 | | | | | PROGRAMME INFO | | | |
| | | Radio 4's award-winning current affairs documentary series investigates major issues at home and abroad.
The programme combines vivid reportage and rigorous analysis to assess the impact of policy and events on people's lives - and holds to account those who are responsible. | | | | | LISTEN AGAIN | | | |
|
|
| | Presenters | | | |
|  | | | | File on 4 is fiercely independent. Based in Manchester, we pride ourselves in adding a touch of grit to the stories of the day. We spend a lot of time on the road, testing Government policies and expert theories by talking to the people who experience them as everyday day reality. Our approach is invariably sceptical, but always fair. We avoid the answers that come easily, realising that life is more complex than a sound-bite, and we leave the listener to be the final judge.
Jenny Cuffe | | | | |
| | | | | | PROGRAMME DETAILS | | | |
|  | | Mid-Term Blues?
View the transcript for this programme
While Washington is talking of little but war, there are elections underway in America which will decide the future of the Bush team's political agenda. In 4 weeks' time, the US will vote for a new Congress and for control of the Senate.
Public attention is focussed on president George Bush as Commander-in-Chief, rather than on the woeful condition of the country's economy and the particular embarrassment of fraud and sleaze allegations which have begun to stick to members of his Administration. Iraq has drowned all this out.
Joan Claybrook of consumer interest group Public Citizen told File On 4: "The corporate crime wave was dominating the newspapers and on television and they had to change the subject. The only option was war. It has sucked all the air out of the medi and so it has trumped all these other issues."
Reporter Gerry Northam has investigated serious charges of corporate malpractice andinsider-trading against two highly-placed Bush appointees, the Secretaryof the US Army, and the man running the President's new Task Forcepolicing the very area of business ethics.
As one rallies the troops, the other has the more fundamental problem ofrebuilding the shattered confidence at the very heart of America's economy.
File on 4 is broadcast at 20:00 BST on Tuesday 8 October and repeated on Sunday 13 October at 17:00 BST.
| | |
RELATED LINKS
Public Citizen
The BBC is not responsible for the content of any external websites
| |
| | |
