A.B.C. Stands for Always Bash Clinton

ABC Follows A Path To Shame

I'm racheting up my hero, Tim Rutten's, article. He's been away too long on vacation, and he's coming off a little as Timid Timmy. Given time, he'll get back up to speed. In the meantime, here's how I would say, what he has to say. (We catch this in mid-program.)

.... For most of the week, ABC rather haughtily attempted to characterize itself as the victim of philistines, or self-righteously as a champion of free speech or, more pathetically, as just plain misunderstood by people who just don't understand how television is done.

It is none of those things.

It's an opportunistic and self-interested organization that somehow thought it could approach the most wrenching American tragedy since Pearl Harbor with the values that prevail among network television executives — the sort of ad hoc ethics that would make a streetwalker blush — and that nobody would mind.

That part of this whole shabby sequence of events is the hardest to fathom. It's well understood, of course, that docudramas are seldom documentary and only sporadically dramatic. As a rule, they're basically devices to free unimaginative writers from the burden of having to make up characters' names. You simply appropriate the names of real people, then make them do whatever attention-getting thing fills the allotted time.

But did the people who run ABC Entertainment — the network division directly responsible for this mess — really believe that Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger would watch themselves on television doing and saying thing they never did or said and not object? When these fictional incidents were portrayed as contributing to the deaths of nearly 3,000 innocent people, did they think that the former Clinton administration officials and others so caricatured simply would shrug and say, "Well, that's dramatic license for you?" Did they really expect anyone to accept the preposterous notion that — as some at the network argued this week — the film's facts were wrong, but its "essence" was true? These people really need to get out more.

What's easier to understand is what ABC thought it was up to with its marketing of "The Path to 9/11" and why it thought a successful marketing campaign might lead our politically polarized nation to feverishly overlook the network's irresponsibility toward history. After all, why should the many thousands of Americans still grieving for loved ones lost five years ago care about an accurate account of the governmental decisions that may have contributed to those deaths when they could get a good dose of "essence"?

Over the past weeks, the network flooded the country with advance copies of its film. Some sources put the number of DVDs in circulation at 900. An ABC spokeswoman, who demanded to be "off the record" said Friday that she couldn't confirm 900 copies, but that the number "certainly was more than 500." She promised to e-mail back an accurate count; she never did. Many of those copies were directed at right-wing talk show hosts and, some, to Republican bloggers, who long have argued that — however complacent the Bush administration may initially been concerning radical Islamic terrorism — Clinton and his people overlooked far more signs of Al Qaeda's lethality for a far longer period of time. These commentators were delighted to see that ABC's docu-dramatic version of events supported their view. So, for weeks they've been talking the film up on their radio programs and analyzing its merits on their blogs. . . . .

. . . . However, with that many copies in circulation, interested Democrats and former Clinton administration officials soon saw the movie and began picking its ludicrous inaccuracies apart in protests to ABC and — more important — directly to Robert Iger, the chief executive of Disney, the network's parent company. By Friday, even the film's star, Harvey Keitel, was telling an interviewer:

You cannot cross the line from a conflation of events to a distortion of the event. Where we have distorted something, we made a mistake and it should be corrected.

So ABC began re-editing a film that already had been scrutinized by hundreds of people with long memories and access to publication. Democrats remained skeptical that any version of the film could be made credible; GOP partisans were angry and some said they felt used. Most were disgusted with what they deemed Disney/ABC's cowardice in the face of Democratic criticism. As conservative columnist Mark Steyn put it on one talk show: ABC

...supposedly spent years working on it to get it absolutely right, to get the absolute truth, and then they're frantically staying up late the night before it broadcasts snipping out 10 minutes here and there, because Bill Clinton and Sandy Berger and various other Clinton apparatchiks object to this or that line here and there. I mean, that makes them look pathetic, it makes ABC, I think, look ridiculous, in fact, because there's hundreds of these tapes out there. People are going to know exactly what lines were cut and what weren't cut....

One of the most unfortunate consequences of all this was that most of the news media completely overlook a stunning affront to 1st Amendment freedoms that occurred when the Democratic leadership of the U.S. Senate sent Iger a letter Thursday appearing to threaten the network's licenses unless "The Path to 9/11" was altered or killed:

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."

We've all become accustomed to a Congress that behaves as if it's divided between Bloods and Crips rather than Republicans and Democrats — but this was a thuggish new low. If we were inclined to dramatic license, the guys with thick necks in "On the Waterfront" would come to mind, though it's doubtful even Harvey Keitel could plausibly play Harry Reid as threatening.

WTF!!??

Here's where I part from Timid Timmy. What is wrong with him? This is not thuggishness. If this is thuggery, I say you haven't seen nuthin' yet, city-boy.

Come November.