In America, what you earn depends largely on your success in school. Unfortunately, your success in school depends largely on what your parents earn. It's an intergenerational Catch 22 that's at the heart of modern poverty.
Keep that in mind while looking at the monstrously depressing map up above, which comes courtesy of a new report by the Southern Education Foundation. In 2011, there were 17 states where at least half of all public school students came from low-income families, up from just four in 2000. Across the whole country, 48 percent of kids qualified as low income, up from 38 percent a decade earlier.
To be crystal clear, the researchers were not analyzing poverty rates per se. Rather, they tracked at the percentage of children in each state who received free or reduced school lunches, which are only available to students whose families earn below 185 percent of the poverty line. For a family of four, that amounted to about $41,000 in 2011—a figure that might feel dire in New York City, but less so in New Mexico. In the end, we are talking about families poor enough to get for some amount of federal food help.
More troubling than the strict number of low-income students, however, was the long-term trend. As I noted up above, the number of states handing out cheap and free meals to more than half their students quadrupled in ten years, a point that this Washington Post illustration hammers home vividly. American public school students are becoming poorer.
The reasons why are both complicated and familiar. In an interview with the Post, one of the study's authors pointed to the "2008 recession, immigration and a high birthrate among low-income families," as factors. The changes were happening before the economy collapsed, but the bust exacerbated them.
I think there are a few quick points to take away from these numbers.
First, whenever you hear about "America's failing school," remember these maps. Poverty—or in many cases, near poverty—is the 50 pound backpack dragging down U.S. students.
Second, policy makers and pundits often get worked up about our mediocre performances on international standardized tests. But the reality is that there are vast variations between our students, who are divided by geography and socio-economic class in ways quite unlike children in countries such as Japan or Finland. If schools are still, in a sense, factories, then Massachusetts districts get much better raw material to work with than Texas districts. Suburbs get a leg up on cities. And their results often reflect it. Trying to capture our vast range of educational outcomes in a single ranking misses those nuances.
And finally, the worst thing about these numbers may be that they're a glimpse of the future. Like I said up above, students from low-income families tend to end up parents of low-income families. And on it goes.
Monday, October 14, 2013
How Prisons Change the Balance of Power in America
The 14th Amendment, when combined with the War on Crime, has paradoxically disenfranchised vast swaths of the population and given the rural, white areas surrounding the prisons unforeseen political power.
Lucy Nicholson/ReutersWhat has it really cost the United States to build the world’s most massive prison system?
To answer this question, some point to the nearly two million people who are now locked up in an American prison—overwhelmingly this nation’s poorest, most mentally ill, and least-educated citizens—and ponder the moral costs.Others have pointed to the enormous expense of having more than seven million Americans under some form of correctional supervision and argued that the system is not economically sustainable. Still others highlight the high price that our nation’s already most-fragile communities, in particular, have paid for the rise of such an enormous carceral state. A few have also asked Americans to consider what it means for the future of our society that our system of punishment is so deeply racialized.
With so many powerful arguments being made against our current criminal justice system, why then does it persist? Why haven’t the American people, particularly those who are most negatively affected by this most unsettling and unsavory state of affairs, undone the policies that have led us here? The answer, in part, stems from the fact that locking up unprecedented numbers of citizens over the last forty years has itself made the prison system highly resistant to reform through the democratic process. To an extent that few Americans have yet appreciated, record rates of incarceration have, in fact, undermined our American democracy, both by impacting who gets to vote and how votes are counted.
The unsettling story of how this came to be actually begins in 1865, when the abolition of slavery led to bitter constitutional battles over who would and would not be included in our polity. To fully understand it, though, we must look more closely than we yet have at the year 1965, a century later—a moment when, on the one hand, politicians were pressured into opening the franchise by passing the most comprehensive Voting Rights Act to date, but on the other hand, were also beginning a devastatingly ambitious War on Crime.
From Voting Rights to the War on Crime
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave the federal government a number of meaningful tools with which it could monitor state elections and make sure that states with a particularly grim history of discriminatory voting practices would make no voting policy without its approval. The act had been intended to combat the intimidation and legal maneuvers—such as passage of poll taxes, literacy requirements, and so-called “Grandfather clauses”— that had left only 5 percent of black Americans, by the 1940s, able to vote, despite passage of the 14th and 15th amendments after the Civil War.
But the very same year that Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he also signed another Act into law: the Law Enforcement Administration Act (LEAA), a piece of legislation that, well before crime rates across America hit record highs, created the bureaucracy and provided the funding that would enable a historically and internationally unparalleled war on crime.
So, at the very same moment that the American Civil Rights Movement had succeeded in newly empowering African Americans in the political sphere by securing passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, America’s white politicians decided to begin a massive new war on crime that would eventually undercut myriad gains of the Civil Rights Movement—particularly those promised by the Voting Rights Act itself.
From the War on Crime to Mass Incarceration
Thanks to LEAA and America’s post-1965 commitment to the War on Crime, and more specifically, thanks to the dramatic escalation of policing in cities across the nation as well as the legal changes wrought by an ever-intensifying War on Drugs, between 1970 and 2010 more people ended up in prison in this country than anywhere else in the world. At no other point in this nation’s recorded past had the economic, social, and political institutions of a country become so bound up with the practice of punishment.
By the year 2007, 1 in every 31 U.S. residents lived under some form of correctional supervision. By 2010, more than 7.3 million Americans had become entangled in the criminal justice system and 2 million of them were actually locked up in state and federal prisons. By 2011, 39,709 people in Louisiana alone were living behind bars and 71,579 were either in jail, on probation, or on parole. And this was by no means a “southern” phenomenon. In Pennsylvania, 51,638 people were actually locked behind bars in 2011 and a full 346,268 lived under some form of correctional control by that year.
The nation’s decision to embark on a massive War on Crime in the mid-1960s has had a profound impact on the way that American history evolved over the course of the later 20th and into the 21st centuries. As we now know from countless studies, such staggering rates of incarceration have proven bothsocially devastating and economically destructive for wide swaths of this country—particularly those areas of America inhabited by people of color. This nation’s incarceration rate was hardly color blind. Eventually one in nine young black men were locked up in America and, by 2010, black women and girls too were being locked up at a record rate.
Diluting our Democracy
So how did this overwhelmingly racialized mass incarceration end up mattering to our very democracy? How is it that this act of locking up so many Americans, particularly Americans of color, itself distorted our political process and made it almost impossible for those most affected by mass incarceration to eliminate the policies that have undergirded it at the ballot box? The answer lies back in the 1870s and in a little-known caveat to the 14th Amendment.
Ratifying the 14th Amendment was one of Congress’s first efforts to broaden the franchise after the Civil War. A key worry among northern politicians, however, was that since white southerners could no longer rely on the notorious “three-fifths” rule to pad their own political power, they would now try to inflate their census population for the purposes of representation by counting African Americans as citizens while denying them to access the ballot.
So, to prevent any power grab on the part of ex-Confederates, Congress decided to add so-called Section 2 to the 14th Amendment. Firstly it stipulated that any state that “denied” the vote “to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States” would have its representation downsized in proportion to the number of individuals being disenfranchised. Secondly, Section 2 allowed for the disenfranchisement of otherwise eligible citizens—without affecting representation—if they had participated “in rebellion, or other crime.” The idea here was to keep those who had committed crimes against the Union and those who might still be in rebellion against the Union from wielding political power in the wake of the Civil War.
This latter provision of Section 2, however, proved damaging to black freedom—political and otherwise. Almost overnight, white southerners began policing African Americans with new zeal and charging them with “crimes” that had never before been on the books. Within a decade of the Civil War, thousands of African Americans found themselves leased out and locked up on prison plantations and in penitentiaries.
Southern whites, of course, profited from these new laws politically as well as economically. By making so many blacks into convicts, whites could deny them the right to vote under Section 2 without undermining their state’s census population for the purposes of political representation. And, because of another clause of another Amendment, the 13th, which allowed the continuation of slavery for those who had committed a crime, these same white southerners were able to force thousands of newly imprisoned black southerners to work for free under the convict lease system.
Fast-forward 100 years when, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, another War on Crime began that also, almost overnight, led to the mass imprisonment of this nation’s African American citizens.
In 1974, as the numbers of imprisoned Americans was rising precipitously and when states once again began to disfranchise individuals with criminal convictions, the U.S. Supreme Court was asked in a landmark case, Richardson v. Ramirez, to rule explicitly on the issue of whether it was constitutional under the 14th Amendment to disfranchise those serving, or who have served, time in prison. The court did the same thing that many southern states did after the Civil War—it interpreted Section A of the 14th amendment very, very differently than it was intended to be interpreted. It, too, decided that disenfranchisement would be permitted when a citizen was convicted of any crime, without regard to whether such crimes might be thought of as ideologically analogous to rebellion or were more likely to affect African Americans than others.
Notably, Justice Thurgood Marshall dissented vigorously in this case. The purpose of Section 2, he argued, was clearly to enfranchise, not disenfranchise, former slaves and their descendants. Marshall’s fellow members of the bench, though, felt that their decision would not have any discriminatory effect because the nation already had the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to handle this issue.
And yet, the negative impact of Richardson v. Ramirez on African American voting was vast and immediate. By the year 2000, 1.8 million African Americans had been barred from the polls because so many felon disfranchisement laws had been passed in states across the country after 1974. Not only were their votes not counted in that year’s hotly contested presidential election, but by the next presidential election a full ten states, according to The Sentencing Project, had "African American disenfranchisement rates above 15%," which clearly affected the outcome of that contest as well.
By 2006, 48 out of 50 states had passed disfranchisement laws and, with more than 47 million Americans (1/4 of the adult population) having criminal records by that year, the nation’s political process had been fundamentally altered. By 2011, 23.3% of African Americans in Florida, 18.3% of the black population of Wyoming, and 20.4% of African Americans in Virginia were barred from the ballot.
According to sociologists Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, not only did African Americans pay a high price for the disfranchisement policies that accompanied the nation’s War on Crime, but so did liberal voters in general. According to theirresearch, such policies “affected the outcome of seven U.S. Senate races from 1970 to 1998 . . . [and] in each case the Democratic candidate would have won rather than the Republican victor” and these outcomes likely “prevented Democratic control of the Senate from 1986 to 2000” as well.
Distorting our Democracy
Disfranchising thousands of voters is only part of the story of how mass incarceration has distorted American democracy. Today, just as it did more than a hundred years earlier, the way the Census calculates resident population also plays a subtle but significant role. As ex-Confederates knew well, prisoners would be counted as residents of a given county, even if they could not themselves vote: High numbers of prisoners could easily translate to greater political power for those who put them behind bars.
With the advent of mass incarceration, and as the number of people imprisoned not only rose dramatically, but also began moving urbanites of color into overwhelmingly white rural counties that housed prisons, the political process was again distorted. In short, thanks to this process that we now call “prison- gerrymandering,” overwhelmingly white and Republican areas of the United States that built prisons as the War on Crime escalated got more political power, whereas areas of country where policing was particularly concentrated and aggressive, areas in which levels of incarceration were, as a result, staggering, lost political power.
Consider research by the Prison Policy Initiative showing how voters across the country gain political power from housing a penal facility. In Powhatan County,Virginia 41% of the 5th Board of Supervisors District that was drawn after the 2000 Census were actually people in prison and in both the First and Third Supervisory Districts of Nottoway County, approximately ¼ of their population comes from large prisons within the county. In the case of Southampton County, such prison-based gerrymandering means that votes of those citizens who live there are worth almost more than twice as much as votes cast in other districts that have the required number of actual residents.
In Michigan as well, mass incarceration has meant distorted democracy. A full four state senate districts drawn after the 2000 Census (17, 19, 33 and 37), and a full five house districts (65, 70, 92, 107 and 110) meet federal minimum population requirements only because they claim prisoners as constituents. Similarly in Pennsylvania, no fewer than eight state legislative districts would comply with the federal "one person, one vote" civil rights standard if non-voting state and federal prisoners in those districts were not counted as district residents.
Why We Should Care
As Americans go to the polls this November to vote on criminal justice issues that directly affect our lives—ranging from proposals to decriminalize marijuana, to roll back three strikes laws, to fund more prison construction—the massive carceral state that we are trying to shape at the ballot box has already distorted our democracy. Americans’ power to even rethink, let alone undo, the policies and practices that have led to mass incarceration via the franchise has been severely compromised—in no small part due to the fact that the parties that benefitted the most from the rise of this enormous carceral state are now empowered, seemingly in perpetuity, by its sheer size and scope.
There are, of course, other ways to dismantle the carceral state. Indeed, history shows us that we ended the brutal convict leasing system of the Post-Civil War era not by going to the polls but by grassroots and legal activism. Nevertheless, we should all be concerned about the ways mass incarceration has eroded our democracy. Even if we don’t care about the record rate of imprisonment in this country—despite its myriad ugly consequences, its unsustainable cost, and its particularly devastating fallout on communities of color—when the principle of “one person, one vote” no longer has real meaning in a society, and when political power is no longer attained via its people but rather through a manipulation of their laws, we must all question the future of our nation
Monday, October 7, 2013
What the U.S. Government Has to Do With Your Popcorn Shrimp
The shutdown again offers a window into the workings of dry government agencies: 90 percent of America's seafood imports are now going uninspected.
Flickr/jeffreywIt’s day four of the US government shutdown and imported food Americans are eating is passing through with little of the inspection it’s normally given.
Thanks to the shutdown, food safety inspectors at the US Food and Drug Administration, which monitors 80% of the US’s food supply, are on furlough until the budget gets passed, as Food Safety News reports.
That means the FDA isn’t carrying out some of its most critical responsibilities. First is the FDA’s oversight of food imports. The furlough means more than 90% of the foreign seafood Americans eat is coming through unchecked, as well as half the fruit and one-fifth of the vegetables.
One of the big ways the FDA protects consumers is by blocking shipments from companies with a history of tainted foods, monitoring them through what it calls ”red alerts.” These include categories like filthiness (meaning excrement),fruits covered in pesticides, drug-doped seafood, dairy products with melamine, dietary supplements that might have mad cow disease, e. coli-containing seafood and candy laced with lead.
The FDA blocks shipments from tens of thousands such violators. Now, however, there’s no one to stop those foods from finding their way onto American plates.
Take shrimp for example. Americans now eat 4.2 pounds (1.9 kg) a year, way more than any other type of seafood. Some 90% of that is imported, much of it from Thailand, Indonesia, India and Bangladesh:
"Exploitative Labor Practices in the Global Shrimp Industry," Accenture
So consistently has shrimp imported from those four countries arrived alreadydecomposed, covered in filth or teeming with salmonella, that FDA flags all shipments as “red alerts” (companies are exempted only after demonstrating health standard compliance).
That means Americans might unknowingly be chowing down on red-alert shrimp. If that were to cause a nationwide outbreak of, say, salmonella, the FDA would normally step in to prevent people from eating more.
Not now. Though the FDA says it will continue to act on “high-risk recalls” (pdf), Caroline Smith DeWaal, the food safety director of a non-profit group called the Center for Science in the Public Interest, doubts that’s sufficient.
“I don’t have confidence that they have the capacity to recognize an emergency and respond to it,” DeWaal told the Christian Science Monitor.
Note that county health authorities are still managing local problems, such as thesalmonella outbreak that’s killed one person in Kentucky so far.
But county officials can’t do much when the outbreak comes from shipped food, as opposed to shoddy hygiene. The food-related outbreaks cross borders too, such as the outbreak of a rare strain of Hepatitis A that sickened 162 people in 10 states across the US throughout the summer. The FDA traced the strain to a Townsend Farms Organic Antioxidant Blend sold at Costco, prompting a recall. After the FDA isolated the culprit, berries imported from Turkey, it placed the responsible company on red alert .
Friday, October 4, 2013
The Big Chill
Why American refrigerators are so huge: An Object Lesson.
Fridges wait in a Louisiana landfill after Katrina (Flickr/usdagov)When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, the loss of electricity throughout the city ruined refrigerators even in neighborhoods barely affected by the storm as maggots infested the rotting food left behind in them by fleeing residents. When evacuees returned, they pushed those refrigerators out to the street in the hope that they would eventually be carried away. Many who returned also wrote long, angry messages about the inadequacy of the government’s response to the disaster on the front of these appliances. American refrigerators are just about the only refrigerators in the world large enough to serve as impromptu billboards. They are also inexpensive enough that citizens of all classes either own or have access to one. A fridge as billboard, after Katrina in New Orleans (Flickr/Infrogmation)Americans have the biggest refrigerators in the world — 17.5 cubic feet of volume on average. The size of our refrigerators is followed closely by Canadians while the rest of the world lags far behind. Since our refrigerators run day and night, they use more energy than any other household appliance, which means their size has ramifications for the planet’s rate of global warming. However, the enormous popularity of refrigerators in the United States is an indicator of the value of refrigeration both for preserving the food we buy and for the convenience that comes when such huge machines are stocked. The fact that we put perishable food in the refrigerator (even sometimes when it doesn’t belong there) suggests that we still remember refrigeration’s most basic advantage: to prevent food from spoiling before we consume it.
While the usefulness of refrigerators explains their prevalence, it does not explain their size. Most people would agree that fresh food tastes better than anything that's been kept in a refrigerator for even a short amount of time. So why then would anyone want a weeks' worth of perishable food stored in their kitchen at one time? Are Americans slaves to convenience? While our large refrigerators do limit the number of shopping trips we have to take, they also make it possible for us to consume a much greater variety of foods than we ever did without them in our kitchens.
Americans had an early collective desire for cold things. Starting in the early nineteenth century, entrepreneurs cut ice from lakes and streams in New England and elsewhere; then transported it to warmer climes to sell for a profit. While it took the development of mechanical refrigeration later in the century to coin the term, this was the start of the American “natural ice” industry. In order to make such an industry possible, ice merchants had to develop a market, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Over the course of the nineteenth century, ice went from a luxury to a necessity for the vast majority of Americans and has remained so ever since. In the early twentieth century, the market for ice developed into a market for large refrigerators to keep all the foodstuffs that ice once preserved. Indeed, a refrigerator is called an icebox because before the development of household refrigeration machines during the 1920s the ice delivery man would drop a block in your “refrigerator” and you would have to try to keep the door closed to prevent it from melting too quickly. Flickr/1950sUnliIn the course of developing an ice industry, Americans also developed the world’s most efficient cold chains, which now make the stocking of our enormous refrigerators possible. A cold chain is a supply chain that transports and stores temperature sensitive perishable goods. The most visible manifestation of the cold chain is the electric household refrigerator, but that is just its end point. Cold storage warehouses, refrigerated trucks – even the displays in grocery stores – are all part of this poorly understood infrastructure. Perishable goods travel from nearly every point on the globe to nearly every other point, refrigerated at every step of the way.
As cold chains became longer and more complex, having a big refrigerator became increasingly important for taking advantage of the opportunity that this new infrastructure brought. “Proper refrigeration is today an ever increasing necessity,” wrote the Frigidaire refrigerator company in a cookbook it distributed to housewives in 1929:
The rapid growth of population in cities and urban areas has brought dependence upon distant centers of food supply. Meat, for example, travels a great distance before it finally reaches the home. Fresh fruits, vegetables, poultry, milk, butter, eggs and other food products in very few cases enter the home directly from the farm. It is therefore vitally important, with this complex distribution of food, that every home provides proper refrigeration.
Refrigeration in the middle of the cold chain, however, lagged behind the household variety at its end. A real refrigerated railway car (as opposed to one that depended on ice in any fashion), for example, was not perfected until the 1950s. The refrigerated shipping container – which makes it possible for Americans to buy perishables from other hemispheres, let alone continents – is even more recent than that.
Because the average American family goes grocery shopping once a week, a gigantic refrigerator is required to keep all the perishables they acquire on that trip. Household refrigerators differ greatly from country to country because the characteristics that citizens in different countries want in their refrigerators are reflections of their cultures so at this point in history once weekly shopping trips is an almost uniquely American habit. While Americans and Canadians want storage capacity, European countries are generally more concerned with energy efficiency or the cost of their operation. Since Americans have always had abundant natural resources (like food), a large refrigerator has become closely identified around the world with the American way of life.
While large refrigerators are a recent development, ice and refrigeration have actually played an oversized role in American culture for a very long time. Before refrigerators, American iceboxes kept our food cold, at least as long as nobody opened them too often. “Who ever heard of an American without an icebox?,” wrote the British travel writer Winifred James in 1914. “It is his country’s emblem. It asserts his nationality as conclusively as the Stars and Stripes afloat from his roof-tree, besides being much more useful in keeping his butter cool.” “The Hard Times Refrigerator,” sold by the Boston Scientific Refrigerator in 1877 for people who were facing difficult economic circumstances was nothing but a wooden chest big enough to store fifty pounds of ice.
The drawbacks of using ice as a source of cold for food preservation were numerous. Iceboxes had to be scrubbed out regularly. Since ice melts, iceboxes were dependent upon a steady supply of it being delivered to their kitchens each day. Opening the door to the icebox too often sped up the inevitable melting. Yet even poor families owned iceboxes because the convenience of even far-from-perfect refrigeration made them a household necessity.
The first commercially viable electric refrigerator was the Domelre, a small air-cooled box that customers could place on top of their existing iceboxes. The refrigeration pioneer Fred Wolf invented it in 1913, towards the end of a career building large-scale refrigeration plants for a variety of commercial enterprises. By the 1920s, the practical considerations associated with household refrigeration were mostly resolved. And once the kinks were worked out, everybody wanted a refrigerator of their own. The market for refrigerators even grew during the Great Depression. As a result, mechanical refrigerator sales in the United States grew at a faster pace than anywhere else in the world, saturating the market by the end of World War II. The speed of their adoption was faster than a host of other comparable household technologies, including the clothes washer and the color television.
In today’s global economy, more people around the world aspire to emulate America’s lifestyle and that means an increased demand for refrigeration. In China, it is widely believed that cold drinks are bad for the stomach, yet Chinese refrigerators are still growing in size with the country’s increasing affluence. There is also an enormous potential for the number of refrigerators in China to grow further. As of 2005, only 12 percent of rural Chinese families owned refrigerators. In urban areas that figure was 80 percent. This leaves plenty of room to expand the reach of refrigerators even in China’s developed areas. Industrialized production has made it possible for more Chinese to buy refrigerators. The longest and most efficient cold chains in human history have made it possible for the Chinese to stock ever-larger refrigerators with perishable goods from around the world. Flickr/reader of the packUnfortunately, this logistical triumph has serious consequences for the future of the planet. In 2009, the New York Times published a story about people who were foregoing refrigerators for the sake of a greener planet. “Refrigerator lust is one of the things driving huge energy-use increases in the developing world,” wrote one blogger quoted in that article. “A great deal of what’s in your fridge absolutely does NOT need to be there.” While technically true, imagine life without meat or ice cubes or cold milk or cold anything for that matter. Imagine never being able to preserve perishable packaged food once it’s opened. Certainly many people live without refrigeration today, but their diets are not nearly as varied and sophisticated as those with access to the end of a cold chain. More importantly, refrigeration all along the cold chain helps prevent food waste, a huge contributor to global warming all by itself.
As more and more people around the world are gaining access to refrigerators, now is a good time to consider the importance of this technology beyond its mere presence in our kitchens. Thanks to the efficiencies associated with the modern cold chain, almost every American can now afford to eat foods out of season, or foods of all kinds shipped in from far away. Only needing to go shopping once each week may seem petty in the great scheme of things. After all, what’s another day at the market compared to the fate of the Earth? Luckily, the sustainability vs. convenience dilemma is not an either/or proposition. “Sustainable growth in refrigeration and air conditioning should provide the maximum growth of benefits with the minimization of other impacts,” argues the refrigerating engineer Robert Heap. In other words, society's goal should be to maintain the maximum level of convenience for people, preserving as much food as possible. We can still make a wide variety of perishable food readily available around the world, without forcing consumers to give up too much for the sake of the environment. As household refrigerators are becoming more energy efficient all the time, whatever sacrifices that do need to be made will only decrease over time.
The size of our refrigerators, like the food we keep inside them, tells us something about our culture, our lifestyle and our values. If we better appreciate the importance of refrigerators in both the past and the present, then we can place their few adverse effects in their proper context. While refrigerators require energy, so does producing food in the first place or just driving to the supermarket. If food already travels a great distance to reach our homes, then we are lucky to have lots of space in which to preserve it.
BBC Worldwide today announces that the special 50th Anniversary episode of Doctor Who, the world’s longest running and most successful sci-fi series will, for the first time ever, be broadcast simultaneously to millions of viewers worldwide in a global simulcast on 23rd November 2013.
From Canada to Colombia, Brazil to Botswana and Myanmar to Mexico, fans in at least 75 countries spanning six continents will be able to enjoy the episode in 2D and 3D* at the same time as the UK broadcast, with more countries expected to be confirmed within the next month. The US, Australia and Canada have also signed up for the simulcast which will be shown in numerous countries across Europe, Latin America and Africa. In addition to Matt Smith and Jenna Coleman, the one-off special, entitled The Day of the Doctor stars former Time Lord David Tennant as well as Billie Piper, and John Hurt.
On top of the worldwide TV broadcast, hundreds of cinemas in the UK and across the world also plan to screen the hotly anticipated special episode simultaneously in full 3D, giving fans the opportunity to make an event of the occasion and be part of a truly global celebration for the iconic British drama series. Details about tickets for the anniversary screening will be announced in due course.
Tim Davie, CEO of BBC Worldwide comments: “Few TV shows can still lay claim to being appointment viewing but Doctor Who takes this to another level. In its 50th Anniversary year we wanted to create a truly international event for Doctor Who fans in as many countries as possible and the simultaneous broadcast and cinema screening of the special across so many countries will make for a fitting birthday tribute to our Time Lord.”
Steven Moffat, Showrunner for Doctor Who and Executive Producer of the 50th Anniversary episode adds: “The Doctor has always been a time traveller - now he's travelling time zones. On the 23rd of November, it won't be the bad guys conquering the Earth - everywhere it will be The Day of the Doctor!”
The free-to-air 3D coverage will be available to those with access to a 3D TV set and to the BBC’s HD Red Button service. This is part of the BBC’s two-year trial experimenting with 3D production and distribution, which has also included selected coverage from Wimbledon 2012 and the London 2012 Olympic Games.
The 50th Anniversary weekend for Doctor Who in November will also see over 20,000 fans gather at London’s ExCel for the official celebration event which will feature appearances from cast old and new including Matt Smith and former Doctors Sylvester McCoy, Colin Baker and Tom Baker. Further information on the event can be found at www.doctorwho.tv
Since 1963 Doctor Who has been one of the best loved dramas and certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most successful sci-fi series ever. The show has received numerous awards across its 50 years and has seen huge commercial success with over 10 million DVDs and 8 million action figures sold globally. It is also the number one BBC show on iTunes in the UK. BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the UK broadcaster distributes Doctor Who to over 200 territories across the world.
