All Out War on The Path to 9/11
John on September 7, 2006 at 9:11 pm
Liberals are in an uproar. Over the Jihadi plotters arrested in the UK and Belgium?
No, silly, over a movie that says the Clinton administration was insufficiently focused on the terror threat. Check out this post at Hot Air for a rundown of reactions including a not-so-subtle threat from pinhead Harry Reid that ABC’s broadcasting license might be in danger.
It strikes me how every time a film or TV show comes out bashing Christianity, we’re always told that freedom of speech is a supreme value. When Christians argued that the DaVinci Code was a transparent tissue of lies, we were told to settle down and stop taking everything so seriously.
Well at least the Dems are on record now. Protecting the “Clinton legacy” ranks considerably above protecting Jesus’ legacy. I sort of thought so.
Category: TV |
I think you’re missing the issue, which is that the broadcast networks have an ethical and legal duty to be fair. If this film were produced and distributed by any other entity, there wouldn’t be quite the firestorm (people would complain, of course, as well they should, but they’d concede that the producers ultimately have no such ethical and legal duty to accuracy).
September 9, 2006 @ 9:44 amJPE,
People always have the right to complain. What disturbs me here is that elected officials have turned complaints into threats. This is tantamount to genuine censorship.
And for those, like Kos, who’ve accused Bush of censorship it becomes a matter of rank hypocrisy.
Finally, the idea that broadcast networks have ever been politically fair is laughable. Dan Rather? Walter Cronkite? Katie Couric? It has not been fair for 4 decades. It’s still not fair. At least today the monopoly has been broken by talk radio and the net. To wit, this blog.
September 9, 2006 @ 6:24 pmIf the film is biased, then it seems to me that pointing out the networks’ legal duty to fairness is a legitimate tact. If that constitutes censorship, so be it (although I’d tend to think that censorship is the silencing of works whose authors have a legal right to produce and disseminate. Given that definition, this simply isn’t censorship: it’s the remediation of a breach of legal duty).
As far as the slant of network news, the action in that debate takes place over whether a bias actually exists, not what the proper course of action is given the existence of bias. These are two distinct issues (1. existence of bias; 2. proper remedy). The debate over the Path to 9/11 devolves on (1), while the debate over network news and bias devolves on (2).
September 10, 2006 @ 8:50 amGot that backwards: Path to 9/11 involves 2, news bias debate involves 1.
September 10, 2006 @ 8:51 amJPE,
There used to be a law called the “fairness doctrine” which mandated equal time for opposing views. That law is no longer in effect. The networks have an obligation to serve the public, but their is no “legal duty” to be fair in the way you’re suggesting.
Even if there was, it certainly wouldn’t mean that a network should accede to the wishes of Bill Clinton and liberal congressman, who are partisans and not disinterested judges. Several reviews suggest that the film is harder on Bush than on Clinton. So if fairness is the issue, we don’t really have an issue.
The bias does exist. It’s not that hard to see.
September 10, 2006 @ 3:02 pm