Fred Silverman

Fred Silverman (born September 13, 1937) is an American television executive and producer. He worked as an executive at all of the Big Three television networks, and was responsible for bringing to television such programs as the series Scooby-Doo (1969–present), All in the Family (1971–1979), The Waltons (1972–1981), and Charlie's Angels (1976–1981), as well as the miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man (1976), Roots (1977) and Shōgun (1980). For his success in programing wildly popular shows, Time magazine declared him "the man with the Golden gut" in 1977.

Biography

Early life and career

Silverman was born in New York City. He graduated from Syracuse University, where he was a member of Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, and then earned a Master's degree from the Ohio State University. He went to work for WGN-TV in Chicago, Illinois, overseeing program development and children's programming, as well as at WPIX in New York City. His masters thesis analyzed ten years of ABC programming and was so good it got him hired as an executive at CBS at the age of 25 in 1963. There, he took over responsibility for all daytime network programming and later, took charge of all of entertainment programming, day and night. Silverman married his assistant, Cathy Kihn, and they had a daughter, Melissa, and son, William.

Hacking Democracy

Hacking Democracy is the 2006 documentary film broadcast on HBO and created by producer / directors Russell Michaels and Simon Ardizzone and producer Robert Carrillo Cohen and executive producers Sarah Teale & Sian Edwards. Filmed over three years it documents American citizens investigating anomalies and irregularities with 'e-voting' (electronic voting) systems that occurred during the 2000 and 2004 elections in the U.S.A., especially in Volusia County, Florida. The film investigates the flawed integrity of electronic voting machines, particularly those made by Diebold Election Systems, exposing previously unknown backdoors in the Diebold trade secret computer software. The film culminates dramatically in the on-camera hacking of the in-use / working Diebold election system in Leon County, Florida - the same computer voting system which has been used in actual American elections across thirty-three states.

In 2007 Hacking Democracy was nominated for an Emmy award for Outstanding Long Form Investigative Journalism.