorter duration. NewsHour Productions transferred production of the weekend broadcasts from WNET in a move to streamline the program's production and news-gathering resources, allowing the weekday and weekend NewsHour broadcasts to have the same pool of correspondents and to share resources with Washington Week (which is also produced by WETA-TV). Coinciding with the move, the weekend editions began carrying feature segments covering culture and the arts. Sreenivasan (who remains a New York-based correspondent for the weekday broadcasts and serves as a contributor for the PBS news discussion program Amanpour & Company) was replaced as weekend anchor by NBC News and MSNBC correspondent Geoff Bennett. As of December 31, 2022, John Yang anchors the weekend program.

On May 13, 2022, Woodruff announced to NewsHour staffers that she would step down as anchor at the end of the year, though she intends to continue reporting longer pieces for the program while doing projects and specials for WETA through the 2024 United States presidential election at the earliest. Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett were named Woodruff's successors. Woodruff made her final broadcast as anchor on December 30, 2022. Nawaz and Bennett anchored their first broadcast as co-anchors on January 2, 2023.

On June 10, 2024, PBS News Hour introduced a new logo and the new studio (still at WETA), to match the current PBS logo. At the same time, the program's longstanding of camel case in its name was discontinued, with "NewsHour" becoming two words, "News Hour", in conjunction with the network's rebranding of the show's presence on digital media as PBS News.

Production and ratings
The program is notable for being shown on public television. There are no interruptions for advertisements (though like most public television programs, there are "corporate image" advertisements at the beginning and end of each broadcast, as well as barker interruptions asking viewers to donate to their local PBS member station or member network during locally produced pledge drives, which are replaced by encore presentations of a select story segment from the past year for stations that are not holding a drive during that time).

The program has a more deliberate pace than the news broadcasts of the commercial networks it competes against, allowing for deeper detail in its story packages and feature segments. At the start of the program, the lead story is covered in depth, followed by a news summary that lasts roughly between six and eight minutes, briefly explaining many of the top national and international news headlines; international stories often include excerpts of reports filed by ITN correspondents. This is usually followed by three or four longer news segments, typically running six to twelve minutes, which explore a few of the events mentioned in the headline segment in depth and include discussions with experts, newsmakers, and/or commentators. The program formerly included a reflective essay on a regular basis, but these have been curtailed in recent years; since Woodruff and Ifill became anchors, these essays have mainly aired as part of the end-of-show segment "Brief, but Spectacular".

On Fridays, the program features political analysis and discussion between two regular contributors, one from each of the Republican and Democratic parties, and one host from among the senior correspondents. Since January 2021, the usual participants have been Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart and The New York Times columnist David Brooks. Analysts who fill in when Capehart or Brooks are absent have included David Gergen, Thomas Oliphant, Rich Lowry, William Kristol, Ramesh Ponnuru, Ruth Marcus, Michael Gerson, David Corn and E. J. Dionne. On Mondays, a similar segment, "Politics Monday", features analysis and discussion of political issues with contributors Amy Walter, national editor of The Cook Political Report, and Tamara Keith, Washington, D.C. correspondent for NPR.

The program's senior correspondents are Woodruff and Jeffrey Brown (Arts, Culture & Society). Essayists have included Anne Taylor Fleming, Richard Rodriguez, Clarence Page and Roger Rosenblatt. Correspondents have been Tom Bearden, Betty Ann Bowser, Susan Dentzer, Elizabeth Farnsworth, Kwame Holman, Spencer Michels, Fred de Sam Lazaro, the economics correspondent Paul Solman (Making Sen$e), Malcolm Brabant and others.

Lehrer and Ifill were frequent moderators of U.S. political debates. By November 2008, Lehrer had moderated more than ten debates between major U.S. presidential candidates. In 2008, Ifill moderated a debate between U.S. vice presidential candidates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin; in 2004, she moderated a debate between candidates Dick Cheney and John Edwards.

Honor Roll segment
On March 31, 2003, after the U.S.–led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the PBS News Hour began what it called its "Honor Roll", a short segment displaying in silence the picture, name, rank, and hometown of U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq. On January 4, 2006, military personnel killed in Afghanistan were added to the segment. According to Nielsen ratings at the program's website, 2.7 million people watch the program each night, and 8 million watch in the course of a week. PBS NewsHour aired the final honor roll segment on August 30, 2021, after the end of War in Afghanistan.

Availability
The PBS News Hour is broadcast on more than 350 PBS member stations and member networks, making it available to 99% of the viewing public, and audio from the program is broadcast by some NPR radio stations. It is also rebroadcast twice daily in late night via American Public Television's World digital subchannel service. Broadcasts of the PBS News Hour are also made available worldwide via satellites operated by various agencies such as the Voice of America.

A limited number of PBS member stations and regional member networks do not clear the PBS News Hour on their schedules due to existing carriage on a "primary" PBS member station, a pool mainly confined to "secondary" stations (most of which participate in the service's Program Differentiation Plan) that share certain media markets with a "primary" member outlet. These include the NJ PBS network in New Jersey (as WNET, which co-manages NJ PBS and WLIW, carries the program in the New York City area, the latter airing the program live, while WHYY-TV does so in the Philadelphia market); KVCR-DT in San Bernardino, California; KCET in Los Angeles (KOCE-TV in Huntington Beach, which shares ownership with KCET through parent Public Media Group of Southern California and is the primary PBS member in the region, serves as the program's carrier in the Los Angeles market); and WYIN in Gary, Indiana (WTTW, the primary PBS station for the Chicago DMA that includes WYIN's Northwest Indiana service area, serves as the program's carrier in the Chicago market). In Boston, WGBH-TV airs the program live each weeknight (with a simulcast online), while its secondary station WGBX rebroadcasts the weekday editions later the same evening, and the weekend editions live; a similar case exists in New York City but in reverse, where WLIW airs the weekday and weekend editions of the PBS News Hour live while WNET airs them on a tape delay (delayed by one hour on weekday editions and by a half-hour on weekends). KQED in San Francisco airs the program each weeknight in simulcast with its radio sister at 3:00 p.m. Pacific Time (6:00 p.m. Eastern Time), in addition to airing the Western Edition on television at 6:00 p.m. PT. Unusually for many years, the secondary station of Milwaukee PBS, WMVT, carried the program as part of an early-evening news block with the Nightly Business Report (which was the lead-in to News Hour on many member stations until that program ceased production in December 2019), and half-hour international newscasts from Deutsche Welle and BBC World News, due to an expanded schedule of PBS Kids and local-interest programming on WMVS; this has since been rectified with the launch of the all-hours PBS Kids subchannel network.

Archives of shows broadcast after February 7, 2000, are available in several streaming media formats (including full-motion video) at the program's website. The show is available to overseas military personnel on the American Forces Network. Audio from select segments is also released in podcast form, available through several feeds on the PBS News Hour's subscriptions page with link to a FeedBurner website (for free mp3 download) and through podcast services such as Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and among others.

Livestreaming
The PBS News Hour is streamed live on the program's YouTube channel at 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time each weeknight, with the Western edition also streaming live at 9:00 p.m. ET (6:00 p.m. Pacific Time). PBS News Weekend is also streamed on the YouTube channel live Saturdays and Sundays at 5:00 p.m. ET. Full episodes are available later on the PBS News YouTube channel and on the program's dedicated page on PBS's website.

The News Hour was also livestreamed on Ustream until IBM Watson Media discontinued free livesteraming on the platform on September 17, 2018. The News Hour has also provided livestreaming of special events, most notably streaming the January 2017 inauguration of Donald Trump on the program's Twitter account.

International broadcasts

 * In Australia the program is seen Tuesdays through Saturdays at 1:00 p.m. AEST on SBS.
 * In New Zealand the NewsHour is seen Tuesdays through Saturdays at 10 p.m. on Face TV (Auckland).
 * In Japan the program is seen Tuesdays through Friday on NHK BS1.
 * Around the world for members of the United States Armed Forces on the American Forces Network.
 * The program is seen internationally through the Voice of America.

PBS News Hour editorial guidelines
On December 4, 2009, when introducing the new PBS NewsHour format, Lehrer read a list of guidelines for what he called "MacNeil/Lehrer journalism":
 * "Do nothing I cannot defend."
 * "Cover, write, and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me."
 * "Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story."
 * "Assume the viewer is as smart and as caring and as good a person as I am."
 * "Assume the same about all people on whom I report."
 * "Assume personal lives are a private matter until a legitimate turn in the story absolutely mandates otherwise."
 * "Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories, and clearly label everything."
 * "Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes except on rare and monumental occasions."
 * "No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously."
 * "And finally, I am not in the entertainment business."

Anchors

 * Amna Nawaz, co-anchor since January 2, 2023; joined April 6, 2018 as a chief correspondent
 * Geoff Bennett, co-anchor since January 2, 2023; previously anchor of weekend broadcast beginning April 2, 2022; joined January 3, 2022 as chief Washington correspondent
 * Stephanie Sy, anchor of PBS News Hour West and continuing correspondent; joined October 14, 2019
 * John Yang, weekend anchor since December 31, 2022; joined March 1, 2016 as a national correspondent

Correspondents

 * Laura Barrón-López – White House correspondent and substitute weekend anchor (joined on June 16, 2022)
 * Malcolm Brabant – special correspondent, especially reporting from Europe, based in Denmark (joined June 15, 2015)
 * William Brangham – correspondent/producer and occasional substitute anchor for the weekday and weekend program (joined August 10, 2012)
 * Marcia Biggs - special correspondent, Middle East
 * Jeffrey Brown – chief correspondent for arts, culture, and society, substitute weekday anchor (joined December 23, 1998)
 * Daniel Bush – senior digital political reporter on air during election night coverage (joined November 2015)
 * Tom Casciato - special correspondent
 * Fred de Sam Lazaro – correspondent and contributor to the Agents For Change series (joined December 10, 1985)
 * Lisa Desjardins – political correspondent (joined October 29, 2014)
 * Michael Hill – substitute weekend anchor (joined in September 2020)
 * Miles O'Brien – science and aviation correspondent, substitute anchor (joined February 9, 2010)
 * Ali Rogin - weekend correspondent
 * Nick Schifrin – foreign affairs and defense correspondent and substitute anchor (joined February 10, 2016)
 * Paul Solman – business, economics and occasional art correspondent, creator of Making Sen$e (joined September 1, 1978)
 * Hari Sreenivasan – special correspondent and former substitute anchor and weekend anchor (December 7, 2009 – March 27, 2022)
 * Alison Stewart – substitute weekend anchor (joined September 27, 2013)
 * Megan Thompson – substitute weekend anchor (joined January 11, 2013)
 * Mike Taibbi – special weekend correspondent (joined April 11, 2015)
 * P.J. Tobia – foreign affairs editor (joined June 19, 2013)
 * Judy Woodruff – senior correspondent and former weekday anchor (joined September 5, 1983 – June 24, 1993; joined CNN Group and returned to PBS on April 12, 2006; stepped down as main anchor on December 30, 2022)

Political analysts

 * David Brooks of The New York Times (Fridays; joined September 21, 2001)
 * Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post (Fridays; joined January 8, 2021)
 * Tamara Keith of NPR (Mondays; joined November 1, 2012)
 * Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report (Mondays and election night; joined July 29, 2004)
 * Jeff Greenfield (weekends)
 * E. J. Dionne of The Washington Post (substitute)
 * Susan Page of USA Today (substitute; joined July 16, 2018)
 * Stuart Rothenberg of Inside Elections (substitute; joined October 30, 1992)
 * Gary Abernathy of The Washington Post (substitute)
 * Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post (substitute)
 * Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal (substitute)

Former

 * Robert MacNeil – weekday anchor (October 20, 1975 – October 20, 1995; died on April 12, 2024)
 * Jim Lehrer – weekday anchor and executive editor (March 15, 1976 – June 6, 2011; retired except on Fridays until his last day December 30, 2011, and his last day as an executive editor on September 26, 2014; died on January 23, 2020)
 * Charlayne Hunter-Gault – weekday anchor (December 8, 1977 – June 13, 1997; retired)
 * Kwame Holman – correspondent (1983 – 2014; retired)
 * Roger Mudd – essayist and political correspondent (1987 – 1993; later became primary anchor for The History Channel; died on March 9, 2021)
 * Margaret Warner – weekday anchor (June 24, 1993 – September 7, 2017; now a White House correspondent after leaving NewsHour)
 * Gwen Ifill – Monday-Thursday anchor (also a Senior Correspondent) (October 4, 1999 – November 14, 2016; died from endometrial cancer)
 * Ray Suarez – weekday anchor (October 4, 1999 – October 25, 2013; moved to Al Jazeera America, and left NewsHour after the launch of 2013's NewsHour with Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff)
 * Terence Smith – weekday anchor (August 17, 1998 – November 23, 2005; retired)
 * Yamiche Alcindor – White House correspondent (December 31, 2015 – January 7, 2022; moved to NBC News)

Political analysts

 * David Gergen (Fridays; March 30, 1981 – March 18, 1994)
 * Michael Gerson of The Washington Post (substitute, died on November 17, 2022)
 * Paul Gigot (Fridays; March 25, 1994 – September 14, 2001)
 * Mark Shields as a syndicated columnist (Fridays; November 11, 1988 – December 18, 2020; died on June 18, 2022, from kidney failure)

Criticism and reception
In 1992, radio broadcaster David Barsamian called the News Hour "stenographers to power", accusing them and other news media of having a pro-establishment bias.

Critical response
PBS News Hour has received generally positive reviews from television critics and parents of young children. Patrick Kevin Day of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff are making history on PBS." David Leonard and Micah Schwalb of The Denver Post wrote, "One of the most trusted news programs on television." Phil Owen of TheWrap wrote, "The least partisan analysis." Tim Surette of TV Guide wrote, "The calm and credible information we need." Jennifer Gerson of The 19th wrote, "Nawaz is stepping into history."

In 2003, UCLA political scientist Tim Groseclose and Missouri economist Jeff Milyo evaluated various media programs based on "think tank" citations to map liberal versus conservative media slants and published a study alleging liberal media bias in general. Based on their research, PBS News Hour is the most centrist news program on television and the closest to a truly objective stance. However, their methodology has been questioned.

FAIR study
In October 2006, the media criticism group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) accused the PBS News Hour of lacking balance, diversity, and viewpoints of the general public, and for presenting corporate viewpoints. FAIR found that the PBS News Hour's guest list from October 2005 to March 2006 had Republicans outnumbering Democrats 2–1, and minorities accounting for 15 percent of U.S.-based sources. FAIR also protested in 1995 when Liberty Media purchased a majority of the program, citing Liberty's majority owner, John Malone, for his "Machiavellian business tactics" and right-wing sentiments.

News Hour executive producer Linda Winslow responded to many aspects:

"FAIR seems to be accusing us of covering the people who make decisions that affect people's lives, many of whom work in government, the military, or corporate America. That's what we do: we're a news program, and that's who makes news... I take issue with the way the FAIR report characterizes each guest, which they have obviously done very subjectively. Witness the trashing of Mark Shields and Tom Oliphant (in the full report), who are not liberal enough for FAIR's taste. When you get down to arguing about degrees of left-and-rightness, I think you undermine your own argument."

She also accused FAIR of counting sound bites as interviews, thereby skewing their numbers toward the political party holding a majority (at the time of FAIR's report, Republican Party).

Partnership with NPR
The PBS News Hour partnered with NPR for the broadcast of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions of 2016, in a strategy to prepare for the election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

title: PBS News Hour


text:
Scourge of God

The Scourge of God may refer to:

 * Attila the Hun who was known by this name
 * (In medieval ecclesiastical legend) a generalized epithet for any disaster afflicting a nation because of sin
 * The Black Death
 * Genghis Khan, etc.
 * (Alternately) the affliction of the virtuous through same, using "scourge" in the sense of purification through mortification
 * The Scourge of God (film), a 1920 film directed by Michael Curtiz
 * Scourge of God (wargame), a 1982 wargame about the Mongolian invasions of China, the Middle East and Europe
 * The Scourge of God (novel), a 2008 novel written by S. M. Stirling

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Scourge of God


text:
Merthyr Tydfil F.C.

Merthyr Tydfil Football Club was a Welsh football club based at the Penydarren Park ground in Merthyr Tydfil. In 2010 the club was liquidated and reformed under the name Merthyr Town, which was accepted into Division One of the Western League.

History
The club was formed in 1945, and joined the Welsh League. In their first season, they finished as runners-up, and joined the Southern League. The club were immensely successful in their first few seasons, winning the championship in 1947–48, 1949–50, 1950–51, 1951–52 and 1953–54. In the 1947–48 championship-winning season, Merthyr only dropped one point at home (against Colchester United) and only lost four games all season. However, despite their success, the club failed to be elected to the English Football League. The 1950–51 season ended with Merthyr winning the Southern League, the Welsh Cup, the Southern League Cup and the Welsh Challenge Cup.

After bouncing between the various Southern League divisions during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the club finally won their sixth championship in 1988–89, making them joint Southern League title record-holders together with Southampton. This time, winning the championship meant promotion to the Football Conference, the fifth level of English football. The club finished ninth in their first two seasons, and then fourth. However, they then went into decline, and were relegated back to the Southern League in 1995, where they remained until reforming in 2010. They should have been relegated a season earlier, but were reprieved when Northern Premier League champions Marine failed to meet the stadium criteria for the league.

The club's best FA Cup performance was reaching the second round, which they managed in 1946–47 (losing 3–1 to Reading), 1954–55 (losing 7–1 to Bradford City), 1973–74 (losing 3–0 to Hendon), 1979–80 (losing 3–1 in a replay with Chesham United) and 1990–91 (losing 5–1 to Woking). The only time the club managed to defeat a Football League club in the FA Cup was in the first round of the 1946–47 cup, when they beat Bristol Rovers 3–1.

The club were considerably more successful in the Welsh Cup, which they won on three occasions: 1949 (beating Swansea Town 2–0), 1951 (beating Cardiff City 3–2 in a replay) and 1987 (beating Newport County 1–0 in a replay). In addition, the club finished as runners-up in 1947 and 1952.

After winning the final in 1987, the club were allowed to enter the European Cup Winners' Cup, at a time when English clubs were banned from European competition. In the first round, they were drawn against the Italian club Atalanta. The club managed a win in the first leg at home, beating the Italians 2–1. However, the return leg was lost 2–0, and the club was eliminated from the competition.

Historically, the club's biggest rivals are Gloucester City. The two clubs played over 120 times in their history, making it one of the most played Anglo-Welsh derbies in football. In the late 1990s and early 2000s Newport County were local rivals.

Notable former players
For all players with a Wikipedia article see Category:Merthyr Tydfil F.C. players.

League

 * Southern League/Southern Football League Premier Division
 * Champions: 1947–48, 1949–50, 1950–51, 1951–52, 1953–54, 1988–89
 * Runners-up: 1952–53, 1997–98
 * Southern League Division One
 * Runners-up: 1970–71
 * Southern League Division One North
 * Runners-up: 1978–79
 * Southern League Division One Midland
 * Champions: 1987–88
 * Southern League Western Division
 * Champions: 2002–03
 * Champions 2014–15 Southern Football League Division 1 South & West
 * Welsh Football League Division One
 * Runners-up: 1945–46

Cup

 * Welsh Cup
 * Winners: 1949, 1951, 1987
 * Finalists: 1947, 1952
 * Welsh Football League Cup
 * Winners: 1951, 1962, 1981
 * Finalists: 1983

Club records

 * Record Attendance: 21,000 vs. Reading, FA Cup second round, 1946
 * Highest league position: 4th in Football Conference, 1991–92
 * Most goals scored in a league season: 187 in the Welsh League, 1945–46
 * Fewest goals conceded in a league season: 32 in the Southern League Western Division, 2002–03

title: Merthyr Tydfil F.C.


text:
User:TDC/History of the Soviet Union (1927-1953)

Planning
At the Fifteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in December 1927, Stalin attacked the left by expelling Trotsky and his supporters from the party and then moving against the right by abandoning Lenin's New Economic Policy which had been championed by Bukharin and Rykov. Warning delegates of an impending capitalist encirclement, he stressed that survival and development could only occur by pursuing the rapid development of heavy industry. Stalin remarked that the Soviet Union was "fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries" (the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, etc.), and thus must narrow "this distance in ten years". In a perhaps eerie foreboding of World War II, Stalin declared, "Either we do it or we shall be crushed".

To oversee the radical transformation of the Soviet Union, the party, under Stalin's direction, established Gosplan (the State General Planning Commission), a state organ responsible for guiding the socialist economy toward accelerated industrialization. In April 1929 Gosplan released two joint drafts that began the process that would industrialize the primarily agrarian nation. This 1700 page report became the basis the first Five-Year Plan for National Economic Construction, or Piatiletka, calling for the doubling of Soviet capital stock between 1928 and 1933.

Shifting from Lenin's NEP, the first Five-Year Plan established central planning as the basis of economic decision-making and the stress on rapid heavy industrialization (see Economy of the Soviet Union). It began the rapid process of transforming a largely agrarian nation consisting of peasants into an industrial superpower. In effect, the initial goals were laying the foundations for future, exponential economic growth.

The new economic system put forward by the first Five-Year plan entailed a complicated series of planning arrangements (see Overview of the Soviet economic planning process). The first Five-Year plan focused on the mobilization of natural resources to build up the country's heavy industrial base by increasing output of coal, iron, and other vital resources. At a high human cost, this process was largely successful, forging a capital base for industrial development more rapidly than any country in history. However, as the economy grew more complex in the post-Stalin years, the prudence of planned economic decision-making would prove less apt at attaining growth through technological innovation and improvements in productivity, thus resulting in the stagnation associated with the later years prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Industrialization in practice
The mobilization of resources by state planning augmented the country's industrial base. Pig iron output, necessary for development of nonexistent industrial infrastructure rose from 3.3 million to 10 million tons per year. Coal, the integral product fueling modern economies and Stalinist industrialization, successfully rose from 35.4 million to 75 million tons, and output of iron ore rose from 5.7 million to 19 million tons. A number of industrial complexes such as Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk, the Moscow and Gorky automobile plants, the Urals and Kramatorsk heavy machinery plants, and Kharkov, Stalingrad and Cheliabinsk tractor plants have been built or under construction.

Based largely on these figures the Five Year Industrial Production Plan had been fulfilled by 93.7 percent in only four years, while parts devoted to heavy-industry part were fulfilled by 108%. Stalin in December 1932 declared the plan a success to the Central Committee, since increases in the output of coal and iron would fuel future development.

While undoubtedly marking a tremendous leap in industrial capacity, the Five Year Plan was extremely harsh on industrial workers; quotas were extremely difficult to fulfill, requiring that miners put in 16 to 18-hour workdays. Failure to fulfill the quotas could result in treason charges. Working conditions were poor, even hazardous. By some estimates, 127,000 workers died during the four years (from 1928 to 1932). Due to the allocation of resources for industry along with decreasing productivity since collectivization, a famine occurred. The use of forced labor must also not be overlooked. In the construction of the industrial complexes, inmates of labor camps were used as expendable resources.

From 1921 until 1954, during the period of state-guided, forced industrialization, it is claimed 3.7 million people were sentenced for alleged counter-revolutionary crimes, including 0.6 million sentenced to death, 2.4 million sentenced to labor camps, and 0.7 million sentenced to expatriation. Some other estimates put these figures much higher. Much like with the famines, the evidence supporting these high numbers4 is disputed by some historians, although this is a minority view.

Collectivization
Main article: Collectivisation in the USSR.

In November 1928 the Central Committee decided to implement forced collectivization. This marked the end of the NEP, which had allowed peasants to sell their surpluses on the open market. Grain requisitioning intensified and peasants were forced to give up their private plots of land and property, to work for collective farms, and to sell their produce to the state for a low price set by the state itself.

Given the goals of the First Five Year Plan, the state sought increased political control of agriculture, hoping to feed the rapidly growing urban areas and to export grain, a source of foreign currency needed to import technologies necessary for heavy-industrialization.

By 1936 about 90% of Soviet agriculture was collectivized. In many cases peasants bitterly opposed this process and often slaughtered their animals rather than give them to collective farms. Kulaks, prosperous peasants, were forcibly resettled to Siberia (a large portion of the kulaks served at forced labor camps). However, just about anyone opposing collectivization was deemed a "kulak." The policy of liquidation of kulaks as a class, formulated by Stalin at the end of 1929, meant executions, and deportation to forced labor camps.

Despite the expectations, collectivization led to a catastrophic drop in farming productivity, which did not regain the NEP level until 1940. The upheaval associated with collectivization worsened famine conditions during a time of drought, particularly in the Ukraine and Volga region. The number of people who died in these famines is estimated at between two and five million. The actual number of casualties is bitterly disputed to this day. In 1975, Abramov and Kocharli estimated that 265,800 kulak families were sent to the Gulag in 1930. In 1979, Roy Medvedev used Abramov's and Kocharli's estimate to calculate that 2.5 million peasants were exiled between 1930 and 1931, but he suspected that he underestimated the total number.

Changes in Soviet Society

Stalin's industrial policies largely improved living standards for the majority of the population, although the debated mortality levels resulting from Stalinist policies taints the Soviet record.

Employment, for instance, rose greatly; 3.9 million per year was expected by 1923, but the number was actually an astounding 6.4 million. By 1937, the number rose yet again, to about 7.9 million, and in 1940 it was 8.3 million. Between 1926 and 1930, the urban population increased by 30 million. Unemployment had been a problem during the time of the Tsar and even under the NEP, but it was not a major factor after the implementation of Stalin's industrialization program. The mobilization of resources to industrialize the agrarian society industrial created a need for labor, meaning that the unemployment went virtually to zero. Several ambitious projects were begun, and they supplied raw materials not only for military weapons but also for consumer goods.

The Moscow and Gorky automobile plants produced automobiles that the public could utilize, although not necessarily afford, and the expansion of heavy plant and steel production made production of a greater number of cars possible. Car and truck production, for example, reached 200,000 in 1931. Because the industrial workers needed to be educated, the number of schools increased. In 1927, 7.9 million students attended 118,558 schools. This number rose to 9.7 million students and 166,275 schools by 1933. In addition, 900 specialist departments and 566 institutions were built and functioning by 1933.

The Soviet people also benefited from a degree of social liberalization. Females were given an adequate, equal education and women had equal rights in employment, precipitating improving lives for women and families. Stalinist development also contributed to advances in health care, which vastly increased the lifespan for the typical Soviet citizen and the quality of life. Stalin's policies granted the Soviet people universal access to health care and education, allowing this generation to be the first not to fear typhus, cholera, and malaria. The occurrences of these diseases dropped to record-low numbers, increasing life spans by decades.

Soviet women under Stalin were also the first generation of women able to give birth in the safety of a hospital, with access to prenatal care. Education was also an example of an increase in standard of living after economic development. The generation born during Stalin's rule was the first near-universally literate generation. Engineers were sent abroad to learn industrial technology, and hundreds of foreign engineers were brought to Russia on contract. Transport was also improved, as many new railways were built. Workers who exceeded their quotas, Stakhanovites, received many incentives for their work. They could thus afford to buy the goods that were mass-produced by the rapidly expanding Soviet economy.

The Great Purges
Main article: Great Purge.

As this process unfolded, Stalin consolidated near-absolute power using the 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov (which many suspect Stalin of having planned) as a pretext to launch the Great Purges against his suspected political and ideological opponents, most notably the old cadres and the rank and file of the Bolshevik Party. Trotsky had already been expelled from the party in 1927, exiled to Kazakhstan in 1928 and then expelled from the USSR entirely in 1929. Stalin used the purges to politically and physically destroy his other formal rivals (and former allies) accusing Zinoviev and Kamenev of being behind Kirov's assassination and planning to overthrow Stalin. Ultimately, those supposedly involved in this and other conspiracies numbered in the tens of thousands with various Old Bolsheviks and senior party members blamed with conspiracy and sabotage which were used to explain industrial accidents, production shortfalls and other failures of Stalin's regime. Measures used against opposition and suspected opposition ranged from imprisonment in work camps (Gulags) to execution to assassination (of Trotsky's son Lev Sedov and likely of Sergei Kirov - Trotsky himself was to die at the hands of one of Stalin's assassins in 1940). The period between 1936-1937 is often called the Great Terror, with thousands of people (even merely suspected of opposing Stalin's regime) being killed or imprisoned. Stalin is reputed to have personally signed 40,000 death warrants of suspected political opponents.

During this period, the practice of mass arrest, torture, and imprisonment or execution without trial, of anyone suspected by the secret police of opposing Stalin's regime became commonplace. By the NKVD's own estimates, 681,692 people were shot during 1937-38 alone (although many historians think that this was an undercount), and millions of people were transported to Gulag work camps.

Several show trials were held in Moscow, to serve as examples for the trials that local courts were expected to carry out elsewere in the country. There were four key trials from 1936 to 1938, The Trial of the Sixteen was the first (December 1936); then the Trial of the Seventeen (January 1937); then the trial of Red Army generals, including Marshal Tukhachevsky (June 1937); and finally the Trial of the Twenty One (including Bukharin) in March 1938. See also: Moscow Trials

In spite of the Stalin's seemingly progressive constitution, enacted in 1936, the party's power was in reality subordinated by the secret police, the mechanism whereby Stalin secured his dictatorship through state terror.

War and Stalinist development
Heavy-industrialization contributed to the Soviet Union's wartime victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War (known throughout the former USSR as the Great Patriotic War). The Red Army overturned the Nazi eastern expansion single-handedly, with the turning point on the Eastern Front being the Battle of Stalingrad. Although the Soviet Union was getting aid and weapons from the United States, its production of war materials was greater than that of Nazi Germany because of rapid growth of Soviet industrial production during the interwar years. The Second Five Year Plan raised the steel production to 18 million tons and the coal to 128 million tons. Before it was interrupted, the Third Five Year Plan produced 18 millions of steel and 150 million tons of coal. During the war, the allies were able to outstrip Nazi Germany in the production of war materials, in some cases ten-fold. The tank production, for example, was equal to 40,000 per year for the allies, to only 4,000 for Nazi Germany.

While naïve to de-emphasize U.S. assistance in World War II, the Soviet Union's industrial output helped stop Nazi Germany's initial advance, and stripped them of their advantage. According to R. Hutchings, "One can hardly doubt that if there had been a slower buildup of industry, the attack would have been successful and world history would have evolved quite differently." For the laborers involved in industry, however, life was difficult. Workers were encouraged to fulfill and overachieve quotas through propaganda, such as the Stakhanovite movement. Between 1933 and 1945, some argue that seven million civilians died because of the demanding labor. Between 1930 and 1940, 6 million were put through the forced labor system.

Some historians, however, interpret the lack of preparedness of the Soviet Union to defend itself as a flaw in Stalin's economic planning. Shearer argues that there was "a command-administrative economy" but it was not "a planned one". He argues that the Soviet Union suffered from a chaotic state of the Politburo in its policies due to the Great Purges, and was completely unprepared for the Nazi German invasion. When the Soviet Union was invaded in 1941, Stalin was indeed surprised. Economist Holland Hunter, in addition, argues in his Overambitious First Soviet Five-Year Plan, that an array "of alternative paths were available, evolving out of the situation existing at the end of the 1920s... that could have been as good as those achieved by, say, 1936 yet with far less turbulence, waste, destruction and sacrifice."

While by no means an "orderly" economy or an efficient one, the Five Year Plans did plan an offensive, but since the Soviet Union was under attack, the situation required a defensive response. The result, as Shearer points out, was that the command economy had to be relaxed so that the mobilization needed was achieved. Sapir supports this view, arguing that Stalin's policies developed a mobilized economy (which was inefficient), with tension between central and local decision-making. Market forces became more significant than central administrative constraints. This view, however, is refuted by Stephen Lee, who argues that Soviet Union's "heavy industrialization translated into ultimate survival."

Wartime developments
The Nazi invasion caught the Soviet military unprepared. A widely-held belief is that this was caused by a large number (an estimated 40,000) of the senior officers being sent to prison in the "Great Purges" of 1936-1938. To secure Soviet influence over Eastern Europe and buy some time, Stalin arranged the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany on August 23, 1939. A secret appendix to the pact gave Eastern Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Finland to the USSR, and Western Poland and Lithuania to Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1st, USSR followed on September 17th. On November 30th, the USSR’s invaded Finland during the Winter War. Although outnumbering Finnish troops by over 50:1, the Soviets were unable to capture more than a small fraction of the nation.

On June 22nd 1941, however, Hitler broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union (see Operation Barbarossa).

Using his contacts within the German Nazi party, NKVD spy Richard Sorge was able to discover the exact date and time of the planned German invasion of the Soviet Union. This information was passed along to Stalin, but went ignored, despite warning from not only Sorge, but Winston Churchill as well.

It is said that Stalin at first refused to believe Nazi Germany had broken the treaty. However, new evidence shows Stalin held meetings with a variety of senior Soviet government and military figures, including Vyacheslav Molotov (People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs), Semyon Timoshenko (People's Commissar for Defense), Georgy Zhukov (Chief of Staff of the Red Army), Nikolai Kuznetsov (Commander of both North Caucasus and Baltic Military Districts), and Boris Shaposhnikov (Deputy People's Commissar for Defense). All in all, on the very first day of the attack, Stalin held meetings with over 15 individual members of the Soviet government and military apparatus.5

Nazi German troops reached the outskirts of Moscow in December 1941, but were diverted to shore up southern flanks. At the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942-43, after losing an estimated 1 million men in the bloodiest fighting in history, the Red Army was able to regain the initiative of the war. Due to the unwillingness of the Japanese to open a second front in Manchuria, the Soviets were able to call dozens of Red Army division back from eastern Russia. These units were instrumental in turning the tide, because most of their officer corps had escaped Stalin’s purges. The Soviet forces were soon able to regain their lost territory and push their over-stretched enemy back to Nazi Germany itself.

From the end of 1944 to 1949 large sections of eastern Germany came under the Soviet Union's occupation and on May 2nd 1945, the capital city Berlin was taken, while over fifteen million Germans were removed from eastern Germany and pushed into central Germany (later called GDR German Democratic Republic) and western Germany (later called FRG Federal Republic of Germany). Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Czech etc. were then moved onto German land.

The Soviets bore the brunt of World War II because the West could not open up a second ground front in Europe until the invasion of Italy and D-Day. Approximately 21 million Soviets, among them 7 million civilians, were killed in "Operation Barbarossa," the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany. Civilians were rounded up and burned or shot in many cities conquered by the Nazis. Many feel that since the Slavs were considered "sub-human," this was ethnically targeted mass murder. However, the retreating Soviet army was ordered to pursue a 'scorched earth' policy whereby retreating Soviet troops were ordered to destroy Russian and occupied Polish civilian infrastructure and food supplies so that the Nazi German troops could not use them.

World War II resulted in enormous destruction of infrastructure and populations throughout Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, with almost no country left unscathed. The Soviet Union was especially scathed due to the mass destruction of the industrial base that it had built up in the 1930s. The only major industrial power in the world to emerge intact, and even greatly strengthened from an economic perspective, was the United States.

As mentioned, the Soviets bore the heaviest casualties of World War II. These war casualties can explain much of Russia's behavior after the war. The Soviet Union continued to occupy and dominate Eastern Europe as a "buffer zone" to protect Russia from another invasion from the West. Russia had been invaded three times past 150 years before the Cold War during the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, and World War II, suffering tens of millions of casualties.

The Soviets were determined to punish those peoples it saw as collaborating with Germany during the war. Millions of Poles, Latvians, Georgians, Ukrainians and other ethnic minorities were deported to Gulags in Siberia. It was also during the Soviet retaking of Poland during which thousands of Polish Army officers, including reservists, were executed in what came to be known as the Katyn massacre.

Stalin also had all Russian soldiers taken captive by Germany sent to isolated work camps in Siberia. This was done to minimize any perceived counter-revolutionary ideas they had been exposed to while not under direct Soviet control.

The tenor of Soviet-US relations
The wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union was an aberration from the normal tenor of Russian-US relations. Strategic rivalry between the huge, sprawling nations goes back to the 1890s when, after a century of friendship, Americans and Russians became rivals over the development of Manchuria. Tsarist Russia, unable to compete industrially, sought to close off and colonize parts of East Asia, while Americans demanded open competition for markets.

In 1917 the rivalry turned intensely ideological. Americans never forgot that the Soviet government negotiated a separate peace with Germany in the First World War in 1917, leaving the Western Allies to fight the Central Powers alone. Lasting Russian mistrust stemmed from the landing of U.S. troops in Soviet Russia in 1918, which became becoming involved, directly and indirectly, in assisting the anti-Bolshevik Whites in the civil war.

 The Big Three: The Allied Leaders at Yalta Prime Minister Winston Churchill (UK), President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (US), and First Secretary Joseph Stalin (USSR)

The breakdown of postwar peace
When the war ended in Europe on May 8, 1945, Soviet and Western (US, British, and French) troops were located in particular places, essentially, along a line in the center of Europe that came to be called the Oder-Neisse Line. Aside from a few minor adjustments, this would be the "iron curtain" of the Cold War. In hindsight, Yalta signified the agreement of both sides that they could stay there and that neither side would use force to push the other out. This tacit accord applied to Asia as well, as evinced by U.S. occupation of Japan and the division of Korea. Politically, therefore, Yalta was an agreement on the postwar status quo in which Soviet Union hegemony reigned over about one third and the United States over two thirds.

The Soviets were able to use a well organized ring of spies in the United States, to gain critical advantages during meetings with Great Britain and the United States. Several of FDR’s advisors and cabinet members regularly reported their activities to NKVD handlers.

There were fundamental contrasts between the visions of the United States and the Soviet Union, between capitalism and socialism. And those contrasts had been simplified and refined in national ideologies to represent two ways of life, each vindicated in 1945 by previous disasters. Conflicting models of autarky versus exports, of state planning against free enterprise, were to vie for the allegiance of the developing and developed world in the postwar years.

Even so, however, the Cold War was not obviously inevitable in 1945. Despite the wherewithal of the United States to advance a different vision of postwar Europe, Stalin viewed the reemergence of Germany and Japan as Russia's chief threats, not the United States. At the time, the prospects of an Anglo-American front against the USSR seemed slim from Stalin's standpoint. Economic advisers such as Eugen Varga reinforced this view, predicting a postwar crisis of overproduction in capitalist countries which would culminate by 1947-1948 in another great depression. For one, Stalin assumed that the capitalist camp would soon resume its internal rivalry over colonies and trade and not pose a threat to Russia.

Varga's analysis was partly based on trends in U.S. federal expenditures. Due to the war effort mostly, in the first peacetime year of 1946, federal spending still amounted to $62 billion, or 30% of GDP, up from 3% of GDP in 1929, before the Great Depression, New Deal, and Second World War. Thus, Stalin assumed that the Americans would need to Russia, needing to maintain the same level of state expenditures.However, there would be no postwar crisis of overproduction.

Two visions of the world
The United States, however, led by President Harry S. Truman since April 1945, was determined to shape the postwar world according to open up the world's markets to capitalist trade according to the principles laid down by the Atlantic Charter: self-determination, equal economic access, and a rebuilt capitalist democratic Europe that could again serve as a hub in world affairs. Franklin Roosevelt had never forgotten the excitement with which he had greeted the principles of Wilsonian idealism during World War I, and he saw his mission in the 1940s as bringing lasting peace and genuine democracy to the world.

But this vision was equally a vision of national self-interest. World War II resulted in enormous destruction of infrastructure and populations throughout Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, with almost no country left unscathed. The only major industrial power in the world to emerge intact—and even greatly strengthened from an economic perspective—was the United States.

The beginning of the Cold War
Truman could advance these principles with an economic powerhouse that produced 50 percent of the world's industrial goods and military power that rested on a monopoly of the new atom bomb. Such a Europe required a healthy Germany at its center.

The wherewithal of the United States to advance a different vision of the postwar world conflicted with Soviet interests. National security had been the real cornerstone of Soviet policy since the 1920s, when the Communist Party adopted Stalin's "socialism in one country" and rejected Trotsky's ideas of "world revolution." Before the war, Stalin was uninterested in pushing Soviet boundaries beyond their full Tsar extent.

After the war, the aims of Soviet Union were to secure the country's western borders. Stalin, assuming that Japan and Germany could menace the Soviet Union once again by the 1960s, thus quickly imposed Moscow-dominated governments in the springboards of the Nazi onslaught: Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria.

Disagreements over postwar plans first centered on Eastern and Central Europe. Having lost 20 million dead in the war, suffered German and Nazi German invasion through Poland, and suffered tens of millions of casualties due to onslaughts from the West three times in the preceding 150 years, first with Napoleon, the Soviet Union was determined to destroy Germany's capacity for another war. U.S. aims were ostensibly opposed since they would require a healthy Germany at the center of Europe.

Winston Churchill, long a visceral anti-Communist, condemned Stalin for cordoning off a new Russian empire with an "iron curtain." Afterwards, Truman finally refused to give the war-torn Soviet Union reparations from West Germany's industrial plants, Stalin retaliated by sealing off East Germany as a Communist state.

Russia's historic lack of maritime access, a perennial concern of Russian foreign policy well before the Bolshevik Revolution, was also a focus for Russia where interests diverged between East and West. Stalin pressed the Turks for improved access out of the Black Sea through Turkey's Dardanelles Strait, which would allow Soviet passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Churchill had earlier recognized Stalin's claims, but now the British and Americans forced the Soviet Union to pull back.

But when Soviet security was not at stake, Stalin demonstrated no overtly aggressive designs: the Soviet Union eventually withdrew from Northern Iran, at Anglo-American behest; Stalin did observe his 1944 agreement with Churchill and did not aid the communists in the struggle against the corrupt, British-led monarchial autocracy in Greece; in Finland he accepted a friendly, noncommunist government; and Russian troops were withdrawn from Czechoslovakia by the end of 1945.

The Rise and Fall of Soviet espionage in America
After the United States entered the world war in December 1941, Stalin realized that once Germany and Japan were defeated, the world would be left with only three powers able to project their influence across the globe: the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States. And of these, the strongest would be the United States. With that in mind, Stalin's intelligence agencies shifted their focus toward America.

As part of the Lend-Lease aid arrangements, the United States invited the Soviets to greatly expand their diplomatic staffs and to establish special offices to facilitate aid arrangements. Thousands of Soviet military officers, engineers, and technicians entered the United States to review what aid was available and choose which machinery, weapons, vehicles, aircraft, and other materiel would most assist the Soviet war effort. Soviet personnel had to be trained to maintain the American equipment, manuals had to be translated into Russian, shipments to the Soviet Union had to be inspected to ensure that what was ordered had been delivered, properly loaded, and dispatched on the right ships.

Every Soviet cargo ship that arrived at an American port to pick up Lend-Lease supplies had in its crew at least one, often two, and sometimes three informants who reported either to the KGB or to the Soviet Naval GRU. Their task was not to spy on Americans but to watch the Soviet merchant seamen for signs of political dissidence and potential defection. Other agents, recruited or planted by the KGB in every Soviet office in the United States, were tasked with reporting signs of ideological deviation or potential defection among Soviet personnel.

A second mission of these Soviet intelligence officers, however, was espionage against the United States, the size and scope of which was unusually large for two nations in a wartime alliance. The Soviet Union had remarkable success in recruiting spies and gaining access to many important U.S. government agencies and laboratories dealing with secret information. American Communist Party (CPUSA) worked closely with Soviet intelligence agencies to facilitate their espionage.

Soviet intelligence was even able to place operatives close to FDR. US Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White and presidential advisor Alger Hiss, were the two most prominent examples of this.

In February 1943 the US Army’s Signal Intelligence Service established a small program, under the codename Venona, to examine ciphered Soviet diplomatic cablegrams. Since the beginning of World War II in 1939, the federal government had collected copies of international cables leaving and entering the United States. By the late 1940s the evidence provided by the Signal Intelligence Service indicated the massive size and intense hostility of Soviet intelligence operations caused both American counterintelligence professionals and high-level policy-makers to conclude that Stalin had already launched a covert attack on the United States. In the minds of American intelligence community, the Soviet espionage offensive indicated that the Cold War had begun not after World War II but many years earlier.

By the late 1940’s Soviet intelligence assets found themselves under increased scrutiny that eventually undermined the majority of their operations.

"Containment" and the Marshall Plan
While the Soviet Union acquiesced to Anglo-American designs to impede Soviet access to the Mediterranean (a perennial focus of British foreign policy since the Crimean War in the 1850s), the Americans heated up their rhetoric; Anglo-American aims to prop up the Greek autocracy became a struggle to protect "free" peoples against "totalitarian" regimes. This would be articulated in the Truman Doctrine Speech of March 1947, which argued that the United States would have to $400 million to efforts to "contain" communism.

American foreign policy moved from State Department officer George Kennan's argument that the Soviets had to be "contained" using "unalterable counterforce at every point," until the breakdown of Soviet power occurred. U.S. foreign policy moved from State Department officer George Kennan's argument that the Soviets had to be "contained" using "unalterable counterforce at every point," until the breakdown of Soviet power occurred.

The United launched massive economic reconstruction efforts, first in Western Europe and then in Japan (as well as in South Korea and Taiwan). The Marshall Plan began to pump $12 billion into Western Europe. The rationale was economically stable nations were less likely to fall prey to Soviet influence.

Stalin, fearing a subversive element deep within Soviet controled Germany responded by blocking access to West Berlin. The Soviets cut off all rail and road routes to West Berlin. Convinced that he could starve and freeze West Berlin into submission, no trucks or trains were allowed entry into the city. However, this decision backfired when Truman embarked on a highly visible move that would humiliate the Soviets internationally: flying supplies in over the blockade during 1948-1949. Military confrontation loomed while Truman flew supplies through East Germany into West Berlin during the 1948-1949 blockade. This costly aerial supplying of West Berlin became known as the Berlin Airlift.

Truman joined eleven other nations in 1949 to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the United States' first "entangling" European alliance in 170 years. Stalin retaliated these moves by integrating the economies of Eastern Europe in his version of the Marshall Plan, exploding the first Soviet atomic device in 1949, signing an alliance with Communist China in February 1950, and forming the Warsaw Pact, Eastern Europe's counterpart to NATO.

US officials quickly moved to escalate and expand "containment." In a secret 1950 document, NSC-68, they proposed to strengthen their alliance systems, quadruple defense spending, and embark on an elaborate propaganda campaign to convince Americans to fight this costly cold war. Truman ordered the development of a hydrogen bomb; in early 1950 the U.S. embarked on its first attempt to prop up colonialism in French Indochina in the face of mounting popular, communist-led resistance.

The immediate post-1945 period may have been the historical high point for the popularity of communist ideology. Communist parties won large shares of the vote free elections in countries such as Belgium, France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Finland and won significant popular support in Asia&amp;mdash;in Vietnam, India, and Japan&amp;mdash;and throughout Latin America. In addition they won large support in China, Greece, and Iran, where free elections remained absent or constrained but where Communist parties enjoyed widespread appeal.


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Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.

Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. is an American sitcom that originally aired on CBS from September 25, 1964, to May 2, 1969. The series was a spin-off of The Andy Griffith Show, and the pilot episode was aired as the season finale of the fourth season of its parent series on May 18, 1964. The show ran for a total of 150 half-hour episodes spanning over five seasons, in black-and-white for the first season, and then in color for the remaining four seasons. In 2006, CBS Home Entertainment (distributed by Paramount) began releasing the series on DVD. The final season was released in November 2008.

Like its parent series, Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. was also a major ratings hit, never placing lower than tenth in the Nielsen ratings, and ended its run as the second-highest-rated series in the United States. It has enjoyed continued popularity through reruns and DVD releases. The series was created by Aaron Ruben, who also produced the show with Sheldon Leonard and Ronald Jacobs. Filmed and set in California, it stars Jim Nabors as Gomer Pyle, a naïve but good-natured gas station attendant from the town of Mayberry, North Carolina, who enlists in the United States Marine Corps. Frank Sutton plays Gomer's high-octane, short-fused Gunnery Sergeant Vince Carter, and Ronnie Schell plays Gomer's friend Duke Slater. Roy Stuart portrayed Corporal Chuck Boyle, GySgt Carter's good-natured sidekick. Allan Melvin played in the recurring role of Gunnery Sergeant Carter's rival, Staff Sergeant Charley Hacker.

History
Everett Greenbaum and Jim Fritzell, writers for The Andy Griffith Show, are credited with creating the character of Gomer Pyle. The character was based on an "incompetent" gas station attendant whom Greenbaum met and named after Gomer Cool (a writer) and Denver Pyle (an actor on The Andy Griffith Show). Jim Nabors was cast to play Gomer; he had been performing for a Santa Monica nightclub, The Horn, when Andy Griffith discovered him. Though originally intended to appear in only one episode, Gomer proved popular, and after appearing in seasons 3 and 4, Nabors was given his own spin-off produced by Aaron Ruben. The pilot episode of Gomer Pyle was filmed in 1963 as part of The Andy Griffith Show, but was not aired until 1964, as the finale of The Andy Griffith Show's fourth season. In the episode, Andy accompanies Gomer when he reports to the Marine recruiting base at Camp Lejeune.

The 1960s saw a return to "the more mundane sensibilities of comedy," due to viewers' wishes for television programming to be a "cultural antidepressant." Thus, fantasy- and rurally-oriented comedies gained popularity and dominated the Nielsen ratings. Like other comedies at the time, Gomer Pyle was a "deep escapist" show; it avoided political commentary and offered viewers a distraction from the social changes of the 1960s. Despite being a military-themed show and airing during the peak of the Vietnam War, the show never discussed the war. Instead, the show was founded on "Gomer's innocent simplicity [and] Sergeant Carter's frustration and later concern for Gomer's well-being." This, compounded with the popularity of rural comedies in the 1960s, made the show popular. Frank Sutton, who played Carter, ascribed the show's popularity to its concentration on its two main characters, and the plots being built around their respective personalities. The program remained in the top 10 of the ratings throughout its run—in the top three for all but its third season when CBS moved it from Fridays to Wednesdays. Approaching age 40, Nabors quit because he desired to move to something else, "reach for another rung on the ladder, either up or down."

After Gomer Pyle left the air, Jim Nabors hosted his own variety show, The Jim Nabors Hour, from 1969 to 1971. As well as showcasing Nabors' singing and rich baritone voice, the show included comedy sketches that featured Nabors's Gomer Pyle co-stars Frank Sutton and Ronnie Schell. Though told that he should not leave Gomer Pyle, Nabors felt that the show would still be exciting and noted that every character he portrayed in his sketches "turn[ed] out to be Gomer."

Production
The show was produced by creator Aaron Ruben, Andy Griffith Show producer Sheldon Leonard (in partnership with Griffith), and Ronald Jacobs; it was co-produced by Bruce Bayley Johnson and Duke Vincent. Among the writers were Sam Bobrick, Harvey Miller, Aaron Ruben, Jack Elinson, and Bill Idelson; Andy Griffith Show writers Everett Greenbaum and Jim Fritzell also wrote episodes. Coby Ruskin was the primary director in the first four seasons, before John Rich took over the role for the fifth season; other directors included Gary Nelson, Peter Baldwin, and Alan Rafkin. Ruth Burch was in charge of the casting, and John Finger directed the cinematography. The theme song was composed by Earle Hagen, who also composed the themes for shows such as The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and That Girl.

The show was filmed at Camp Pendleton, Desilu Studios's Desilu-Cahuenga, and RKO Forty Acres backlot, where The Andy Griffith Show was filmed. Though Ruben preferred the use of a multiple-camera setup for comedy programs, Gomer Pyle used a single-camera setup because much of the shooting was conducted outdoors. In his book And The Show Goes On, Sheldon Leonard explained that the armed forces offer levels of "cooperation" with filmmakers. Because the Marines felt that the show would be good for the branch's image, Gomer Pyle was given "total cooperation," meaning that the show was allowed unlimited access to military equipment.

The vehicles in the show were provided by the Chrysler Corporation, as opposed to the parent series' vehicles that came from the Ford Motor Company. Although Jeeps are also prominent in the show, the brand itself would not become a part of Chrysler until the AMC buyout that occurred in 1987.

Nabors and Sutton were the only actors credited in every episode (however, Sutton did not appear in every episode). Ronnie Schell (who played Duke Slater) left after the third season to star in Good Morning World, though he returned for the fifth season, promoted to corporal, after graduating from non-commissioned officer training. Roy Stuart, who played Corporal Chuck Boyle, made his debut in the second season and left after the fourth. Andy Griffith, Frances Bavier, Ron Howard, and George Lindsey made guest appearances on the series reprising their respective roles from The Andy Griffith Show. Denver Pyle and Allan Melvin, who both had roles on The Andy Griffith Show, appeared in Gomer Pyle, but did not reprise their original roles. Denver Pyle, who had played Briscoe Darling in six episodes of The Andy Griffith Show, played tomato farmer Titus Purcell in the Gomer Pyle episode "The Price of Tomatoes." Allan Melvin, who had played Clarence "Doc" Malloy and other antagonists on The Andy Griffith Show, played Sergeant Carter's rival, Staff Sergeant Hacker, for four seasons. Nabors also carried the Gomer Pyle character to fellow CBS series The Lucy Show, in which he made a cameo appearance in a 1966 episode.

Nabors always said he had a hard time watching the show's opening credits, as many of the Marines he was filmed training with were later killed in Vietnam.

Premise
The premise of Gomer Pyle is similar to and perhaps inspired by Andy Griffith's starring role in the Broadway play and film version of No Time for Sergeants, which was based on the Mac Hyman novel of the same title. Like Leonard's other shows, Gomer Pyle was character-driven; the main characters were "accessible" and "engaging," and the supporting characters were often eccentric. In the show's pilot episode, Gomer, a gas-station attendant from Mayberry, joins the Marines. Gomer's naïveté immediately exasperates his drill instructor, Gunnery Sergeant Carter (Frank Sutton). Originally situated in Camp Wilson in North Carolina, the setting was moved to the fictional Camp Henderson in California. The show was a fish-out-of-water piece, which, like its contemporary The Beverly Hillbillies, featured rural characters out of their normal settings. Like other comedies of the 1960s, the show avoided political commentary (especially concerning the Vietnam War) and focused instead on the predicaments that ensued from Gomer's unintentional breaking of the rules or sticking his foot in his mouth.

Among the themes explored were the honesty and "strong family values supposedly inherent in small-town life"; according to author Gerard Jones, Gomer Pyle's basic message was "far simpler than any corporate suburban sitcoms with their lessons in compromise and role-following [...] It said merely that the oldest, most basic, least sophisticated sort of sweetness could redeem even the toughest modern types". Author Elizabeth Hirschman noted that Gomer represented a "uniquely American archetype"—a "large, powerful man physically" with the "simple, honest nature of a child or animal". She also noted that, like stories with characters of such an archetype, Gomer's trusting nature was often taken advantage of, though in the end he "reaps happiness" because of his innocence. In his book Watching M*A*S*H, Watching America, media and communications scholar James Wittebols said that Gomer Pyle illustrated how class differences "supposedly negated or diminished by military training" made themselves apparent in the military world.

Characters
Gomer Pyle (played by Jim Nabors), from Mayberry, North Carolina, is a good-natured and innocent private whose naïveté constantly annoys his drill instructor, Sergeant Carter. Eventually, however, his "unquestioning love and trust of the world" lead those in his platoon to befriend him. His good nature attracts the friendship of women; meanwhile, in so far as Carter's abrasiveness repels women, Gomer is in the position of salvaging numerous social occasions by charming the women whose opinions are important to officers at the Marine base. Gomer was created as a stereotype of a rural American; according to Time, he "wears a gee-whiz expression, spouts homilies out of a lopsided mouth and lopes around uncertainly like a plowboy stepping through a field of cow dung. He is a walking disaster area." Though never promoted beyond private first class during the show's run, Jim Nabors (who played Gomer) was given an honorary promotion to lance corporal in 2001, to corporal in 2007, and then to sergeant in 2013 by the Marines.

Vince Carter (played by Frank Sutton), a gunnery sergeant from Kansas, is Gomer's irritable, abrasive, and socially inept drill instructor (later his platoon sergeant) who is constantly annoyed by Gomer's well-intentioned mistakes. Carter disdains Gomer's country idiosyncrasies ("golly!" "Shazam!" "surprise, surprise, surprise!"). He is also put off by Gomer's expectation that the platoon should be a family, of which Carter is the father figure: As much as Carter wants their working relationship to be temporary, as is common in the military, Gomer expects a life-long friendship, which exasperates Carter. Due to the audience's demand for more family-oriented programming, he eventually revealed his softer side: Carter became a father figure to Gomer as well as his best friend. Sutton stated that his character was created "out of whole cloth for the show" and, as the actor played him "by ear," Carter greatly changed during the first season. Barbara Stuart played his girlfriend "Miss Bunny" for three seasons.

Mark Slade appeared in eight episodes in 1964 in the role of "Eddie" though in the first of those appearances he was billed as "Private Swanson."

Duke Slater (played by Ronnie Schell) is Gomer's friend and platoon-mate. Schell left the show in the fourth season to star in the short-lived show Good Morning, World but returned in the final season as the corporal of Gomer's platoon.

Chuck Boyle (played by Roy Stuart) is Gomer's corporal. He often serves as Carter's conscience and sticks up for Gomer when Sergeant Carter is annoyed over his mistakes. Stuart debuted in the second season and left the show after the fourth season; Boyle was replaced by Duke Slater as corporal for the final season.

Lou-Ann Poovie (played by Elizabeth MacRae) is Gomer's girlfriend. She debuts in the third season as a singer for a nightclub, but leaves the job at Gomer's urging to return home to Turtle Creek, North Carolina, and marry her beau Monroe Efford. In a later episode in the same season, she returns to California and reveals that she called the wedding off. At the end of the episode, she reveals that she wants Gomer to be her boyfriend, to the dismay of Carter and Duke. After she loses her job at the nightclub, Gomer finds her a job as a salesclerk at a record shop.

Legacy
In the song "Nobody Home" from Pink Floyd's 1979 album The Wall, an audio clip of Pyle saying his signature line "Surprise, surprise, surprise!" can be heard. The audio clip, however, is not present in the 1982 film.

In Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film Full Metal Jacket, the nickname "Gomer Pyle" is given to Private Leonard Lawrence (played by Vincent D'Onofrio) as a derogatory term during boot camp, after incurring the drill instructor's wrath for being unable to turn off his idiot's grin and his perceived incompetence.

A brief clip of the show airing on American Forces Vietnam Network television appears during the military hospital scene in the 1994 film Forrest Gump. In the scene, Gump is scolded for watching the show by a fellow soldier who calls it "stupid shit".

In other media
E. Kitzes Knox wrote a novel based on the series, also titled Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. The paperback was published by Pyramid and released in 1966. Jim Nabors recorded Shazam!, which is not a soundtrack of the show but features Jim singing novelty songs in his "Gomer" voice, and released it on the Columbia Records label.

A board game was released in 1964 by Transogram.

A trading card set was published by Fleer in 1965.

Home media
CBS DVD (distributed by Paramount Home Entertainment) has released all five seasons of Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. on DVD in Region 1. All episodes have been fully restored and digitally remastered in full-color, but due to clearance issues, some episodes that feature Nabors (and other cast members) singing have been edited to remove those performances.

On March 10, 2015, CBS DVD (distributed by Paramount) released Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.- The Complete series on DVD in Region 1.

In Region 4, Shock Entertainment has released all five seasons on DVD in Australia.

title: Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.


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Joe Henry

Joseph Lee Henry (born December 2, 1960) is an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer. He has released 15 studio albums and produced multiple recordings for other artists, including three Grammy Award-winning albums.

Early life
Henry was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, the state where his parents, whom he described as devout Christians, were also from. He grew up in Oakland Township, Michigan, and attended Rochester Community Schools. He graduated from Rochester Adams High School, then graduated from the University of Michigan.

1985 to 2005
Henry moved to Brooklyn, New York in 1985 and began performing in local music venues. He released his first album Talk of Heaven in 1986. The album earned him a recording contract with A&M, which subsequently released the albums Murder of Crows in 1989 and Shuffletown in 1990. Shuffletown, produced by T-Bone Burnett, represented a shift in musical direction towards the "alt country" genre. Henry's next two recordings, Short Man's Room (1992) and Kindness of the World (1993), featured members of the country-rock band the Jayhawks. The song "King's Highway" was recorded by Joan Baez in 2003 and Gov't Mule in 2005. For his 1996 album Trampoline, Henry incorporated guitarist Page Hamilton of Helmet and a reviewer at Trouserpress called the album "idiosyncratic broadmindedness."

1999's Fuse was recorded with producers Daniel Lanois and T-Bone Burnett. The album was called an "atmospheric marvel" by one reviewer and Ann Powers of The New York Times wrote: Henry has "found the sound that completes his verbal approach."

Scar, released in 2001, featured jazz musicians Marc Ribot, Brian Blade, Brad Mehldau and saxophonist Ornette Coleman on "Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation." According to AllMusic's Thom Jurek, the album is a "triumph not only for Henry—who has set a new watermark for himself—but for American popular music, which so desperately needed something else to make it sing again."

2003's self-produced Tiny Voices album was Henry's first recording on Epitaph's Anti- label. AllMusic's Jurek described this album as "the sound of....electric guitars in an abandoned yet fully furnished Tiki bar in Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles."

Henry's wife talked him into letting her send Madonna, who is her sister, a demo of his song "Stop," which was reworked and recorded as "Don't Tell Me" (from Madonna's 2000 album Music). Henry's own tango-tinged version of the song appeared on Scar and was featured in an episode of The Sopranos. Henry and his sister-in-law recorded a duet, "Guilty by Association," on the charity album Sweet Relief II: Gravity of the Situation, and collaborated on the songs "Jump" on Confessions on a Dance Floor, "Devil Wouldn't Recognize You" on Hard Candy, and "Falling Free" on MDNA.

In the early 2000s, Henry was an inaugural member of the Independent Music Awards' judging panel to support independent artists.

2006 to present
After producing the Grammy-award-winning album Don't Give Up on Me by Solomon Burke, Henry produced additional records and in 2006 opened up a home studio where he often collaborates with recording engineer Ryan Freeland and Los Angeles-based musicians such as Jay Bellerose, Greg Leisz, David Piltch, Patrick Warren and Keefus Ciancia. In September 2006, Henry and Loudon Wainwright III began composing the music for the Judd Apatow movie Knocked Up in Henry's home studio. Some instrumentals were used as background score for the film while other songs appeared on Wainwright's 2007 Strange Weirdos which Henry produced.

In 2007, Henry released Civilians, which was described as "a rich, acoustic affair that returns us to Henry's rootsier sounds". The final track on the album, "God Only Knows," was used in a "TCM Remembers 2008" TV commercial. Bonnie Raitt's 2012 album Slipstream, which Henry produced, contained versions of two songs from Civilians.

In 2009, Henry released his ninth solo record, Blood from Stars which incorporates orchestral blues with guitarist Marc Ribot, pianist Jason Moran and his son, Levon Henry, on saxophone. The album focuses on facets of blues with a sprinkling of jazz, rock and pop and traces the rugged history of American storytelling."

In May 2011, Henry released the album Reverie with simple acoustic instrumention on guitar, upright bass, piano and drums. "When you listen to Reverie, especially on headphones, you can hear traffic in the background or a neighbor calling her dog. It's not always a pristine recording environment. Henry not only left the windows open at his basement studio, but also put microphones on them." "But there was this singer-songwriter environment, this post-Dylan fallout, of people who think that pages of your diary set to music are songs, and that the more 'honest' songs are, the better they are. And that's the greatest misconception of American popular music: that if you're being honest, you're being entertaining."

In June 2014, Henry released his thirteenth album, Invisible Hour. It was recorded at his LA home studio, The Garfield House, in 2013 with his regular band of musicians (Jay Bellerose, Jennifer Condos, Levon Henry, Greg Leisz, John Smith, and David Piltch). Guests providing backing vocals on the album included The Milk Carton Kids and Lisa Hannigan. Paste magazine described it as "11 impossibly beautiful songs" and "Joe Henry's masterpiece".

In October 2017, Henry released Thrum.

In June 2019 Joe recorded what was intended to be demos of 13 new songs. With only a handful of friends playing in support, Joe entered the studio and tore through these songs with determination and abandon, then went home. The next day he listened and understood that something had transpired that was more than he had bargained for; that the songs as recorded sparked an ember that somehow remained bright and alive before him, moving beyond any sense of expectation he may have held. These raw and wirey songs together construct Joe's 15th studio album titled "The Gospel According To Water", which was released on November 15, 2019.

Reception
Henry has been described as "a modest-selling 'critic's darling' with a reputation for pushing the envelope" and who writes "songs [that] don't fit into an easily defined box" and instead is influenced by folk, blues, jazz, rock and country.

Personal life
Henry married Melanie Ciccone in 1987. They have two children. Melanie is the sister of Madonna.

In 2013, Henry and his brother David released a biography of Richard Pryor, titled Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him.

Joe Henry and his family moved out of their home (and his long-time recording space), The Garfield House, in early 2015.

In May 2019 Joe Henry revealed that a few months earlier he was diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer. He further advised that he has responded well to the treatment he has received, and that his prognosis for now is very encouraging.

Albums

 * Talk of Heaven (Profile, 1986) – digital re-release on Astor Place (1999)
 * Murder of Crows (A&M, 1989)
 * Shuffletown (A&M, 1990)
 * Short Man's Room (Mammoth, 1992)
 * Kindness of the World (Mammoth, 1993)
 * Trampoline (Mammoth, 1996) – recorded in 1994–95
 * Fuse (Mammoth, 1999)
 * Scar (Mammoth, 2001) – recorded in 2000
 * Tiny Voices (Anti-, 2003) – recorded in 2002–03
 * Civilians (Anti-, 2007)
 * Blood from Stars (Anti-, 2009)
 * Reverie (Anti-, 2011)
 * Invisible Hour (earMusic, 2014) – recorded in 2013
 * Shine a Light: Field Recordings from the Great American Railroad with Billy Bragg (Cooking Vinyl, 2016) – live
 * Thrum (earMusic, 2017)
 * The Gospel According to Water (earMusic, 2019)
 * All the Eye Can See (earMusic, 2022)

EPs

 * Fireman's Wedding (1994)

Production credits

 * Strange Angels by Kristin Hersh (co-producer, 1998)
 * I Oughtta Give You a Shot in the Head for Making Me Live in This Dump by Shivaree (co-producer, 1999)
 * Teddy Thompson by Teddy Thompson (co-producer, 2000)
 * Dim Stars, Bright Sky by John Doe (co-producer, 2002)
 * Don't Give Up on Me by Solomon Burke (producer, 2002)
 * Drill a Hole in That Substrate and Tell Me What You See by Jim White (co-producer, 2004)
 * Knuckle Down by Ani DiFranco (co-producer, 2005)
 * The Forgotten Arm by Aimee Mann (producer, 2005)
 * Hope and Desire by Susan Tedeschi (producer, 2005)
 * I've Got My Own Hell to Raise by Bettye LaVette (producer, 2005)
 * I Believe to My Soul by various artists (producer, 2005)
 * Our New Orleans: A Benefit Album for the Gulf Coast by various artists (co-producer, 2005)
 * The River in Reverse by Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint (producer, 2006)
 * Between Daylight and Dark by Mary Gauthier (producer, 2007)
 * Strange Weirdos by Loudon Wainwright III (co-producer, 2007)
 * Sex & Gasoline by Rodney Crowell (producer, 2008)
 * Recovery by Loudon Wainwright III (producer, 2008)
 * The Bright Mississippi by Allen Toussaint (producer, 2009)
 * La Différence by Salif Keita (producer, 2009)
 * A Stranger Here by Ramblin' Jack Elliott (producer, 2009)
 * Genuine Negro Jig by Carolina Chocolate Drops (producer, 2009)
 * The Way of the World by Mose Allison (producer, 2010)
 * I Know I've Been Changed by Aaron Neville (producer, 2010)
 * The Long Surrender by Over the Rhine (producer, 2011)
 * Let Them Talk by Hugh Laurie (producer, 2011)
 * Passenger by Lisa Hannigan (producer, 2011)
 * Weather by Meshell Ndegeocello (co-producer, 2011)
 * Slipstream by Bonnie Raitt (co-producer, 2012)
 * Kin: Songs by Mary Karr & Rodney Crowell by various artists (producer, 2012)
 * Devil In Me by Natalie Duncan (producer, 2012)
 * Tooth & Nail by Billy Bragg (producer, 2013)
 * Didn't It Rain by Hugh Laurie (producer, 2013)
 * Meet Me at the Edge of the World by Over the Rhine (producer, 2013)
 * The Wexford Carols by Caitríona O'Leary (producer, 2014)
 * Broken Bones by Guy Pearce (producer, 2014)
 * Worthy by Bettye LaVette (co-producer, 2015)
 * Dig In Deep by Bonnie Raitt (co-producer, 2016)
 * American Tunes by Allen Toussaint (producer, 2016)
 * Dorado by Son of the Velvet Rat (producer, 2016)
 * Real Midnight by Birds of Chicago (producer, 2016)
 * Lovers and Leavers by Hayes Carll (producer, 2016)
 * I Am the Rain by Chely Wright (producer, 2016)
 * Whistle Down the Wind by Joan Baez (producer, 2018)
 * The Nomad by Guy Pearce (producer, 2018)
 * All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn't Do by The Milk Carton Kids (producer, 2018)
 * There Is No Other by Rhiannon Giddens (producer, 2019)
 * Speak to Me by Julian Lage (producer, 2024)

Songwriting credits

 * "Don't Tell Me" by Madonna (co-writer, 2000; based on his song "Stop")
 * "Hope Against Hope" by Rosanne Cash (co-writer, 2003)
 * "Jump" by Madonna (co-writer, 2005)
 * "Devil Wouldn't Recognize You" by Madonna (co-writer, 2008)
 * "Love and Treachery" by Madeleine Peyroux (co-writer, 2009)
 * "Falling Free" by Madonna (co-writer, 2012)
 * "At the Heart of Me" by Chely Wright (co-writer, 2016)
 * "Holy War" by Chely Wright (co-writer, 2016)
 * "See Me Home" by Chely Wright (co-writer, 2016)

title: Joe Henry