Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Disney Throws Away Millions For Republican Causes

by digby

Jonathan at A Tiny Revolution notices a strange contradiction:

So…”The Path to 9/11″ cost $30 million and was written and directed by conservative ideologues. Factually speaking, it’s predictably craptastic. And yet Disney is glad to lose at least $30 million on it.

By contrast, this was Disney’s treatment of another political movie—one that eventually grossed over $200 million:

The Walt Disney Company is blocking its Miramax division from distributing a new documentary by Michael Moore that harshly criticizes President Bush, executives at both Disney and Miramax said Tuesday…

A senior Disney executive elaborated that the company had the right to quash Miramax’s distribution of films if it deemed their distribution to be against the interests of the company. The executive said Mr. Moore’s film is deemed to be against Disney’s interests not because of the company’s business dealings with the government but because Disney caters to families of all political stripes and believes Mr. Moore’s film, which does not have a release date, could alienate many.

”It’s not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle,” this executive said.

read on…

You would think they would at least be somewhat uncomfortable about screening this rightwing mini-series only for conservatives. According to this alleged email to Hugh Hewitt, 900 screening copies were mailed out. Sadly, it appears that there were none available for members of the Clinton administration or anyone from the left.

This correspondent told Hewitt that the Disney execs were all atwitter over the week-end:

The story here is the backlash that the Disney/ABC execs experienced was completely unexpected and is what caused them to question themselves and make these changes at all. Had this been the Bush Admin pressuring, they wouldn’t have even taken the call. The execs and studio bosses are dyed in the wool liberals and huge supporters of Clinton and the Democratic Party in general. They had no idea any of this could happen. As I understand this, the lawyers and production team spent literally months corroborating every story point down to the sentence. The fact that they were the attacked and vilified by their “own team” took them completely by surprise; this is the first time they’ve been labeled right-wing, conservative conspiracists.

The scramble caused by this backlash was so all consuming that the execs spent their holiday weekend behind closed door meetings and revamped their ad campaign. But at the end of their mad scramble, they found only a handful of changes they could make and still be true to the events. The changes are done only to appease the Clinton team – to be able to say they made changes. But the blame on the Clinton team is in the DNA of the project and could not be eradicated without pulling the entire show. A $40 million investment on the part of ABC is enough to stem even Bill Clinton’s influence.

We are, apparently, supposed to assume that the communist corporate officers of Disney/ABC (many of whom inexplicably contributed to the Bush campaign) knew that the “blame on the Clinton team is in the DNA of the project” and yet they never expected this fictionalized account of the Clinton administration causing 9/11 would make any waves among their comrades. Sure, that makes perfect sense.

It’s evident that Disney/ABC Entertainment is anything but a bunch of lefties. If they were they would have been thrilled to distribute “Fahrenheit 9/11” instead of avoiding it like the plague. And they most certainly wouldn’t have signed off on crazy anti-semite Mel Gibson’s Holocaust project, for God’s sake:

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 6, 2005 – Mel Gibson, whose “The Passion of the Christ” was assailed by critics as an anti-Semitic passion play – and whose father has been on record as a Holocaust denier – has a new project under way: a nonfiction miniseries about the Holocaust.

[…]

It is not expected that Mr. Gibson will act in the miniseries, nor is it certain yet that his name, rather than his company’s, will be publicly attached to the final product, according to several people involved in developing it. Nor is it guaranteed yet that the project will be completed and broadcast.

But Quinn Taylor, ABC’s senior vice president in charge of movies for television, acknowledged that the attention-getting value of having Mr. Gibson attached to a Holocaust project was a factor.

“Controversy’s publicity, and vice versa,” Mr. Taylor said.

Right. Holocaust denial and anti-semitism is an awesome way to get publicity. But distributing a documentary about the Bush administration’s handling of 9/11 was too hot to handle. And they had no idea that a mini-series claiming that the Clinton administration was responsible for the attacks would be controversial at all.

Here’s the record:

Disney/ABC cancelled the reality show featuring a gay couple, “Welcome To The Neighborhood,” ten days before it was to air when James Dobson and the religious right threatened to withdraw their support for the conservative classic “Narnia.”

Disney refused to allow its subsidiary Miramax, which specialized in controversial fare, to distribute “Fahrenheit 9/11” allegedly because they felt it was too political.

They made a deal with Mel Gibson, beloved on the religious right for his film “The Passion,” to produce a film about the Holocaust even though they knew at the time he held extremely controversial views about the Holocaust and Judaism. They only cancelled the project when he was caught by the police drunkenly saying “all the wars in the world are caused by the Jews.”

Now they have produced a blatantly rightwing work of fiction which they are saying is based on the official 9/11 Commission report and they are giving it away without any advertising. They sent out hundreds of screening copies but failed to send any to the Clinton administration officials who are trashed in the film or to liberal columnists and bloggers.

There’s a pattern here folks and it isn’t a pattern that shows ABC knuckling under to liberals. There is a huge amount of money at stake in all these decisions, but for some reason Disney seems to be more than willing to throw it away when it benefits the right wing: already produced films and TV shows are either cancelled or allowed to be distributed by others, while hugely expensive, controversial rightwing mini-series’ are broadcast with no advertising and allowed to be downloaded for free by I-tunes.

Isn’t that something that Disney shareholders should be just a little bit concerned about? If ABC is protecting its “Narnia” franchise, at some point you have to look at whether the price they are paying is too high. If they have thrown this kind of money away to appease the GOP for business reasons then their shareholders have just been taken to the cleaners. The old K Street project is dead and when Democrats take congress this fall they aren’t going to be happy. They are on to it.

If Disney/ABC is giving away free air time for conservative projects and denying distribution to programs that don’t favor the Republican Party, then perhaps somebody needs to look at whether this stuff is legal. There are laws regulating corporate giving to campaigns. By not showing advertising it seems to me that it’s not impossible to make a case that this latest is a free gift to the Republican party just weeks before an important election.

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ABC Has No Class

by tristero

To provide a slimeball like Limbaugh an advance copy of their miniseries but refuse to send one to Clinton? Not to mention Madeline Albright and Sandy Berger? Who the fuck do they think they are? From Albright’s letter:

While I have requested a copy of the broadcast, I have yet to receive one. I have been informed by some who had been given the right to view the broadcast that the drama depicts scenes that never happened, events that never took place, decisions that were never made and conversations that never occurred; it asserts as fact things that are not fact.

For example, one scene apparently portrays me as refusing to support a missile strike against bin Laden without first alerting the Pakistanis; it further asserts that I notified the Pakistanis of the strike over the objections of our military. Neither of these assertions is true.

You can write ABC here.

Trials and Tribulations

by digby

According to Pete Williams on MSNBC, Bush’s announcement that they are moving the 14 terrorists we’ve had holed up in secret prisons to Guantanamo is a political ploy to force Democrats to have to give “rights” to Khalid Sheik Mohammed if they want to challenge his Guantanamo policies. It’s quite clever.

Might I suggest that since they’ve just spent the last week shrieking about fascists and Nazi’s and comparing the GWOT to WWII, that Democrats simply remind them that the gold standard for trials of fascists is the Nuremberg trials? Perhaps we could settle this whole thing by simply saying that Nuremberg should serve as the basis for these new “Islamo-fascist” trials and put an end to the controversy.

Of course, that means the trials would have to be public.

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The Littlest Hero: One Year Ago Today

by digby

One year ago today I was as depressed as I’d ever been after watching a week’s worth of Katrina aftermath horrors. And then I saw this story on Talk Left:

In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.

They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love.

…Deamonte volunteered his vital statistics. He said his father was tall and his mother was short. He gave his address, his phone number and the name of his elementary school.

He said that the 5-month-old was his brother, Darynael, and that two others were his cousins, Tyreek and Zoria. The other three lived in his apartment building. The children were clean and healthy ? downright plump in the case of the infant, said Joyce Miller, a nurse who examined them. It was clear, she said, that “time had been taken with those kids.” The baby was “fat and happy.”

Later, more details emerged:

Deamonte began to give more details to Derrick Robertson, a 27-year-old Big Buddy mentor: How he saw his mother cry when he was loaded onto the helicopter. How he promised her he’d take care of his little brother.

[…]

Late Saturday night, they found Deamonte’s mother, who was in a shelter in San Antonio along with the four mothers of the other five children. Catrina Williams, 26, saw her children’s pictures on a website set up over the weekend by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. By Sunday, a private plane from Angel Flight was waiting to take the children to Texas.

Here’s the kid last February, doing well in the first grade in San Antonio.

February 2006
Alan Rochkus, principal of Harmony Hills Elementary School, watches Demonte Love, first-grader, complete a math puzzle while a KSAT-12 photojournalist films him. Love rescued six children, ranging in age from 5 months to three years, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, La. He received a Trumpet Award for his heroism.

It does your heart good, doesn’t it?

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Take Another Look Kewl Kids

by digby

Since the press has turned into lobotomy patients with memory deficit disorder on the Plame case, I don’t suppose it’s even worthwhile to point out that the Armitage revelations of the past week or so in Isikoff and Corn’s new book aren’t really all that earth shattering compared with this week’s bombshell:

A key question was, what did Valerie Wilson do at the CIA? Was she truly undercover? In a subsequent column, Novak reported that she was “an analyst, not in covert operations.” White House press secretary Scott McClellan suggested that her employment at the CIA was no secret. Jonah Goldberg of National Review claimed, “Wilson’s wife is a desk jockey and much of the Washington cocktail circuit knew that already.”

Valerie Wilson was no analyst or paper-pusher. She was an operations officer working on a top priority of the Bush Administration. Armitage, Rove and Libby had revealed information about a CIA officer who had searched for proof of the President’s case. In doing so, they harmed her career and put at risk operations she had worked on and foreign agents and sources she had handled.

Another issue was whether Valerie Wilson had sent her husband to Niger to check out an intelligence report that Iraq had sought uranium there. Hubris contains new information undermining the charge that she arranged this trip. In an interview with the authors, Douglas Rohn, a State Department officer who wrote a crucial memo related to the trip, acknowledges he may have inadvertently created a misimpression that her involvement was more significant than it had been.

[…]

In 1997 she returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.) She was eventually given a choice: North Korea or Iraq. She selected the latter. Come the spring of 2001, she was in the CPD’s modest Iraq branch. But that summer–before 9/11–word came down from the brass: We’re ramping up on Iraq. Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group.

There was great pressure on the JTFI to deliver. Its primary target was Iraqi scientists. JTFI officers, under Wilson’s supervision, tracked down relatives, students and associates of Iraqi scientists–in America and abroad–looking for potential sources. They encouraged Iraqi émigrés to visit Iraq and put questions to relatives of interest to the CIA. The JTFI was also handling walk-ins around the world. Increasingly, Iraqi defectors were showing up at Western embassies claiming they had information on Saddam’s WMDs. JTFI officers traveled throughout the world to debrief them. Often it would take a JTFI officer only a few minutes to conclude someone was pulling a con. Yet every lead had to be checked.

“We knew nothing about what was going on in Iraq,” a CIA official recalled. “We were way behind the eight ball. We had to look under every rock.” Wilson, too, occasionally flew overseas to monitor operations. She also went to Jordan to work with Jordanian intelligence officials who had intercepted a shipment of aluminum tubes heading to Iraq that CIA analysts were claiming–wrongly–were for a nuclear weapons program. (The analysts rolled over the government’s top nuclear experts, who had concluded the tubes were not destined for a nuclear program.)

The JTFI found nothing.

Now I realize that it would be imprudent of me to suggest that her group’s failure to adequately provide the vice president with the information he needed might have prompted him to tell his henchman Libby to burn her, but, you know I’m like that.

Armitage may have just been a gossipy little busybody from way back, but that doesn’t explain LIbby and Judy and Rove and Cooper or the “two senior administration officials” who tried to get the Washington Post to print that Wilson’s CIA “wife” had sent Wilson on a “boondoggle.” Rove said she was “fair game.” You simply cannot persuade me that every last person involved in this did not know that the head of the Joint Task Force on Iraq’s WMD at the CIA in 2003 was the person they were busy making sure was publicly outed.

Wilson scared the hell out of them because they knew who his wife was and knew what she knew. This is about Cheney and the CIA, whom he and all the neocons have thought were a bunch of liberal appeasers for decades because they have so often failed to back up the wingnuts’ most fanciful, paranoid wet dreams about the boogeyman of the day — wet dreams, by the way, which were always, everytime, proven false in the end.

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Selling Credibility

by digby

One of the puzzles of the 9/11 movie is the fact that they are so adamant about the fact that this movie was based on the 9/11 Commission Report when they actually optioned two other books and the story is obviously at least partially based on them.

I suspect that this is ABC marketing all the way. This FoxNews story from last summer gives it away:

At the moment, ABC officials are calling the miniseries “Untitled Commission Report” and producers refer to it as the “Untitled History Project.”

The production company was called “UHP” productions. One can assume that the rightwing creative team believed that they were making their version of an “historical” docudrama based on various sources. They didn’t seem to see this as “the story of the 9/11 Commission.”

“We are trying to maintain as much accuracy, integrity and be as sensitive as we can in documenting an important series of historical events,” producer Marc Platt told The Post.

The film focuses mostly on the events leading up to the attacks, which don’t appear on screen until the very end, says Platt.

(Platt’s comments about accuracy and integrity are nonsense as but that’s another story.)

It’s Steve McPherson, the ABC executive in charge of the project who emphasizes the commission:

“For us, having talked to Thomas Kean and the whole commission, we just felt it was a really important thing to bring to air,” ABC chief Stephen McPherson told The Post yesterday at the TV critics press tour in L.A

I have not heard that they spoke with “the whole commission.” Thomas Kean may have been a “consultant” on the series but considering the numerous inaccuracies, it appears the producers may not have really used the 9/11 Commission report as much of a source at all. It was a phony marketing hook.

In any case, Kean doesn’t appear to have been much of a stickler for accuracy. As most of you have probably read by now, the movie features an entirely fabricated scene — and it’s a doozy. Here’s Rush Limbaugh gleefully describing it:

So the CIA, the Northern Alliance, surrounding a house where bin Laden is in Afghanistan, they’re on the verge of capturing, but they need final approval from the Clinton administration in order to proceed.

So they phoned Washington. They phoned the White House. Clinton and his senior staff refused to give authorization for the capture of bin Laden because they’re afraid of political fallout if the mission should go wrong, and if civilians were harmed…Now, the CIA agent in this is portrayed as being astonished. “Are you kidding?” He asked Berger over and over, “Is this really what you guys want?”

Berger then doesn’t answer after giving his first admonition, “You guys go in on your own. If you go in we’re not sanctioning this, we’re not approving this,” and Berger just hangs up on the agent after not answering any of his questions.

Richard Clarke vociferously denies that this ever happened and it is most definitely not part of the 9/11 commission report. This is apparently a key scene, perhaps the most important scene in the movie, in that it indicts the Clinton administration for being too soft and weak to take out bin Laden when they had the chance. Rush certainly does seem to love it. Unfortunately, it just ain’t true.

But what did the last of the “good Republicans,” the 9/11 commissioner/consultant Kean have to say about this completely fabricated scene?

Neither Berger nor Ben-Veniste was consulted on the film. Kean, however, is an official adviser; he says the incident was a fictionalized composite. It was “representative of a series of events compacted into one,” he replied to Ben-Veniste at the time. In a phone interview a few days later, he added, “It’s reasonably accurate.”

No it actually isn’t. It’s a fraud. But Kean’s official impramatur on this project is what ABC has been selling from the beginning. Well, not selling, actually. They are giving this film away for free to the public and to school children saying it is an objective, accurate historical account of the events that led to the worst terrorist attack in American history.

One wonders whether Kean has actually seen the movie or if he understands that his credibility has just been flushed down the toilet by the marketing department at ABC news. But then, perhaps he doesn’t care. Matt Stoller reports on the allegedly bi-partisan Kean. It isn’t pretty.

Update: Firedoglake’s spotlight project has an interesting way to contact ABC affiliates. ThinkProgress has another helpful tool.
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Update II: Jennifer Nix at FDL reports that she was on a call with journalists questioning Tom Kean today and that they were asking some tough questions. It also appears that ABC may be shamed into changing its phony “based on the 9/11 Commission Report” pitch. That is excellent news, if true.

The single most damaging thing about this rightwing fiction is that they have been presenting it as based on the bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report, which gave it credibility that it simply has no right to. If they are forced to discard that then we have a tiny victory. I would hope that they will also edit out the blatantly fraudulant scenes, allow a rebuttal after the movie or pull it from their schedule all together. But this would be a start.

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9/11 Spokesmodel

by digby

Now that we know “The Path to 9/11” is not actually based on the 9/11 Commission report, it is probably a good idea to take a look at what is actually was based on (aside from the fevered wingnut dreams of its creative team.) ABC had optioned a couple of books for the project. The first is called “The Cell” co-written by John Miller, formerly of ABC’s 20/20. It follows the story of John O’Neill, who is played by the star of the movie, Harvey Kietel.

Miller, you’ll recall, is the ABC spokesmodel who left the network and went directly work as the head of counterterrorism for the LAPD. This was, as you might imagine, something of a shock to the locals, who expected that their new counterterrorism chief would be someone who had at least a tiny bit of law enforcement experience. LA, after all, is a serious terrorist target, having been the destination of the thwarted Millenium plot. We take our terrorism quite seriously here.

He gained quite a reputation:

When was the last time a top LAPD official made the tabloid’s gossipy Page Six? Umm–never? But John Miller, the ex-TV journalist brought in by chief William Bratton to head up the local anti-terrorism fight, makes the New York Post over his rocky reception here in Los Angeles.

“New Yorker and former ABC anchor John Miller is having a hard time fitting in at his new job with the Los Angeles Police Dept. Miller, who was hired by his pal Bill Bratton to be the LAPD’s head of counterterrorism, is technically a civilian…When notoriously nightlife-loving Miller showed up to a crime scene at Club Lingerie on Sunset Boulevard, a fellow officer quipped, “So John, did you really respond to the call? Or were you here already?”

This was the real kicker:

Miller, the ex-ABC reporter who chief William Bratton found a $157,000-a-year job at the LAPD — as anti-terrorism boss and head of the Critical Incident Management Bureau, despite no cop experience — has enough trouble being taken seriously by LAPD officers and by journalists in town. On Thursday, his burden got heavier. He was stopped at LAX with a loaded gun in his computer bag and briefly detained before boarding a flight to New York with his wife and child. The LAPD-issued .38 and a license to carry it are two of the perks Bratton gifted Miller with to go with the job. (Miller was Bratton’s PR spokesman back at the NYPD). Miller was allowed to go ahead and fly to New York to celebrate Barbara Walters’ retirement, but he may face a fine and the wrath of his sponsor. At an evening press conference, Bratton said:

“I talked to John when he was on the plane, and he was incredibly embarrassed for himself, for his family and for the department. Apparently, he was moving things around from one case to another when he was packing and he forgot the gun was there.”

He gets the gun back when he returns. But if you’re inclined to forget where you put a loaded handgun, should you really be one of only about 100 civilian Angelenos licensed to carry one? The chief quipped, “I’m confident that he did not try to smuggle a weapon on the plane, that he and his family did not plan to hijack a plane and fly off to Cuba or something.” L.A. Times, L.A. Daily News, N.Y. Daily News, N.Y. Post

Even in Lala-land, having a showbiz counter-terrorism chief running around carrying loaded weapons on airplanes was a bit much.

LAPD chief Bill Bratton’s anti-terrorism commander, John Miller, has turned in the handguns he was caught with while boarding at LAX a few weeks back. Miller, the ex-ABC newsman who Bratton brought when he came here from New York, also gave up the department-issued Chevy Tahoe with lights and siren. Apparently everyone agreed the PR downside wasn’t worth the upside, and the official line is Miller voluntarily surrendered the perks.

After showering himself in ignominy for a few years here in LA, he is now doing PR for the FBI. He is a member of the Bush Adminstration. You can see why ABC isn’t advertising the fact that their soap opera is partly based on his work.

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A Plea For Comity And Respect

by tristero

You won’t find it from me. Not when it comes to opposing the fascist incompetents running this country. Not after the adulterous Gingrich said this:

COLMES: We were just talking about [House Democratic Leader] Nancy Pelosi [CA] and what she wants to do in this effort to perhaps get Rumsfeld removed. He recently made some very controversial comments, basically suggesting that critics of the Iraq war are tantamount to Hitler’s appeasers. Do you agree with him on those comments?

GINGRICH: Essentially, sure. I mean, I think you’ve got to say that —

COLMES: You’re calling appeasers people who disagree with the Bush policy administration —

GINGRICH: Look —

COLMES: — comparing them to those who enabled Hitler?

GINGRICH: Yes.

COLMES: That’s an astounding comment —

GINGRICH: GINGRICH: What’s your — what’s your — why? Why is it astounding?

COLMES: — that’s a very insulting comment —

GINGRICH: It’s not an insulting comment.

Nor after Rice compared Bush/Iraq to the Civil War and critics of Bush to people who would tolerate slavery.

And let’s not forget: It’s only September. The Bush administration hasn’t even begun to get nasty.

Disney and The Dobsonites

by digby

Are Disney and ABC becoming willing tools of the right wing? Or are they simply currying favor with James Dobson and the far right out corporate necessity? Either way, something very strange is happening in Mouseland.

Earlier this year, you’ll remember that they cancelled, at the last minute, a reality TV show called “Welcome To The Neighborhood” which featured a gay couple competing for a house. The NY Times reported:

Ten days before the first episode was to be shown, ABC executives canceled Welcome to the Neighborhood, saying that they were concerned that viewers who might have been appalled at some early statements made in the show –including homophobic barbs –might not hang in for the sixth episode, when several of those same neighbors pronounced themselves newly open-minded about gays and other groups.

ABC acted amid protests by the National Fair Housing Alliance, which had expressed concern about a competition in which race, religion and sexual orientation were discussed as factors in the awarding of a house. But two producers of the show, speaking publicly about the cancellation for the first time, say the network was confident it had the legal standing to give away a house as a game-show prize. One, Bill Kennedy, a co-executive producer who helped develop the series with his son, Eric, suggested an alternative explanation. He said that the protests might have been most significant as a diversion that allowed the Walt Disney Company, ABC’s owner, to pre-empt a show that could have interfered with a much bigger enterprise: the courting of evangelical Christian audiences for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Disney hoped that the film, widely viewed as a parable of the Resurrection, would be the first in a profitable movie franchise.

In the months and weeks before Welcome to the Neighborhood was to have its premiere, as Disney sought to build church support for Narnia, four religious groups lifted longtime boycotts of the company that had been largely prompted by Disney’s tolerance of periodic gatherings by gay tourists at its theme parks. Representatives for two of those groups now say that broadcasting Neighborhood could have complicated their support for Narnia. One, the Southern Baptist Convention, with more than 16 million members, lifted the last of the boycotts against Disney on June 22, a week before ABC announced it was pulling the series.

[…]

Asked whether Disney’s plans for Narnia had affected Neighborhood, Mr. Brockman of ABC referred a reporter to comments made on July 26 by Stephen McPherson, the president of ABC Entertainment, to a gathering of television critics. At that time it was not widely known that a gay couple had won the competition. Instead, Mr. McPherson, a champion of the show until its sudden cancellation, was asked if he had been influenced by criticism by civil rights groups.

“If I stopped airing things just because advocacy groups had issues with it, we would run a test pattern,” Mr. McPherson said. Rather, he said, he had begun to worry that some of the neighbors’ most intolerant statements early on could confuse the audience’s understanding of “the message you were trying to get across.”

Right. Mr. McPherson, very slickly avoided the question of whether it was pressure from the religious right and implied it was done for the benefit of gays, which is not credible — particularly since we know that he hired a religious cultist to direct his 40 million dollar mini-series “The Path To 9/11” written by a well known, far right wing writer.

David Cunningham, the young director, is the son of a famous leader of a controversial evangelical youth ministry called Youth With A Mission. It has been heavily criticized over the years for its authoritarian teachings and cultlike attributes. Cunningham’s alma mater is the YWAM “college” called the University of Nations, which teaches filmmaking as a way to spread the gospel. Some members of the group even worked on the film.

Cunningham has worked with other members of the religious right in Hollywood with the intention of spreading the word. His previous film, received ecstatically in the Christian right community, was called “To End All Wars”* produced by Jack Hafer, a fellow religious rightist. Cunningham was chosen as one of the 30 emerging voices who are the “future of the American church” by Charisma Magazine. He’s quoted saying:

“My life’s mission is to challenge and shape culture through film.”

The writer of this project, Cyrus Nowrasteh, is a well documented rightwing filmmaker:

“To quote Team America, he’s [Michael Moore] an out of control socialist weasel.” —Interview, June 9, 2005.

There is obviously nothing wrong with these conservative activists making films. There have always been those with a conservative point of view in Hollywood; studio bosses and network executives tend to be conservative in all senses of the word. But it is more than a little bit odd that ABC chose this particular creative duo to develop and film a hugely expensive six hour mini-series about the political culpability for 9/11. You’d think they could have found some people who were less politically invested in a particular point of view than these two.

It’s even more odd that they have gone such great lengths to advertise it as being based upon the bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report when, in fact, they optioned two other books as sources for the film, one of which is widely touted on the right. Therefore, the series is quite obviously a compilation of several sources and the product of the worldview of its rightwing creative team. In other words it is a work of fiction. To advertise it as being “based” on the 9/11 Commission Report is a fraud on the public.

And now they have announced that they will not show advertising on this big 40 million dollar investment and will distribute it for free to 100,000 educators around the country and on i-tunes. It’s basically a gift to the Republican party and the conservative movement.

What is going on over at Disney/ABC? Are they selling out their shareholders to a small shadowy group of Hollywood rightwingers because they share their worldview? Or is it just a gambit for Disney to keep Focus on the Family on their side as they roll out the “Narnia” franchise? Has Disney been so successfully mau-maued by the religious right that they are now in the business of blatantly propping up the Republican Party on its behalf?

Whatever it is, it’s quite clear that they are determined to make the nation believe this work of fiction is a credible depiction of the events leading up to 9/11 when it is quite clearly a biased political drama written with the intention of making the Clinton administration culpable for the attacks in the minds of Americans. They chose people with a politiical and cultural agenda to make this film and have been dishonest in promoting it.

What is going on over at Disney?

Update: After refusing to screen the movie for anyone to the left of Hugh Hewitt and then disappearing the public blog after numerous “clarifications,” they are now refusing to allow any lefty bloggers on a promotional phone call today with their paid shill Thomas Kean, who lends his official impramatur as co-chairman of the 9/11 commission to this work of fiction.

* “To End All Wars” actually has an embedded message that would frighten the war-mongering 101st keyboarders to the depth of their bunny slippers. At the end, it’s all about forgiveness, which, as we all, know is anathema to any self-respecting wingnut. But I’m sure they enjoyed the gory crucifixion and beheading scenes. What rightwing Christian tale would be complete without them?

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The Right Never Takes A Vacation From Propaganda

by tristero

One of the less noticed rhetorical strategies of the right is what could be termed micro-propaganda. What I’m referring to are offhand or nearly offhand remarks with a rightwing bias, even entire articles that are so small or trivial that anyone who would take the trouble to complain about them would be dismissed as harping on the meaningless. Cumulatively, however, these little biases add up, and create a nearly unconscious, but utterly ubiquitous, atmosphere of bias against anyone or any cause to the left of Lieberman.

Now the proximate subject of this post – an unimportant article in the Times Book Review – may elicit comments along the lines, “How could you waste even a single pixel and my precious time on this” but the topic – the ubiquity and insidiousness of rightwing propaganda – is a crucial one.

Richard Brookhiser,the senior editor of National Review, was provide with an entire page of the New York Times Book Review to discourse upon, I kid you not, the marginal jottings of John Adams in his books. Could anything be more trivial or less ripe for rightwing Wurlitizing? Ahh, but that’s why they pay Brookhiser the big bucks.

In keeping with the scholarly conceit of pseudo-academics like Gingrich and others, Brookhiser types up his overall impression of Adams’s notes with an atavistic partisan spin: “What he [Adams] most dislikes is breezy confidence; the pieties of both left and right set him off.” [Emphasis added.] This positions Adams as a paragon of dispassionate disinterest, calmly far above the fray. But this is total poppycock. First of all, the “dispassionate observer” bears no relation to the actual Adams, which can easily be verified by reading what Franklin thought of Adams’ awful diplomacy in France during the war, or by what happened later to Franklin’s nephew Benjamin Bache during Adams’ presidency. More importantly, the modern notions of “right” and “left” really don’t apply at all to Adams’ politics.* It’s an artificial conceit that distorts Adams’ beliefs beyond recognition and a sign that stealth rightwing propagandizing is Brookhiser’s real intent.

Brookhiser also sets up with his phrase the expectation that we will receive a balanced, even-numbered set of examples of Adams skewering equally “the pieties of the right and the left.” In fact, we encounter only three main examples (Adams’s marginalia in his own books don’t count, as he is above the fray, remember?). Two are clearly from people Brookhiser considers left – Rousseau and the “English feminist” Mary Woolstonecraft – and one whom he apparently considers right, Henry St. John.

About the “lefties” – again, this is Brookhiser’s labelling, not Adams’s and certainly not mine – Brookhiser quotes Adams at his sneering best. “Ha! ha! ha!” smirks Adams at Rousseau. “This foolish woman,” Adams rants against Woolstonecraft.

As for Adams on the presumed righty Henry St. John, Brookhiser starts by informing us that Adams thought “more highly” of him than he did of Rousseau, and Brookhiser describes St. John’s “supple attacks on the Whig establishment” which made him “popular in revolutionary America.” So how bad could St. John be if the Patriots of 1776 made him popular? And indeed, the Adams marginalia hardly mock St. John – “not always” is about as close to mockery as Adams gets.

The meta-effect is clear. Mock the left, respectfully disagree with the right, whose ideas are worth thinking highly of.

Yes, the article is so monumentally trivial I risk a howl of outrage from Bob Somerby by bothering to waste time on it. Yes, the propaganda is subtle and not the main point. But you multiply this stuff in dozens and dozens of different places and it starts to add up. As I come across them, I’ll point to more examples.

The lesson to be taken from this is that the right never, ever, rests from fomenting their bad ideas. Contrast Brookhiser’s nonsense with Sean Wilentz’s heavily detailed and genuinely dispassionate book on the evolution of American democracy and you’lll get a sense of the difference between the fake erudition of the right and the reality-based scholarship, not of liberals, but of the rest of us. Wilentz may be a liberal, but his book isn’t. And that’s the goal of all genuine scholarship, not the snake oil Brookhiser’s peddling.

*Correct me if I’m wrong but don’t the terms “right” and “left” derive from the French Revolution and, in Adams’s time, referred only to the internal political issues of France? In any event, “right” and “left” as we know them have nothing to do with John Adams, Ben Franklin, or anything connected with American politics in the 18th Century.