On April 13, the Time Warner subsidiary is set to answer claims that in 2008, Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel featured a report titled “Children of Industry” that was a “hoax,” full of scenes that in the words of one HBO stringer, were "fabricated" or "dramatized."
The plaintiff in the case is Mitre Sports International, which manufactures and sells sporting equipment and is objecting to HBO’s depiction of young children in India hand-stitching Mitre-branded soccer balls for pennies or less in order to pay off their parents’ debts. According to Mitre, it has interviewed the children shown and they have admitted that they were paid by producers to pretend to be child laborers.
An HBO spokesperson maintains that the case is “without merit,” but in May 2014, a judge found there was enough evidence to let a jury decide whether Mitre was defamed by the broadcast. Now, in the weeks preceding trial, HBO has been working furiously to quash a trial subpoena of HBO chairman and CEO Richard Plepler and limit the fallout of a public spectacle that could introduce evidence that HBO employees lied on visa applications to get into India, looked the other way when one of its researchers warned about showing abused kids at the hands of a corporate master, “doctored” interviews with a child labor expert and U.S. government official, and set up a phony “cross talk” between Gumbel and correspondent Bernard Goldberg (a frequent media critic on Fox News) who “had never watched the show seen by viewers.” (Just like leslee udwin and BBC showed a different version of India's daughter to officials and different version to the world)
The idea for the “Children of Industry” report is credited to Real Sports coordinating producer Joe Perskie, who became interested in the manufacturing of soccer balls during the 2002 World Cup. Along with Zehra Mamdani, another Real Sports production assistant, the two conducted research in 2006 and 2007. They talked to Kailash Satyarthi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who is an expert in child labor, and focused on the Indian cities of Meerut and Jalandhar.
