The Fictional Path to 9/11
With the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks approaching prepare to be bombarded by 9/11 symbolism and tributes all over the media spectrum. It is hard to believe that we’re already 5 years away from that terrible day, moreso because so little has changed in our nation, despite 9/11 “changing everything.”
One thing that hasn’t change is the right-wing’s stranglehold on the corporate media. Witness ABC/Disney’s “docudrama,” “The Path to 9/11″ set to air September 10th and 11th and presented as “based on The 9/11 Commission Report.” There’s only one problem: it’s fiction. Written by a conservative activist, the movie places all the blame on the Clinton administration by fictionalizing many scenes and presents the Bush administration as engaged and active. No mention of My Pet Goat.
Though the piece criticizes President Clinton, former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, and Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, ABC has refused to provide any of their offices with copies and has apparently distributed over 900 copies to right-wing bloggers. Even Bush counterterrorism official Roger Cressey has decried the film as “shameful” and inaccurate.
So is this piece of Republican propaganda a gift-in-kind from ABC to Bush and the GOP? Congressmen Conyers, Dingell, Harman, and Slaughter think as much and have asked ABC to correct the many factual errors in the film. And did we mention that ABC is airing the entire show commercial free? That’s a mighty big gift.
Fight back against the right-wing noise machine and demand ABC tell the truth about 9/11.
September 6th, 2006 at 5:29 pm
My biggest objection is that the unpaid political ad leaves the Bush Administration off the hook. They could have prevented the 911 attacks with the tools available, but they didn’t even try.
September 11th, 2006 at 10:49 pm
Getting the Story Right…
The Liberal Avenger
This photo orginally appeared on the Drudge Report site, as part of Drudge’s attempt to imply that President Clinton had fathered the child of an African-American prostitute.
The recent controversy over ABC’s The Pat…
March 31st, 2007 at 1:18 am
[...] This sort of thing goes right to the heart of the problem with The Path to 9/11. As one of Legum’s colleagues points out, fabrications in the miniseries have already been used as talking points by right-wing commentators. Similarly, the Legum piece mentioning Patterico was cited by more than a dozen liberal websites, many of which repeat the inaccurate claim that advance copies were sent to right-wing bloggers (link link link link link). A couple of the websites picking up the story are quite popular, and as far as I know, only Glenn Greenwald has made an attempt to correct the error. [...]