World Summit 2009 Presenters: David Fanning

David Fanning has been executive producer of FRONTLINE since its first season in 1983. In 2009, after 27 seasons and more than 530 films, FRONTLINE is America's longest-running investigative documentary series on television. The series has won all of the major awards for broadcast journalism: thirty-nine Emmys, including a special Emmy award for excellence in documentary filmmaking (2007), twenty-four duPont-Columbia University Awards, thirteen Peabody Awards, and eleven Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards. In 1990 and in 1996, FRONTLINE was recognized with the Gold baton, duPont-Columbia's highest award, for its "total contribution to the world of exceptional television." In 2002, the series was honored with an unprecedented third Gold Baton for its post September 11th coverage, a series of seven hour-long documentaries on the origins and impact of terrorism. And in 2003, "A Dangerous Business," a FRONTLINE/New York Times joint-investigation of the cast-iron pipe making industry was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service.

David Fanning began his filmmaking career as a young journalist in South Africa. His first films, "Amabandla AmaAfrika" (1970) and "The Church and Apartheid" (1972), produced for BBC-TV, dealt with race and religion in his troubled homeland. He came to the U.S. in 1973 and began producing and directing local and national documentaries for KOCE, a public television station in California. His film "Deep South, Deep North" (1973) was a PBS/BBC co-production and the first in a long succession of collaborations between U.S. and European television. In 1977, David Fanning came to WGBH Boston to start the international documentary series WORLD. As executive producer, he produced and presented over fifty films for PBS in five years. With director Antony Thomas, Mr. Fanning produced and co-wrote "Death of a Princess" (1980). Then in 1982, again with Thomas, he produced "Frank Terpil: Confessions of a Dangerous Man," which won the Emmy Award for best investigative documentary.

In 1982, Mr. Fanning began the development of FRONTLINE. The series has worked with well over two hundred producers and as many journalists, covering a wide range of domestic and foreign stories. Its signature has been to combine good reporting with good filmmaking.

With David Fanning's enthusiastic encouragement, one of FRONTLINE's singular achievements has been its embrace of the Internet. In 1995, FRONTLINE developed one of the first deep content web sites in history. By putting interviews, documents and additional editorial materials on the web, the series made its journalism transparent, and changed the nature and content of broadcast journalism. Rather than an ephemeral one-time transmission, the documentaries and all their ancillary materials are now preserved on the series website. In 2009, there are over 85 hours of full-length documentaries streamed on the series website, one of the largest sites of its kind. The site has 50 million page views annually.

In 2001, Mr. Fanning's determination to bring more foreign stories to American audiences led to the creation of FRONTLINE/World, a television magazine-style series of programs designed to encourage a new, younger generation of producers and reporters. The emphasis has been on bringing a largely unreported world to viewers through a series of journeys and encounters. David Fanning sees it as a prototype for the future, and a place to build a community of enterprising journalists.

David Fanning and his wife, the television writer and producer Renata Simone, live in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

[FRONTLINE website]

[A Dangerous Business, 2003]  Pulitzer prize-winning piece.