Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

King Hack

by digby

There are many lessons to be learned from this “PT9/11” controversy. I’m sure we will all be discussing them at some length in the days to come.

But if there is one thing I think we can all take away from this right now, it’s that Hugh Hewitt is the most unctuous, intellectually craven, partisan shill on the current political scene. Nobody in this entire episode has behaved with less integrity, less dignity or less probity.

Case in point, regarding the comparisons between the right’s demands regarding the Reagan biopic and the left’s objections to “PT9/11:”

I am looking forward to Gabler’s defense of the ABC film, but also to the reasoned differentiation between CBS’s explanation and any explanation that ABC can or would ever be able to offer about changes to or cancelation of “The Path to 9/11.”

First, hundreds of people have screened :The Path to 9/11,” including me and many other critics and/or hosts of large audience shows. (Complaints from tiny lefty bloggers that I received a screener and others didn’t ignore the fact that I requested it weeks ago and that I have an audience in the millions, not the tens.) To my knowledge not one professional critic has yet suggested the film is other than a powerful narrative of the era, especially chilling in its portrait of the enemy, or particularly damning of the Clinton-era fecklessness regading terror. It isn’t like we don’t know that Monica was a distraction and Madeleine Albright a less-than-brilliant Secretary of State (how about that late lurch towards North Korea?) John O’Neill was in fact fired; there were warnings that were ignored about the African embassy bombings, and no response followed the Cole attack and the American ambassador to Yemen was an obstruction to that investigation, Massoud was assasinated by al Qaeda. These are not debatable subjects. They are facts.

Second, the Reagan biopic served no purpose and memorialized no important event in American history. “The Path to 9/11” does both. The attempt to bury the latter is the attempt to erect an official history on one of the most devastating days in our nation’s history. Those demanding its ruin are demanding censorship of the very worst sort.

Finally and most importantly, just because people complain that a film is inaccurate doesn’t make it so. The Reagan pic was by CBS’s own account a deeply flawed bit of anti-Reagan advocacy.

This is not the case about “The Path to 9/11,” which is a powerful and hugely researched project, though it is not a documentary and does not claim to be. There is no reasonable case to be made that the film distorts history or slanders public figures in any significant way.

There’s a whole week’s worth of drivel like that and worse.

I suppose this does prove the Dean of Columbia’s Journalism School’s contention that Hewitt is no mere GOP mouthpiece. I’ll repeat what I wrote about this earlier:

All those “smart, determined conservatives” who are “starting new organizations and making more converts” [as Lehman termed Hewitt and others of his ilk]are funded by a network of wealthy benefactors. They are not required to make money (I guess they are considered the loss leaders of the oligarchy) and their function is to simultaneously write the word and spread it. They’ve been fairly successful recently at making a market for their work, but it’s still not big enough to sustain it. With the exception of actual political campaigns (at which point they actively coordinate with whichever strategic electoral wizard they’ve anointed), after 30 years of listening only to each other there is no need to explicitly inform anyone of the company line. They know it without having to be told.

I suppose you could call that “journalism.” I call it “propaganda” and I’m stunned that Nicholas Lemann, of all people, hasn’t figured out how this thing works by now. But when you hear some of Hewitt’s interviews with DC journalists it’s clear they haven’t figured it out either.

Hewitt stands apart, actually, as being even more craven and unprincipled than the rest. In that way he serves an important purpose for the right. His mere presence in the discourse serves to make people like John Podhoretz and Jonah Goldberg seem like paragons of rectitude by comparison.

People of the center or left who continue to help Hewitt pretend to be a credible person by appearing on his show can no longer be considered credible themselves. By encouraging Hewitt’s blatant intellectual corruption they are irrevocably tainted by that intellectual corruption themselves.

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Accountability

by digby

Fifty-seven percent of the respondents said they think it would be good for the country “if the Democrats in Congress were able to conduct official investigations into what the Bush administration has done in the past six years.”

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The C Word

by tristero

There are rightwingers all over the internets, including below in comments, who are mewling that the Democrats are calling for “censorship” in putting political pressure on ABC/Disney to prevent the airing of lies about 9/11. I, for one, suggest a compromise: If ABC would issue a disclaimer, or better yet a continuous banner, stating:

Note: The program you are watching contains lies and numerous unsubstantiated smears deliberately inserted by rightwing operatives to deflect blame from George W. Bush

then I would have no objection whasoever to the broadcast.

As an alternative, they could simply postpone the broadcast to correct the errors and eliminate the lies.

But as the promotional videos demonstrate, the Disney series is rightwing 9/11 porn. It has no business being broadcast. If it is, then any Congress, whether controlled either by Republicans or Democrats, should investigate whether ABC is, intentionally or not, fomenting the agenda of groups bent on subverting the government of the United States. Let’s not forget. Contrary to what the extreme right thinks, this government is supposed to be a democratic republic, not an oligarchy, and not a theocracy.

In addition, this country is certainly not supposed to be a fascist state in which far-right propaganda is permitted on our mass media but anything to the left of Colin Powell’s politics is deliberately squashed or quarantined, available only on less influential media and never heard by the majority of the American people.

The Mouse Has Lots Of Cheese At Stake

by tristero

Matt Stoller’s post on what Disney has at stake is a must reasd. Here’s a taste:

There is a window of time now for Mr. Iger to step up, an ‘apologize for Tylenol tampering’ moment. He needs to cancel this miniseries, and take personal responsibility for inadequate oversight. He should privately fire the people responsible for this total disaster of a project, and apologize. That’s the only way to restore Disney’s brand among a large group of very angry people. Be brave, be public, and be honorable. It’ll work.

And what will happen if he doesn’t? Well, it’s not just boycotts. Those are probably going to happen, but that’s not what Iger has to worry about, or his corporate brethren. You see, Disney has a number of political objectives, as is obvious from the donor patterns of their corporate executives and their lobbying behavior.

One of them is the egregiously awful broadcast flag. Disney is leading the effort to give Hollywood control over how your TV and TiVo are built and what you can do with programs you watch. This is in the Stevens bill before the Senate. Democrats didn’t really have any reason to deny Disney its political candy, since Disney was thought to be responsible with its content, or at least not overtly insane. Their credibility on this front is going quickly, and donations to Chuck Schumer aren’t the palliative they once were.

Another is copyright extensions, which Disney has used to keep its perpetual license on characters like Mickey Mouse, who should by now have fallen into the public domain. Democrats didn’t really have any reason to think that this was anything but a dispute over intellectual property, with corporations like Disney having motives that are only as pure as Snow White, versus pirates bent on stealing songs and movies by hardworking artists. Now that Disney’s credibility is going, lobbyists for Disney are going to find it tougher on Capitol Hill, and lobbyists for the Creative Commons movement are going to find a much easier reception. Iger knows there’s a movement bent on routing around his unreasonable and political control of free speech through copyright extremism. He’s got a choice on whether he gives that movement a whole lot of real political power.

And thing Disney wants is media consolidation. Disney wants to buy everything, since media is seen as a scale business. It’s pretty obvious to Democrats if this movie airs that Disney is not a responsible public steward of the airwaves it controls right now. Why should they be allowed to engulf even more assets? Like Creative Commons, the free media movement is growing rapidly, and it is a real movement that could receive a dollop of political power thanks to Disney’s exceptionally and impressively poor judgment.

Mr. Iger has a choice about what to do here. I don’t imagine he’ll make the right choice, but he might.

And the probability that he will is directly related to how loudly those of us who care about this issue make ourselves heard.

BTW, in the biz, the copyright extensions are often called something like “The Mickey Mouse Protection Bill.” And for good reason. Iger has a lot to lose by angering Democrats if they gain the legislative houses and he airs Republican propaganda. Billions and billions, as, in a different context, Carl Sagan is reputed to have said (but probably didn’t).

ht, Atrios.

Blinking Red Lights

by digby

Hey, guess what? Marc Platt, the producer of “PT9/11” knew over a year ago that he had hired a rightwing religious cultist to direct his movie:

POSTED ON 30/07/05

Sept. 11 miniseries shrouded in secrecy

Details of the plot are being hushed up to protect the film from copycats, executive producer says

GUY DIXON

The rumour mill is buzzing about an ABC miniseries currently being shot in Toronto about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Hollywood is only now daring to dramatize the 2001 events, and this six-hour miniseries, scheduled to air next spring, is one of a handful of Sept. 11 projects in the works. Yet, this production, which so far is being anonymously called the Untitled History Project, seems so unusually secretive that it is causing some in the industry to wonder if there are serious security concerns on set.

Then there is the fact that Harvey Keitel is starring as John O’Neill, the FBI official whose warnings about al-Qaeda fell on deaf ears in Washington. O’Neill eventually quit his job to become, fatefully, the director of security of the World Trade Center. He died in the New York attacks.

Will the miniseries turn O’Neill into a tragic American hero and the Sept. 11 attacks into a rah-rah patriotic tale, in the same way that many feel it was exploited during the last U.S. election? And how can the filmmakers re-enact in Toronto the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon?

Also provoking interest is the background of some of the filmmakers, such as director David Cunningham, who comes from a family that founded an international Christian evangelical missionary group. Screenwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh, however, comes from an Iranian-American family.

As it turns out, the production office isn’t trying to be particularly secretive, said executive producer Marc Platt. But because there are other competing projects floating around at the various networks and studios, such as the now-cancelled miniseries for NBC, and with more films likely to be developed, there is an incentive not to give too much away.

[…]

“The intention really is to tell the story of the events that led up to 9/11, as recounted to the best of our knowledge in The 9/11 Commission Report, as accurately as possible,” Platt said.

[…]

As for the choice of director and writer, there was “no grand plan or intention to hire people of varying backgrounds” or to present the terrorist attacks with any moral or religious slant, Platt said.

The director, who is in his early thirties, is the son of Loren and Darlene Cunningham, founders of Youth With A Mission (YWAM), an international organization of Christian missions, ministries and evangelical outreach programs. Short biographies of Loren and Darlene Cunningham on a YWAM website mention that their son and his wife “own a film company and feel called of God to influence society through this medium, keeping ‘one foot in the film industry and one foot on the mission field.’ “

“I don’t know David’s religious background any more than I know any other of the many filmmakers I’ve ever worked with,” said Platt. He pointed to Cunningham’s 2001 film To End All Wars, which stars Kiefer Sutherland and Robert Carlyle as Second World War prisoners of war in the Pacific in a story about forgiving one’s enemies, as his main reason for hiring the director for the miniseries.

“When this project came up, I thought creatively he was perfect for it,” Platt said.

This was written over a year ago. Platt knew his choice of Cunningham for this project raised some questions. Journalists were asking about it even then. And in light of what we know now, you certainly have to wonder whether that secrecy thing was about more than somebody stealing their concept.

Nowrasteh told Hugh Hewitt that he was approached to do the film:

HH: Now it is a huge project. So before we talk about the particulars, when did it get started? How long did it take to make? And why is it showing without commercials? What is ABC saying about that? And I salute them for.

CN: Well, I salute them as well. I mean, I was contacted in November, 2004, initially, asked if I’d read the report, would I take a look at it, and see if I…

HH: The report being the 9/11 Commission Report?

CN: Yes, the 9/11 Commission Report. Take a look at it, and see if you think there’s a movie there. They were considering at the time anywhere from six to ten hour mini-series, based on the report and other sources. So I started the process of looking into it.

I have no reason to believe that Marc Platt is political except to the extent that he is involved in mainstream Jewish causes. He doesn’t seem to contribute politically and isn’t associated with Horowitz’s Wednesday Morning Club or any other conservative (or liberal) groups that I can find.

They might have innocently called in Nowrasteh based upon his earlier TV Movie “The Day reagan Was Shot.” But regardless of that, I suspect it was Nowrasteh who who then recommended David Cunningham. It’s pure speculation, but it just isn’t credible that this conservative creative team came together by coincidence.

Platt and Disney/ABC were given plenty of hints of problems early in the production, by curious journalists like this one — and the FBI consultants who refused to work on the film because it wasn’t credible. There were red lights blinking all over the place. If Platt and Disney/ABC didn’t see them they were being willfully blind.

And then it’s also possible they knew exactly what they were doing. Nowrasteh says they called him in in November of 2004. Disney ABC and Platt may have felt in that moment of GOP triumph that there was no possible downside to blaming the Democrats for 9/11. It looked like the smart play. Two years later it looks like a debacle of epic proportions.

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Obsessive Clenis Disorder

by digby

All through his presidency, I wondered why the NY Times was so obsessed with Clinton’s manly member but I assumed they would get over it once he left office. I was wrong. A couple of months ago they spent untold man hours a large p[iece of ront page real estate figuring out how many nights the Clintons spent together and today they devoted an entire article about Ned Lamont to rehashing the Lewinsky matter.

Ned Lamont met with New York Times writers for dinner this week. I knew this because Anne Kornblut was on Chris Matthews’ show and they dished about it together:

MATTHEWS: … What‘s going on? You had dinner last night with Mr. Ned?

ANNE KORNBLUT, THE “NEW YORK TIMES”: He came in and had dinner with a few of us and yesterday, of course, was back to school day.

[…]

MATTHEWS: Well why was Lamont carrying favor with you guys last night?

KORNBLUT: Well, we are a local New York metropolitan paper, for one thing, but I think at the same time he wants to come to Washington and thank a lot of the Democrats, the national Democrats who are supporting him and essentially turning against Lieberman, their long-time friend.

[…]

MATTHEWS: Is he too waspy?… Didn‘t he just drop out of the Greenwich Country Club so he could run?

KORNBLUT: Well that‘s why he can afford to run, right?

You can’t win with these people. Clinton was a self made man and they sniffed that he was “trashing the place.” Lamont comes from old money and progressive politics for generations and he’s not a real Democrat (which I guess rules out JFK and FDR as acceptable Democrats too.) Bush, meanwhile, gets treated like a salt-of-the-earth everyman because he talks like a moron even though he’s far more blue blooded than any of them.

Anyway, I saw that Matthews show and expected that we’d be reading quite the article about Ned Lamont in the NY Times. They had dinner, they spoke for hours — they must must have talked about a wide range of topics. But with all that is going on in the world and in that race, apparently Kornblut and her friends couldn’t think of anything to ask about except Bill Clinton’s pants and whether Lamont was as exercized about them as Lieberman was back in 1998:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 — Ned Lamont, Connecticut’s Democratic Senate candidate, has sharply criticized Senator Joseph I. Lieberman’s public rebuke of former President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, suggesting this week that Mr. Lieberman turned his back on a decades-old friendship and helped make a tragic episode a “media spectacle.”

Mr. Lamont said on Wednesday night that he shared Mr. Lieberman’s “moral outrage” over Mr. Clinton’s sexual misbehavior, but Mr. Lamont was harsh in attacking a speech that was praised as principled by many leaders in both parties and helped propel the Connecticut senator to national prominence.

“You don’t go to the floor of the Senate and turn this into a media spectacle,” Mr. Lamont said of Mr. Lieberman’s remarks eight years ago this month.

“You go up there, you sit down with one of your oldest friends and say, ‘You’re embarrassing yourself, you’re embarrassing your presidency, you’re embarrassing your family, and it’s got to stop.’ ” he said.

Mr. Lamont made his comments during a dinner with seven reporters and editors for The New York Times, in a free-wheeling conversation in which he repeatedly spoke of Mr. Lieberman — a longtime Democrat running as an independent on his own line after losing to Mr. Lamont in the primary — as the de facto Republican candidate.

The dinner, held at the Equinox restaurant, was an on-the-record meeting arranged by aides to Mr. Lamont. It came at the end of his first full day in Washington since the Aug. 8 primary, capping a 14-hour marathon of meetings with national reporters, a handful of union leaders, and top Democratic officials.

Mr. Lamont skipped the wine (“I better not,” he said with a chuckle) and ordered a caramelized banana tart for dessert but left before it arrived. He and his aides moved to end the interview after the discussion of the Lewinsky scandal, normally an off-limits topic for Democrats.

In answering repeated questions about the scandal, Mr. Lamont noted that he had young children at the time — his eldest, 19-year-old Emily, sat next to him during the first course but then left.

“Everybody condemns what he did,” Mr. Lamont said, referring to Mr. Clinton. “But it’s how our country responded and handled it, turned it into an impeachable offense and dragged it across the front page of the paper for a long time.”

It goes on and on and on like that for twelve more paragraphs, rehashing the speech and Lieberman’s reason for giving it and how it led to his being chosen for the vice presidency blah, blah, blah. They even quote that putz Dan Gerstein, who wrote the heinous thing, saying Lieberman had to do it in order for the party not to be “widely perceived as ‘the anything goes party.'” Thanks Dan. Very helpful.

That’s all they had to talk to Ned Lamont about over this dinner — which evidently led to him ending it and I don’t blame him. That’s the entire article except four useless final paragraphs about some advertisements. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they wanted to give Joe Lieberman an opportunity to sanctimoniously drone on and on about his superior morality again, which he promptly did, right here.

The kewl kidz at the NY Times just love Lieberman. After all, he gives them the excuse they need to obsess about Clinton’s pants — which makes them feel superior and tingly “down there” all at the same time.

Update:

Jesus, it’s worse than I thought. It appears that the NY Times wasn’t only having fun rolling around in Clinton’s pants. Lieberman has now miraculously “turned up” a letter that Lamont wrote him back in 1998 which he and the Times are blatantly misrepresenting as some sort of agreement with Joe’s speech when it is nothing of the sort. Did a little birdie whisper in Ann Kornblut’s and Jennifer Medina’s ears that they should grill Lamont about Lewinsky? Sure looks that way.

Let’s relive the glory days of the Starr Report, shall we? There’s nothing more important going on, after all. As far as the NY Times is concerned, there has never been anything in the world more important.

h/t Joejoejoe

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Hung Out By Horowitz

by digby

Max Blumenthal has more on the shadowy right wing Hollywood cabal behind “PT9/11” that I wrote about earlier this week.

Disney/ABC either got punked by David Horowitz or they knowingly affiliated themselves with one of the craziest wackos on the right. Either way, they need to pull this loser.

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Protest

by digby

Anybody here in the LA area who can get off work this afternoon should try to get over to The Disney Studios in Burbank at 4pm. The Courage Campaign has organized a protest.
Info here.

If all you can do is make some calls, here’s a handy new tool from PFAW.

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Systemic Icon Failure

by digby

Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice looks at the “PT9/11” controversy from the perspective of Disney’s corporate failure:

How often do you see a corporation truly step in it — I mean, step in it so strongly that you virtually can hear the “squish”?

How often in your lifetime do you see a big corporation do something, either by sloppy advance work or the intent of some higher-ups, that angers and bitterly offends a large number of its customers in such a way that its image could be dramatically transformed for years within a shockingly short period of time? How often do you see a corporation dig in its heels — and make matters worse? Or change course — and possibly (in another way) make matter worse? As any PR person knows, it is far easier to destroy an image (and credibility) than to rebuild it.

The Great “The Path To 911” Docudrama Controversy of 2006 is a body blow to ABC that is likely to have implications for the network and its parent company — for years.

Matt Stoller talks a bit more about the corporate straightjacket that Disney/ABC has put themselves in over this. They have a number of very important issues before the government that vitally depend upon their being perceived as wise stewards who don’t require special supervision or regulation. That is going to be a much harder case to make if they air this biased propaganda. They have a lot to lose.

But it’s even bigger than their current corporate agenda. In 2004, Roy Disney, Walt’s nephew and third largest shareholder of the company gave a stirring speech to the shareholders in which he made this point:

The Walt Disney Company is more than just a business. It is an authentic American icon — which is to say that over the years it has come to stand for something real and meaningful and worthwhile to millions of people of all ages and backgrounds around the world.

This is not something you can describe easily on a balance sheet, but it is tangible enough. Indeed, it is the foundation on which everything we have accomplished as a company — both artistically and financially — is based.

Disney isn’t just any corporation. It is one of the most valuable brands on the planet. They make a product that they can sell over and over again as each generation is born and they sell it with with a stamp of approval from parents who enjoyed the same product when they were children. Roy is right. It is an authentic American icon.

If they allow themselves to become a purveyor of biased political product, which they lately seem intent upon doing, they will have devalued the single most important asset they have. It would be unfortunate for all of us if millions of Americans were to reluctantly be forced to accept that this authentic American icon is nothing more than a cheap imitation of Fox News.

Even Rupert Murdoch keeps his political and entertainment divisions separate.

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Historians Step Up

by digby

Dear Robert Iger:

We write as professional historians, who are deeply concerned by the continuing reports about ABC’s scheduled broadcast of “The Path to 9/11.” These reports document that this drama contains numerous flagrant falsehoods about critical events in recent American history. The key participants and eyewitnesses to these events state that the script distorts and even fabricates evidence into order to mislead viewers about the responsibility of numerous American officials for allegedly ignoring the terrorist threat before 2000.

The claim by the show’s producers, broadcaster, and defenders, that these falsehoods are permissible because the show is merely a dramatization, is disingenuous and dangerous given their assertions that the show is also based on authoritative historical evidence. Whatever ABC’s motivations might be, broadcasting these falsehoods, connected to the most traumatic historical event of our times, would be a gross disservice to the public. A responsible broadcast network should have nothing to do with the falsification of history, except to expose it. We strongly urge you to halt the show’s broadcast and prevent misinforming Americans about their history.

Sincerely,
Arthur Schlesinger
Sean Wilentz, Princeton University
Michael Kazin, Georgetown University
Lizbeth Cohen, Harvard University,
Nicholas Salvatore, Cornell University;
Ted Widmer, Washington College;
Rick Perlstein, Independent Scholar;
David Blight, Yale University;
Eric Alterman, City University of New York.

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