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Bill Moyers and Ken Burns Are Back on the PBS Schedule

Bill Moyers will again have a regular presence on PBS on a Friday-night public-affairs series, while the documentarian Ken Burns, 53, has agreed to work for the public broadcaster for 15 more years, the network announced on Saturday. It also revealed the slate for its “America at a Crossroads” series of documentaries, scheduled for April.

Mr. Moyers, 72, has appeared only occasionally on PBS since stepping down in 2004 from his previous program, “Now With Bill Moyers.” That program, which continued without him, became a flashpoint in the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s debate with PBS over whether PBS programming was politically balanced.

The first episode of “Bill Moyers Journal” — the same name of his series in the 1970s — which was announced on Saturday and begins in April, will examine the role of the press prior to the Iraq invasion.

Mr. Burns’s 14-hour program on World War II will be broadcast in September.

PBS also unveiled the titles of 9 of the 11 documentaries that will make up its weeklong “America at a Crossroads” series in April, examining challenges confronting the United States since Sept. 11. Among the filmmakers was an unusual name: Karl Zinsmeister, the chief domestic policy adviser to President Bush and a producer, with his wife Ann, of “Warriors,” a close-up portrait of the daily life of United States Army soldiers in Iraq. The documentary was written and directed by Ed Robbins.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting initially financed “Warriors” when Mr. Zinsmeister, who has defended the war in Iraq in books and magazine articles, was the longtime editor in chief of The American Enterprise magazine. When he was named to the White House position last May, “he recused himself” from completing the documentary, said Jeff Bieber, one of the series’s executive producers.

Other films that made the cut include a portrait of Richard N. Perle, the former Bush administration adviser and Iraq war advocate, who narrates a documentary in which he confronts his critics, as well as a “Frontline” co-production that takes a critical look at the effort to train Iraqi forces; a profile of the Muslim dissident Irshad Manji; and an examination of Islam in Indonesia, produced by New York Times Television.

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