His first films, Amabandla AmaAfrika, directed alongside BBC Journalist, Francois Marais (1970) and The Church and Apartheid (1972), produced for BBC-TV, dealt with race and religion in his troubled homeland.

He came to the U.S. in 1973 and began producing and directing local and national documentaries for KOCE, a public television station in California.

His film 'Deep South, Deep North' (1973) was a PBS/BBC co-production and the first in a long succession of collaborations between U.S. and European television, especially the British.

Then in 1982, again with Thomas, he produced Frank Terpil: Confessions of a Dangerous Man,[3] which won the Emmy Award for best investigative documentary.

That same year Fanning was also honored with the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism by the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School.