John Lehman (emphasis added) says:
“The larger truth,” he told us, “is that neither administration fully grasped what the threat was. Partially it was inadequate intelligence but you can’t blame it all on the inadequate intelligence — there was, I think, a very naive view held by some in the Clinton administration, mainly Albright and Janet Reno that force was counterproductive.”
Lehman, a Republican, told us that the campaign against the film by the Clinton officials misses the point. “I think what they’re trying to do is to take the fact the specific scenes portrayed were fictional and to try to refute the underlying reality that the Clinton administration just didn’t get it. And by the way before 9-11 neither did the Bush administration.”
All good points (linked to originally by Instapundit). But “larger truths” and “underlying realities” — weren’t those what Dan Rather was looking for?
Oh, you say — Dan Rather was doing journalism, and this program is merely entertainment? Give me a break!!
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Hey, Ron, I’m still waiting for your post on how awful “Apollo 13″ was. In the real world, every single astronaut in the program — trained astronautical engineers, after all — fought for simulator time and spent the whole time arguing ideas and working out procedures to keep the crew alive. But for reasons of time and to keep a manageable number of characters for the audience to follow, Ron Howard collapsed those all into the single role of Ken Mattingly, a character the audience already knew and could empathize with. Fake? Yes. Accurate enough for a dramatization? Yes. Happens all the time. Accurate enough for a news program? Not a chance.
As long as the series is billed as entertainment, I’m OK with some compression of time and characters to make it fit within time and make sense to the audience. ABC is calling this a docudrama, not a documentary, and no one should ever mistake it for factual. It’s a narrative, not a history.
Or are you one of those Lord of the Rings geeks who couldn’t get over the fact that Arwen got all of Glorfindel’s scenes? (And if so, what’s wrong with you, man? You’d rather see scenes of some fey guy you won’t see again for the rest of the film, instead of Liv Tyler?)
And if Dan Rather had produced a fictional “docu-drama” no one would have complained.
Well, we would have complained if we later ran into someone in an argument who believed the docu-drama *was* 100% accurate and cited it as being such — but substantially, yes.
I mean really. Did Oliver Stone’s “JFK” get this kind of treatment?
There are two things getting wrongly conflated here:
1) Fiction (“Path”) is not nonfiction (“F911″,”60 Minutes”)
2) Boycotts and protests are not threats of government action
Ron, honestly. It’s an ABC made-for-television sunday-night movie. It means nothing. It’s a blip on the American cultural sphere. A week after it airs it will fade into nothingness like so much smoke.
The only important thing in the entire kerfluffle is the threat to withdraw the FCC-issued licenses.
It’s an opinion shaper, just like “The Day After” was. Let’s not be naive.
“Apollo 13″ had no political agenda.
I’m not endorsing curtailment of the First Amendment, by the way. But does Clinton have the right to scream? Of course.
Oh, you say — Dan Rather was doing journalism, and this program is merely entertainment? Give me a break!!
I want to believe that the two are still considered seperate.
It’s getting very hard to keep believing that.
No one’s denying President Clinton’s right to scream, Ron. Some of us, though, are a bit distrubed by Senator Reid’s extortion. Until that happened, I didn’t really care about this one way or another. As I indicated in another thread, I’m pretty sure ABC ginned up the controversy intentionally for ratings, and I don’t see any need to help them in that regard. I even didn’t see a need to comment when Dean wrote his “no sympathy” post about how the Bush-bashers were having to take some of what they dished out. I just really didn’t want to add to the spin cycle.
But now here’s Senator Reid, much more blatantly (I know Dean won’t agree, but it is blatant) threatening to use government power to stifle the first amendment than any of the “chilling effect” claims the left likes to make. That I find pretty disturbing.
I agree. I just don’t really think there’s a serious threat to anyone’s broadcast license here.
I just don’t really think there’s a serious threat to anyone’s broadcast license here.
Well, they have expressed both motivation and means. . . should we wait until after an election to determine that they are willing to toss out very serious threats against American broadcasters who don’t toe their line, or should we point out, as firmly as possible now, that the threat they have made is unconstitutional from the start?
I seriously disagree that “The Day After” was an opinion shaper. I haven’t thought of that movie since it came out, either.
I agree, I don’t think there’s a serious threat either. But the fact that the threat was made is totally inexcusable.
AAMOF, didn’t some nutjob make death threats against Hugh Hewitt in the comments section of his blog a couple months ago? Did the fact that the nutjob was very unlikely to ever be in a position to genuinely carry out their threatened attack negate the utter wrongness of their behavior one iota? Or make the vast disapproval they got all across the blogosphere — including here — any smidgen less deserved?
I seriously disagree that “The Day After” was an opinion shaper. I haven’t thought of that movie since it came out, either.
That movie was played in public schools to teach the dangers of global warming. Fahrenheit 9/11, and Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price were used in the same way. My friend’s kid was shown both of these as a senior in high school, and then again in his first semester of college.
Ron,
Are you really saying that the news is under no obligation to get the story straight? Especially on a subject that could effect the course of a close presidential election?
John Podhoretz has seen the thing, and he posts his review.
In his account, Madeline Albright has a good reason to be complaining, Sandy Berger has some reason to be complaining (I disagree with Podhoretz here, as the 9/11 report section I linked in another thread on this shows that him definitely had something to do with squelching the CIA mission), and Bill Clinton has no reason to bitch at all. He also has some non-political TV reviewer comments to make re: length and lack of clarity.
Well, I said ‘wait until the evidence is in before judging’, and now it’s starting to arrive. Looks like the extreme ‘its horrific libel and nothing it says is true!’ position was just as wrong as the ‘it is the Gospel!’ position, and the truth lies somewhere between the two extents.
Of course, many of us knew that the Clinton Administration had a truly craptacular record re: dealing with Islamic terrorism even before this thing came out at all, so…
Clinton lawyers demand cancellation.
I wasn’t aware of Governor Kean saying that the film — which he acted as technical consultant for — was inaccurate. Does anyone have a link?
As to the remainder of it… feh. Maybe Dean will take everything Clinton or his lawyers say as gospel without waiting for confirmation. I won’t.
Cybrludite, I’m being a little cute there. I do think there’s a huge difference between journalism and entertainment — I just wish the “news departments” of TV news shows did, too.
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