producers Neil Docherty

Neil Docherty is a senior editor/producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's investigative documentary program, The Fifth Estate. Since 1992, he has also produced and directed films for FRONTLINE.

He was awarded the 2004 Gordon Sinclair Gemini Award as Canada's best broadcast journalist.

Neil started his career in print, first at the South Wales Echo, Cardiff's evening paper and then The Sunday Times in London, before joining Thames Television in London and directing documentaries for its network shows TV Eye and This Week.

Scottish by birth, Neil started work for the CBC in 1990 and is a Canadian citizen. Since moving to Canada, he has won more than 40 awards for his films including an international Emmy in 1992. He is a five-time Gemini winner, and has three Hot Doc Awards. His documentary about the Salinas brothers, Money, Murder and Mexico (1997), was a co-winner of the Gold Baton at the duPont-Columbia Awards in New York and won a Silver Nymph at the Monte Carlo Television Festival.

He co-produced and directed A Dangerous Business (2003), a joint production of The Fifth Estate, FRONTLINE and The New York Times, which won numerous awards, including the CBC's English Television Award; a Gold Medal at the New York Festival; a Silver Baton at the duPont-Columbia Awards; the George Polk Award; the Harvard Goldcrest Award for Investigative Journalism at Harvard University; a Peabody Award; an IRE award (Investigative Reporters and Editors); and the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award. The New York Times reporters Lowell Bergman and David Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize for the print articles that accompanied the film.

His 2005 FRONTLINE film Al Qaeda's New Front, won a Silver Baton at the duPont-Columbia Awards, a Gold Medal in New York and the Canadian Association of Journalists award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism.

Most recently, Neil produced the FRONTLINE film On Our Watch, about the genocide in Darfur. The film received the Carl Spielvogel Award from the Overseas Press Club.

Docherty is known for his internationally acclaimed 1992 Fifth Estate documentary The Trouble with Evan, an unprecedented two-hour special that ran without commercial breaks and delayed Canada's flagship news hour. The film also aired on FRONTLINE in 1994.

Docherty was "FRONTLINE Producer in residence" at the University of California's graduate school of Journalism at Berkeley in 1997-98. In June '06 he gave a master class at the Banff World Television Festival. And at the '06 Geminis he won for best writing in a documentary for the script Party Games from the CBC's China Rises documentary series. Docherty holds a B.Sc. (Honors) in economics from London School of Economics.

recent films

On Our Watch watch »

Al Qaeda's New Front watch »

A Dangerous Business watch »