ABC and its parent company Disney remain stuck in the La Brea tarpit of political controversies — a controversy where no matter what they do they’re going to alienate some segment of American society…during a hotly-contested election year:
ABC faced growing pressure Friday about its planned miniseries on the buildup to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Former Clinton administration officials, historians and a Democratic petition with nearly 200,000 signatures urged the network to scrap the five-hour drama.
That’s an awful lot of prominent Americans to ignore. If they simply don’t respond, ABC and Disney will likely undergo an instantaneous image change that could take years to fix — if it can ever be fixed at all. MORE:
The network said the movie, scheduled to air commercial-free on Sunday and Monday, is being edited to deal with concerns that it distorts history. ABC had no response to the calls to abandon it.
A group of historians, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Princeton University’s Sean Wilentz, wrote to ABC parent Walt Disney Co. CEO Robert Iger, urging him to scrap the series. They said that permitting inaccuracies to heighten drama is “disingenuous and dangerous.”
“A responsible broadcast network should have nothing to do with the falsification of history, except to expose it,” they wrote.
The historians will lend credence to those who are attacking the film. But look for (very soon) those who don’t want a frame from the film to be edited (unless it’s a part that reflects badly on the Bush administration) to come forward with some historians who like the film. MORE:
The Democratic National Committee said it delivered a petition with nearly 200,000 signatures to ABC’s Washington office urging the network drop its “right-wing factually inaccurate mocudrama.”
Former national security adviser Samuel R. Berger and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, whose depictions are at the center of the controversy, asked Thomas Kean, the Republican ex-governor of New Jersey who led the commission looking into the attacks, to use his influence with filmmakers to pull it.
“You can’t fix it,” Berger said on CNN. “You gotta yank it.”
The reaction of ABC and the flick’s producer basically is: how can you judge it until you actually see it?
The problem is that, in television, tuning in means getting vital “numbers.”
The numbers won’t measure whether a viewer is revolted by the use of 911 in a film that from all accounts is riddled with inaccuracies and peppered with dramatic license that usually is used to reflect badly on the Clinton administration.
In the end, the film will be judged to be a success if it grabs huge numbers of viewers who’ll all be lumped together as the ultimate “get”: an audience for an “event” program.
Meanwhile, there are signs that each day this growing controversy sinks ABC further into tar-like political mire and it is FAR from over yet:
- Max Blumenthal, writing in the Huffington Post, contends the reputed political slant of the ABC movie, far from being happenstance, is intentional:
Now, ABC claims to be editing those false sequences to satisfy critics so the show can go on — even if it still remains a gross distortion of history. And as it does so, ABC advances the illusion that the deceptive nature of “The Path to 9/11” is an honest mistake committed by a hardworking but admittedly fumbling team of well-intentioned Hollywood professionals who wanted nothing less than to entertain America. But this is another Big Lie.
In fact, “The Path to 9/11” is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11’s director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to “transform Hollywood” in line with its messianic vision.
- A longtime ABC talk-show host has vowed to quit if ABC pulls the plug on the picture:
A talkshow host for ABC’s radio station in Washington says he may resign if the Disney-owned network cancels the planned programming of The Path to 911.
“They better not pull this. They better not,” said WMAL host Chris Core, adding, “It would be very embarrassing to work here if they did.”
Core — a popular host on WMAL which also carries such national conservative talkers as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin — said that if ABC pulls the docudrama because of protests from former President Clinton and the entire Democratic Party establishment, “I would have to consider quitting my job” because caving to that pressure would impair ABC’s credibility.
Chris Core told his listeners Friday that the Democrats “protest too much,” and he said he can’t imagine ABC pulling the docudrama because of Democrat anger, including a lengthy letter signed by five leading Senate Democrats.
“Bill Clinton is going to have to look at himself in the mirror,” Core told his listeners. And he added, “He was distracted” by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. And Core told his listeners, “You were distracted. I was distracted. We were all distracted.” That is historical fact.
The D.C. talker said Bill Clinton, who is obsessed with his legacy, is just going to have to live with the historical fact that his attention was on the Lewinsky uproar when terrorists were striking U.S. interests around the world.
NOTE: This suggests that perhaps part of the adamant desire to have this aired in full is the continuing highly personal mega-hatred some on the right (who bitterly complain about highly personal mega-hatred some on the left have towards George W. Bush) continue to have towards Bill Clinton.
- The program came under fire from former Vice President Al Gore: “By all accounts, “The Path to 9/11″ is riddled with inaccuracies and contains material that directly contradicts the factual findings of the 9/11 Commission. I am deeply concerned that ABC is considering going forward with their plans to broadcast this so-called docudrama. The lessons from the events leading up to that tragedy are too important to trivialize, and it would be fundamentally irresponsible to air such distortions.”
SIGNIFICANCE: With each day it’s becoming clear that the program has stirred up such a hornet’s nest of opposition from Democrats that ABC and Disney could wind up airing a movie that a large segment of the highly-polarized United States will feel belonged as a segment on Hannity and Colmes on Fox News. This kind of image shift is VERY hard to undo.
AMERICAblog, a weblog that has played a key role in organizing online and phone protests against the film, reports that it is still being advertised in New Zealand as a dramatization of the 911 report.
Meanwhile, it’s hard to see what any end-game will be for ABC and Disney that will stem some incredible damage.
No matter what course they take, someone will be furious, the corporate images will never be the same and the bottom line (corporate income) is likely to suffer.
It’s hard to extricate yourself from a tar pit.
And it’s ironic when you’re stuck in a tar pit that you filled up yourself.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.