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Morton Silverstein, Documentarian Who Explored Social Ills, Dies at 86

Morton Silverstein, in an undated photograph.

Morton Silverstein, an Emmy Award-winning documentarian whose probing television films tackled a wide range of social injustices, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 86.

The death was confirmed by the television producer Alvin H. Perlmutter, a friend who worked with Mr. Silverstein at NET (National Educational Television).

When Mr. Silverstein’s “What Harvest for the Reaper,” an exposé of Southern migrant workers’ treatment on Long Island farms, appeared on “NET Journal” in 1967, Jack Gould of The New York Times called it a “superb sequel” to Edward R. Murrow’s similarly themed “Harvest of Shame” (1960).

When “Banks and the Poor” aired in 1970, Robert Lewis Shayon, writing in Saturday Review, praised it as “low-keyed, clinically methodical and precise” in its balance and concluded, “Mr. Silverstein has jarred banking’s halo.” That film included hidden-camera footage of loan officers dealing with low-income bank customers and of a woman losing her home.

“There was some consciousness-raising that went on,” Mr. Silverstein was quoted by Alan Rosenthal in the 1980 book “The Documentary Conscience,” “which showed how the Congress of the United States was indeed a bedfellow of the banking industry. Both were properly outraged because they were properly exposed.”

Mr. Silverstein dealt with the need for social change whether he was working for NET, NBC, CBS or elsewhere. (NET merged with WNDT — Channel 13, the New York public television station — to become WNET in 1970.) He was driven, he said, by a “sense of outrage at people being exploited and people without voices.”

The titles of his films reflected that. Among them were “Eye On: Industrial Cancer”; “America at Risk: A History of Consumer Protest,” about tainted food and drugs; “The Poor Pay More”; and “Death on the Highway.”

His first documentary for the NET series “At Issue,” in 1963, was about the aftermath of the church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four young girls. He explored his Jewish heritage in projects like “The Golden Age of 2nd Avenue,” a history of Yiddish theater in New York, and the Peabody Award-winning “Heritage: Civilization and the Jews.”

Morton Silverstein was born on Dec. 6, 1929, in Brooklyn, the older of two sons of Julius Silverstein and the former Lee Lastfogel, who both worked in the garment industry.

With a journalism career in mind, Morton attended the University of Miami but later cheerfully claimed that the only thing he really learned during his college years was tennis. (In an interview on Tuesday, his wife, Rita, teasingly suggested that he also spent a lot of time 90 miles away, in Cuba.)

He enlisted in the Army in 1953 and raised his hand when an officer asked, “Who can type?” His writing career had begun.

He met Rita Katz at the wedding of one of his colleagues in a New York City suburb; she was the maid of honor, and he was the best man. They married in 1962.

By then Mr. Silverstein had already begun his television career, joining the Dumont Network’s “Night Beat,” with Mike Wallace, in 1957. The next year, during the Cuban revolution, he interviewed Fidel Castro at his rebel base. The Times published an article based on his report, identifying him as a New York television producer and reproducing a map that Castro had drawn for him inscribed “por Morton.”

Mr. Silverstein believed himself to have been born into the right era for the work he wanted to do.

“All during the tremendous crucible of the ’60s, with all the movements,” he told TV Quarterly in 2006, offering a laundry list of the decade’s causes, “everything that stood for social justice was all happening at once.”

Some four decades later, he observed, the climate was no longer conducive to doing “shows that get us into the right kind of trouble.” He looked back at the decades and the medium in 2002 in the series “Television in America: An Autobiography,” with interview subjects including Walter Cronkite, Ted Koppel, Joan Ganz Cooney and Dick Clark.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Erika Silverstein, and two grandchildren. He lived in Manhattan.

Asked by Mr. Rosenthal whether he went into his projects deliberately looking for a good-guy/bad-guy scenario, Mr. Silverstein said: “If it ever turns out that everything is hunky-dory, that there was simply nothing to investigate, we’d call off the infantry. But I can’t think of an instance where that’s occurred.”

He didn’t even necessarily believe, he said, that there were always two sides to a story. “There is,” he said, “only one side to the truth.”

A correction was made on 
Oct. 14, 2016

An obituary on Thursday about the documentarian Morton Silverstein misstated part of the title of a television series on which he worked. It is “Heritage: Civilization and the Jews,” not “Heritage: Civilization of the Jews.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: Morton Silverstein, Documentarian of Injustices, Dies at 86. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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