More than a year before Donald Trump criticized Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) in a tweet on Saturday for ignoring his Baltimore district’s “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” PBS aired a documentary titled Rat Film about the city’s rodent problem.
The Baltimore Sun reported on February 26, 2018, that the documentary “about Baltimore’s rodent fight” was scheduled “to air on PBS” that evening:
The Sun reviewed the documentary in an article titled “‘Rat Film’ highlights Baltimore’s rat warfare, urban planning failures,” five months earlier in September 2017, four months after it premiered at the Maryland Film Festival:
“With rats and urban planning and all the other things the film goes into, there was an incredible wealth of material out there, such as Dawn Day Biehler’s Pests in the City and Antero Pietila’s Not in My Neighborhood, and so it was really a matter of following a path that had been charted by the generous scholarship, histories, and experience of others that came before me. The film is a documentation of me trying to make sense of that path,” filmmaker Theo Anthony told PBS in 2018.
Asked by PBS if there was “anything you learned while researching and making Rat Film that really surprised you?” Anthony responded, “I wouldn’t call it surprising necessarily, but the ways in which all of these seemingly different moments in history—pest control, eugenics, urban planning—seemed to dovetail in the same institutions and ideologies was certainly unexpected.”