lies, damned lies and television
This is Disney’s version of ‘Alice in Wonderland’.
On Sunday night, Channel Seven will start to air the two part miniseries The Path to 9/11.
The American Broadcasting Corporation, and its owners Disney seem to be running the whole fifty million dollar enterprise terribly tight for time. They said yesterday:
” “No one has seen the final version of the film, because the editing process is not yet complete, so criticisms of film specifics are premature and irresponsible..”
The criticism comes from Clinton’s Democrats, who have been trying for weeks to see the series, which features them prominently. They are enraged.
“The two-part miniseries, scheduled to be broadcast on Sunday and Monday, is drawn from interviews and documents including the report of the Sept. 11 commission.
The administration letter writers said the miniseries contained factual errors and that their requests to see it had gone unanswered. They said people familiar with the movie had told them about it, but they didn’t name them.
“By ABC’s own standard, ABC has gotten it terribly wrong,” Lindsey and Band said in their letter. “It is unconscionable to mislead the American public about one of the most horrendous tragedies our country has ever known.”
The producers are claiming that the only departures from the Commission report are logistical:
” the movie contains fictionalized scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue and time compression.”
Confused, I googled the production. On the very first page, I find a preview at Patterico’s Pontifications. He’s a proud Right Winger. He opens with a statement which is extraordinary:
” I have been fortunate enough to see an advance showing of The Path to 9/11.
A showing of a series which has been denied to the last but one President of the United States, which the Disney Corporation says in public does not yet exist. Our Pontificator is good enough to tell us what is in it:
” It does not have a “partisan” feel to it by any means. The Bush administation comes in for some criticism (Condi Rice in particular comes off rather poorly), but that is nothing compared to the depiction of Sandy Berger and former Secretary of State Madeline Albright. I doubt that they will be able to show their faces in public after this (and also helps to explain why Berger was so eager to try to illegally remove classified documents from the archives before his Senate testimony on the 9/11 events). If Bill Clinton’s current purpose in life is to solidify a positive “legacy” for his time in office, this film has the potential to be his biggest hurdle to overcome yet.”
It seems that hundreds of DVDs have been sent to Right Wing commentators, while everyone else is told the film does not yet exist. A move that reeks of bad faith.
The writer-producer is Cyrus Nowrasteh, known to hang in Right Wing circles. Oddly, he didn’t originate the project – the company picked him as a hired gun, despite his overt biasses and sympathies, to recount the single most explosive and divisive story in contemporary American politics. Interviewed by the conservative Front Page magazine, he is happy to whack the Clintonians:
” FP: When you refer to the failed effort to stop Bin Laden in the 1990s, this was obviously the time of Bill Clinton. How much do you think his administration made us vulnerable to 9/11?
Nowrasteh: The 9/11 report details the Clinton’s administration’s response — or lack of response — to Al Qaeda and how this emboldened Bin Laden to keep attacking American interests. The worst example is the response to the October, 2000 attack on the U.S.S. COLE in Yemen where 17 American sailors were killed. There simply was no response. Nothing.
To his credit, he refers to be drawn into the reactionary mantra about the evil socialist MainStream Media. Though the U.S.S. Cole example is part of the Commission report, he managed to get the story widened.
” I also expanded my research beyond the commission report, which only goes back to 1998, concluding that I needed to go back to the first attack on the WTC in ‘93 and tell this story over six hours. Marc Platt and ABC exec Quinn Taylor agreed…
I think it is fair to say that a lot of the material which would have pissed the Clintonians off is not covered in the report, and for ABC to justify it with that document is false.
Filming, by the way, finished last December. Nine months to cut and mix a miniseries is not too bad, so I don’t buy the alleged rush on those grounds either.
I reckon this case could cause a lot of trouble. The fact that ABC has been so evasive suggests they know they have a lot of controversial material which drags Clinton into 9/11 and therefore lets Bush off the hook. When you do that kind of program, you simply shouldn’t include uncorroborated scenes that are politically debatable. Bastard Boys, funded by our own ABC, will obey that rule to a fault. People who have read the script say it is astonishingly even-handed, and refuses to take sides.
Why is this so important? When you dramatise an event, it becomes the event in the mind of the audience. It cuts a trench in reality, becomes the history it depicts. You make a lie real, embed it the collective psyche. That is how propaganda works.
Joe Conaston, a Lefty, has also seen the tapes, and provides a comprehensive list in Salon of the distortions he detects. Incidents are made up in which Clinton’s people refuse to go after Bin Laden, or botch the attempt. This is how the miniseries deals with Bush’s role:
” If the producers of “The Path to 9/11″ unfairly indict the Clinton administration with fabricated scenes and notions, they go out of their way to exonerate the Bush White House by ignoring certain damning facts — and creating substitutes that make the president look better. The movie shows a smarmy, condescending Condoleezza Rice demoting Clarke in January 2001 when she takes over as national security advisor. Clarke tries to warn her that “something spectacular” is going to happen on American soil, and she assures him that “we’re on it,” which they assuredly were not.
Indeed, the script downplays the neglect of terrorism as a primary threat by the incoming Bush team — and never mentions the counterterrorism task force, chaired by Vice President Dick Cheney, that never met for nine months before 9/11. The famous Aug. 6 presidential daily briefing, which warned the vacationing Bush that al-Qaida intended to strike here, is given due attention. But the movie then shows Rice telling her associates that “as a result of the Aug. 6 PDB, the president wants to take real action” against al-Qaida. But the 9/11 Commission report’s section on the PDB clearly states that the August warning was not followed up on by Rice:
“We found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an Al Qaeda attack in the United States.” No action was contemplated before 9/11 and the movie’s attempt to claim otherwise is another distortion.”
They said Clinton didn’t, when he did, and that Bush did, when he didn’t. They are lying through their teeth.
Just to show you how this plays, here’s a Frontpage quote, cited first by Daily Kos.
” This is the first Hollywood production I’ve seen that honestly depicts how the Clinton administration repeatedly bungled the capture of Osama Bin Laden. One astonishing sequence in “The Path to 9/11″ shows the CIA and the Northern Alliance surrounding Bin Laden’s house in Afghanistan. They’re on the verge of capturing Bin Laden, but they need final approval from the Clinton administration in order to go ahead. They phone Clinton, but he and his senior staff refuse to give authorization for the capture of Bin Laden, for fear of political fall-out if the mission should go wrong and civilians are harmed. National Security Adviser Sandy Berger in essence tells the team in Afghanistan that if they want to capture Bin Laden, they’ll have to go ahead and do it on their own without any official authorization. That way, their necks will be on the line – and not his. The astonished CIA agent on the ground in Afghanistan repeatedly asks Berger if this is really what the administration wants. Berger refuses to answer, and then finally just hangs up on the agent. The CIA team and the Northern Alliance, just a few feet from capturing Bin Laden, have to abandon the entire mission. Bin Laden and Al Qaeda shortly thereafter bomb the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing over 225 men, women, and children, and wounding over 4000. The episode is a perfect example of Clinton-era irresponsibility and incompetence.”
Except it never happened.
This has the makings of a media civil war. Surely the large, respectable media outfits – CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, bits of the Knight Ridder empire – are feeling played for patsies, degraded by their support for the war, and bashed by obsessive, delusional reactionaries. Here they are watching an extraordinary perversion of documentary truth, a stunning propaganda coup to remake the face of the past for the American heartland. There are a few moves. Fox is in favour, moving to attack Richard Clarke. Newsweek reckons it is okay because “it isn’t a history lesson, it is a television show.”
Scholastic, which did the classroom guides, have pulled them from the internet.
The New York Times has several different lines, but this is extraordinary:
” ABC said it planned to run a disclaimer with the broadcast, reminding viewers that the movie was not a documentary.
But Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the Sept. 11 commission, said genre confusion would not be a problem for commission members, several of whom saw part of the miniseries last week.
“As we were watching, we were trying to think how they could have misinterpreted the 9/11 commission’s finding the way that they had,” Mr. Ben-Veniste said. “They gave the impression that Clinton had not given the green light to an operation that had been cleared by the C.I.A. to kill bin Laden,” when, in fact, the Sept. 11 commission concluded that Mr. Clinton had.
Mr. Ben-Veniste said he did, however, approve of the casting. “I like Harvey Keitel,” he said of the actor who plays John O’Neil, the onetime F.B.I. counterterrorism expert who died in the attacks. “I liked him in ‘Mean Streets.’ I’m a fan.”
Despite this kind of trivialising descant, ABC is shifting ground. Ironically, given the false claim that the series does not yet exist, the producers are making some changes.
Digby collects the story pretty well and flogs a terrible review at the New York Times. He suggests there could be some regulatory issues here, and that Disney might regret picking a fight with the party which could win the mid-term elections. He also links to the complete letter by the senior Democrats to ABC. The letter says
” To quote Steve McPhereson, president of ABC Entertainment, “When you take on the responsibility of telling the story behind such an important event, it is absolutely critical that you get it right.”
There is a good summary at a special purpose blog for this one issue.
More on Disney’s relationship with the Right, and the film’s director, David Cunningham, a hard line evangelical Christian, here.
Thanks to Tim Dunlop, whose own informative post reminded me to come back to the story.
September 9th, 2006 at 5:04 am
There is, of course The Man who knew too much and a documentary of the same name that i cannot find, just yet.
September 9th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
[...] ELSEWHERE: More information at Barista and Machinegun Keyboard. RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI [...]
September 9th, 2006 at 2:29 pm
More than one attempt to kill bin Laden was botched by Clinton and his officials. They are overwhelmingly responsible for the disaster.
The series sounds very accurate.
September 9th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
What does that mean, “overwhelmingly” responsible? Is that the same as 75% responsible? 90%? Why not just “responsible”?
September 9th, 2006 at 5:59 pm
Yep, and Bush with a whole army in Afghanistan – with all the world’s political good will on his side to begin with, hasn’t done any better.
Great justification there CL.
September 9th, 2006 at 8:39 pm
[...] MORE: Editor & Publisher have a detailed preview and critique of Path. See also the discussion, “Strike a blow for accurate history,” on Road to Surfdom. Thinkprogress.org has numerous entries on the firestorm surrounding the program. Barista as gracefully as ever, weighs in. [...]
September 10th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
Probably a bit late, but have managed to track down a link to the documentary that I was thinking of when i made that first comment.
a href=”http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/knew/view/”>The man who knew
September 11th, 2006 at 9:54 am
The Path to 9/11 was badly acted, I’ll say that.
I watched Flight 93 on the weekend. A fantastic film.
September 11th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
I got here from Patterico’s, via your trackback, and there’s something that you should probably make clear: it’s not Patterico who had seen an advance screening of the docudrama, but Justin Levine, who’s an occasional guest blogger at the site, and who works as a producer for a talk radio personality by the name of Bill Handel, who has the number one rated morning talk show in Los Angeles, and whose show is syndicated in 40 markets in the US. The advance copy was sent to Handel, who gave it to Levine to review and let him know whether it was any good.
Night one was certainly rough on Clinton and company. Undoubtedly Bush will get his during night two. The fact still remains, though, that Clinton had eight years in office during which to come to grips with the nature of the threat, whereas Bush & company had been in office 8 months when the plot played out.
Our ABC is known for such savory right-wing fare as Desperate Housewives. Disney, which owns the network, has been known to produce such sterling representations of Roman Catholicism as “Dogma.” Advance screenings were made available to such Bush-friendly media outlets as the NYT, WaPo, LA Times, MSNBC, CNN and Salon.com. A good deal of commentary has been devoted to the comparison between this brouhaha and the Republican outcry regarding the Ronald Reagan docudrama that painted a scathing portrait of that president (at a time during which he was unable to respond to any such criticisms). Whether you like TPT9/11 or not, it’s much less an episode of Dynasty than that one was.
There is a significant difference, however. This is an excerpt from a letter sent by congressional Democrats to Iger of ABC:
“The Communications Act of 1934 provides your network with a free broadcast license predicated on the fundamental understanding of your principle obligation to act as a trustee of the public airwaves in serving the public interest … ,” the lawmakers wrote. “We urge you, after full consideration of the facts, to uphold your responsibilities as a respected member of American society and as a beneficiary of the free use of the public airwaves to cancel this factually inaccurate and deeply misguided program.”
The implied threat is that they will review the broadcasting license unless the network either edits the passages that they find offensive, or, preferably, pull the program altogether. There was plenty of Republican teeth-gnashing and indignation over the Reagan thing, to be sure, but no such lawyerly threatening.
Clinton’s response regarding the program is somewhat amusing when you consider that through his Hollywood connections he had made for himself the hagiographic biopic, “The Man from Hope,” which helped him win election the first time.
Now, from a rhetorical point of view, do you really think that ABC was saying that the series didn’t exist at all, or do you think that in the process of determining how much to cut where they were saying that the final shape of the program as it would air was not determined?
To take a contrary point of view, from yours when you say that this represents
I recommend that you read it against the detailed commentary of the 9-11 Commission, including the parts redacted from the publicly distributed version, that are now available at Captain’s Quarters in pdf format. Further, this kind of metropolitan chauvinism really is out of place. If you take college entry testing scores as a guide to where Americans provide and receive good education, you will find that many parts of that benighted hinterland score well above the areas favored by the coastal elites and their major media marketplaces. Clinton was crap on security. I give him credit for Bosnia. Otherwise, just total crap.
September 11th, 2006 at 5:10 pm
Seven have dropped their claim about ‘Path To 9/11′ being ‘The story of exactly how it happened.’ As of about 3.45pm AEST, the Seven website now describes the program as ‘The thrilling dramatised investigation.’
Seven should do more than stop claiming this program is ‘exactly what happened.’ A responsible broadcaster would pull it.
September 11th, 2006 at 8:08 pm
Thanks for being civil, Dan. It actually makes discussion possible.
I didn’t realise, as I guess you have deduced, that Justin Levine is not Patterico, and the site has now taken some trouble to make the point clear. I can see why it matters – I would be horrified if I guested someone with a public reputation on Barista and readers thought it was me. It doesn’t affect the argument of course.
I did a quick google about the Reagan series. CNN’s description, written at the time, provides astonishing similarities.
Conservatives became very agitated on the basis of pieces of script. There were suggestions of a boycott. Words were allegedly put into Reagan’s mouth. CBS was attacked as a liberal front. The affinities of the makers were attacked.
Conservatives wanted exactly what the Clintonites wanted in the last few days – to get the show pulled. Censorship.
The difference is, they succeeded. It was pulled from CBS and shuffled to Showtime.
You can take different inferences from the quote in the letter. Either that “we are gonna dong you if we get the chance”, or that the use of public airwaves implies a public duty which you should morally aspire to. It has certainly been suggested in some commentary, including here, that the Dems could well sic the FFC onto the ABC, if they take power.
Would this be simple payback? Or would it be because the Dems would think that the ABC is failing its public responsibilities?
Why did CBS concede? Is it not possible the company thought it was pretty dumb to piss off a reigning president, his cabinet, and his party? I would be surprised if the CBS heavies did not feel intimidated.
I think ABC should have pulled this show. I don’t believe they should have invested in it. I think CBS was right to pull that show, and they shouldn’t have invested in it. As I have said above, I do think there is a public responsibility to adhere to very high standards in dramatised documentary, because they show us what is real.
The rules are different for comedy, because it does not pretend to be real on the surface. The rules are also different from polemical documentaries, because they are obviously that, don’t have the same impact, and can be countered by other films. But drama is something else.
On the rhetorical question – they were distributing the thing widely, so they thought it was complete enough to be evaluated. So they should have given it to the dems; their publlc position would have been much stronger. It looks like they have guilty consciences. The conservative argument that the Dems should wait till it was broadcast is pretty silly, and the fact that it was denied to them makes it even worse.
I can’t help thinking that hindsight has gone berserk here. Sitting in judgement on the past, criticising people for specific decisions, when they couldn’t see where they would lead.
For me, the learning and the critique is about institutions. The fact that one man had to trade off the risks and rewards of a particular operation against the general geopolitical fallout means that the decision can fall in several different ways, and be governed largely by luck. The decision that is important is to ensure that you have enough Arabic and Parsi speakers in your agencies to track what is going on. How do you build and maintain the institutions?
I didn’t mean the world “heartland” to be pejorative. Or to suggest stupidity. I was trying to refer to those millions of millions of people who are not politics obsessives, who just get on with their lives. Who deserve more than a reconstruction which is not true, where they can’t be expected to pick the holes.
I am left to wonder why on earth Disney did this. A forty million dollar investment (in our money) for a show with no advertising, though they changed it to very little. Giving the project to known partisans of any persuasion. Restricting the DVD. ???
September 11th, 2006 at 11:46 pm
Thanks also to you for being civil and intelligent in your response.
It would be difficult these days to give a program with political content of any sort to anyone who had any reputation in media who wouldn’t be considered a partisan of one stripe or another by somebody or other. It is certain that despite the relative lack of publicity, the brouhaha surrounding the issue has driven a great deal more viewership to the piece.
Someone might object that ABC was presenting the piece as a public service–as opposed say to Desperate Housewives (not that I have anything against airing images of Eva Longoria or Terry Hatcher, mind you)–at a time during which interest in the subject is naturally likely to be high.
“For me, the learning and the critique is about institutions. The fact that one man had to trade off the risks and rewards of a particular operation against the general geopolitical fallout means that the decision can fall in several different ways, and be governed largely by luck. The decision that is important is to ensure that you have enough Arabic and Parsi speakers in your agencies to track what is going on. How do you build and maintain the institutions?”
I hope that that is what thoughtful people will take away from this. However, the Sandy Berger documents scandal certainly is liable to fuel suspicion that Clinton administration officials have been concerned for some time over how the documentary evidence might paint them. Nobody in our elected government could perhaps reasonably have been expected to anticipate that something of the nature of 9/11 would happen, and I was as clueless as the next person. The first World Trade Center bombing should have been enough to wake me up. The embassy bombings and the Cole incident changed things for me, though. These were very targeted operations that did not seem to have a localized political agenda, and in the case of the embassies it was clear that the perpetrators did not really care about the lives of those who were only connected with the US either by virtue of their jobs or dumb bad fortune. I am not sure whether or not the media is being adequately critiqued in this series, since I am unable to watch it yet (since I live in the boonies and won’t subscribe to satellite TV). And I was angry at the time, and still am, that we didn’t seem to have much political will or intelligence capability to avenge the atrocities. Whether or not that should have served as a clarion call to action on the part of the Clinton administration is certainly debatable, but it was the point at which I personally began to think that they weren’t serious enough about the threat. The Hughes Satellite transfers of missile guidance technology to the Chinese also pissed me off.
Probably I should refresh my recollections of the Reagan pic, but I seem to recall that it was based in part, and largely inspired by, the Kitty Kelley “unauthorized biography” of the Reagans. Once again, I didn’t see it, so I can’t respond with accuracy, but my feeling at the time was that the objectionable parts related to the representation of the private lives of the Reagans rather than to policy decisions–with the exception of the famous passage about AIDs being God’s curse on homosexuals. I am willing to change my opinion about that if someone can inform me otherwise.
As to worrying about the geopolitical fallout, though, I personally hope that we have learned our lesson.
September 11th, 2006 at 11:59 pm
I thought I’d share with you all the feelings of one right-wing commenter from Patterico’s:
September 12th, 2006 at 12:13 am
Lot to be said for living in the boonies. There’s been times when I’ve really enjoyed it.
I doubt whether the dems getting annoyed has increased the viewing audience among anyone who was not already committed to a position.
I’m interested in your line about the difficulty of finding non-partisan people in the media to work on it. I suspect people used to the more British tradition of television more strongly understand the notion that you can tell a story about a real situation which works well, and only contains material which is corroborated. There have been some good examples here in Australia, because our libel laws are pretty fierce, and program makers learn to do without t the juiciest bits.
One way of dealing with it would be to mix the team up – put the Right and Left together, certainly on the researcher level.
Paul Greengrass did a fascinating job on United 93, I reckon. And yet his last film in that style was about Northern Ireland. It was a fearsome critique of Bloody Sunday and theBrits, but I think it was pretty well accepted as a credible account.
A few of the United 93 facts were wrong, btw, but they didn’t affect the tone of the thing, or the overall impression that the US was mindbogglingly unable to call in a swift air defence.
I think the protests from both sides about the Reagan and Clinton films serve a valuable public service – they tell the media that sensationalising real political events and people that many people hold dear is cheap, and trashy and they will be called to account.
September 12th, 2006 at 1:08 am
Certainly any informed protest that requires on the basis of evidence that the media stand to account for their representations is very important, such as the revelations regarding Photoshopped and posed photographs of Israeli war crimes in southern Lebanon. The bases of the criticisms are extremely important, though. When someone criticises a person or a position that we hold dear, we ought to consider the grounds of their objections to the portrayal that they’re attempting to debunk. A great deal of wrangling over the legacy of Thomas Jefferson and what many considered to be the calumny of suggesting that he’d had sexual relations with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings, was finally put to rest when it was proved likely through genetic evidence that she had been his mistress and had given birth to at least one child sired by him. What that has to do with Jefferson’s legacy is another matter entirely, of course. Chris Hitchens, with whom I largely agree regarding the Islamist threat and how we ought to respond to it, certainly upset me with what I regarded as largely unjustified criticism of Mother Theresa, I being a somewhat devout Catholic, but it did make me inform myself on the subject, and I can see the justice of some of his claims.
So the question comes back to the issue of where and in what ways the portrayal of persons and events in this miniseries is substantively incorrect, and what false impressions those errors, lapses in judgment, or calculated misrepresentations might be likely to give rise to among the viewership. My concern is that it becomes an easy matter to dismiss the whole enterprise on the basis of such inaccuracies in shotgun fashion, when a real debate would take the issue up on the merits and in detail.
As reluctant as I am to bring this comparison up, since it’s so predictable, I wonder whether the tough libel laws extend to airing of materials produced outside of Australia itself that might potentially be libellous if produced in Australia. Has Farenheit 911 been broadcast in Australia, and if so by whom? Have any television outlets aired any of the patently nutty conspiracy offerings purporting that the Twin Towers were an inside job perpetrated by a cabal of inside oilmen and Zionists? I ask out of genuine interest.
September 12th, 2006 at 1:31 am
You’ve got it in one, I reckon by talking about substantively incorrect. It is easy to attack a work of film or television for trivial things, and lose focus on the real issues. Of course documentaries and dramas conflate time, simplify stories and create composite characters to tell a story quickly and efficiently. But you can’t do it over important things – the bits that make people change their minds.
I can’t think of any case in which someone has sued over the broadcast of a libel in Australia which was prepared outside and referred to something beyond our borders. We tend not to be very interested in outside conspiracy theories anyway, except in some parts of the blogosphere.
I don’t really get the problem with Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. Who knows how they felt about each other? We know the founding fathers had completely inconsistent attitudes about slavery, and about class too. But it doesn’t erase the good he did. To me, it is something to contemplate and understand, not to stand in judgement, or feel that the issue has to be defended.