In the United States the public broadcaster’s initial reluctance to show the film—it was feared to be too “right wing”—became controversial. PBS finally broadcast the film in September 1986 as a special episode of “Firing Line,” the programme produced by the conservative columnist and National Review editor William Buckley, and followed the broadcast with a debate between Buckley, the historian Robert Conquest, and the journalists Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times and Christopher Hitchens, then of The Nation. Much of the debate had nothing to do with the famine itself. Hitchens brought
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