As PBS’ premier public affairs series, Frontline continues this February with more incisive documentaries covering the scope and complexity of the human, social and political experience. Look for it Tuesdays at 9 p.m.

• Feb. 1 — Post Mortem
  Every day, nearly 7,000 people die in America. And when these deaths happen suddenly, or under suspicious circumstances, we assume there will be a thorough investigation, just like we see on CSI. But the reality is very different. In over 1,300 counties across America, elected coroners, many with no medical or scientific background, are in charge of death investigations. Nationwide there is a severe shortage of competent forensic pathologists to do autopsies. The rate of autopsies—the gold standard of death investigation—has plummeted over the decades. As a result, not only do murderers go free and innocent people go to jail, but the crisis in death investigation in America is also a threat to public health. FRONTLINE correspondent Lowell Bergman reports the results of a joint investigation with ProPublica, NPR, and the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley.

• Feb. 8— Digital Nation
  Over a single generation, the Web and digital media have remade nearly every aspect of modern culture, transforming the way we work, learn, and connect in ways that we're only beginning to understand. FRONTLINE producer Rachel Dretzin (Growing up Online) teams up with one of the leading thinkers of the digital age, Douglas Rushkoff (The Persuaders, Merchants of Cool), to continue to explore life on the virtual frontier. The film is the product of a unique collaboration with visitors to the Digital Nation Web site, who for the past year have been able to react to the work in progress and post their own stories online. Dretzin and her team report from the front lines of digital culture-from love affairs blossoming in virtual worlds, to the thoroughly wired classrooms of the future, to military bases where the Air Force is fighting a new form of digital warfare. Along the way, they begin to map the critical ways that technology is transforming us, and what we may be learning about ourselves in the process.

• Feb. 15—Sex Slaves
  An estimated half-million women are trafficked annually for the purpose of sexual slavery. The women are kidnapped — or lured by traffickers who prey on their dreams of employment abroad — then they are "exported" to Europe, the Middle East, the United States and elsewhere, where they are sold to pimps, drugged, terrorized, locked in brothels and raped repeatedly. In Eastern Europe, since the fall of communism, sex trafficking has become the fastest growing form of organized crime, with Moldova and Ukraine widely seen as the centers of the global trade in women and girls. FRONTLINE presents a unique hidden-camera look at this world of sexual slavery, talking with traffickers and their victims, and exposing the government indifference that allows the abuses to continue virtually unchecked. "Sex Slaves" also follows the remarkable journey of one man determined to find his trafficked wife by posing as a trafficker himself to buy back her freedom.

• Feb. 22—Revolution in Cairo
  FRONTLINE dispatches teams to Cairo, going inside the youth movement that helped light the fire on the streets. We follow the “April 6th” group, which two years ago began making a bold use of the Internet for their underground resistance—tactics that led to jail and torture for many of their leaders. Now, starting with the “Day of Rage,” we witness those same leaders plot strategy and head into “Liberation Square” to try to bring down President Mubarak. Also in this hour, veteran Middle East correspondent Charles Sennott of GlobalPost lands in Cairo for FRONTLINE to take a hard look at Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood—the most well-organized and powerful of the country’s opposition groups—as a new fight for power in Egypt begins to takes shape.

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