ITVS in the News

A sampling of coverage from CNN, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and more…

CNN.com: Muslim superhero comics meets resistance in U.S. Naif Al-Mutawa anticipated a struggle when he launched an Islam-inspired comic book series that he hoped would become a symbol of toleration. He worried about the comics being banned in Saudi Arabia – which wound up happening, briefly – and he expected to be challenged by conservatives in Islam, since Al-Mutawa wanted to buck the trend of Islamic culture being directly tied to the Koran. But it wasn’t an Islamic cleric that stalled the series, called “The 99,” after the 99 attributes of Allah, which the superheroes are supposed to embody. It is the American market, and the voices of Islam’s Western critics, that have caused the most problems for “The 99,” says Al-Mutawa, who is the focus of a PBS documentary airing next week. 

New York Times: An American Minority’s Road to Rights It may be the least-publicized revolution of our time but the one whose impact ultimately reaches the furthest, affecting the way our buildings and buses are built, the way our schools are structured, the way our businesses conduct hiring and outfit their work stations. It’s the disability-rights movement, and Lives Worth Living, a Thursday Independent Lens on PBS, reconstructs how it emerged and eventually pushed through the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990.

Los Angeles Times: Donor Unknown review: Common ground beyond nature, nurtureDonor Unknown is a celebration of commonality, of the connections you can't deny: Harrison's kids define themselves by what they share, with one another and with their donor-father — their eyebrows and foreheads, their love of animals, their sense of humor and way of tucking their hair behind their ears. We are all the product of individual circumstances, Donor Unknown says, but you can only nurture what nature provides. 

Wired.com: At Popcorn Hackathon, Coders Team With Filmmakers to Supercharge Web Video “We always talk about this idea of how in the future, filmmakers will need a technology partner almost the way they need an editor today,” said Matthew Meschery, the director of digital initiatives at Independent Television Service. “So there’s kind of this social experiment around collaborating with a coder or technologist … This was an opportunity to put this into practice.”