dr. elsewhere here
This Path to 9/11 story has exploded like a nova.
And our guy Joe was right there on the crest of the shockwave. His very good question of just who is funding this propaganda piece been picked up by several others, including DU, Justin Rood, DailyKos, and - yes, folks - Howard Dean, who is referring to the show as "slander."
Max Blumenthal has also written an incisive piece on the uber conservative backing of this project that David Horowitz himself signed onto a year ago. Blumenthal also gives some history of the questionable and secretive development of the show, which brings up a curious point, that the project itself was hidden from the public until the last minute, kept from liberals when it did go public, and now incriminating newsletters and memos have been removed from websites. Whatever do these people have to hide??
To get a good bead on just how rapidly and hugely this story erupted, check out wikipedia, and this lengthy entry on Sourcewatch, replete with reviews as well as listings and description of factual errors in the film.
An intriguing footnote to this whole story is the fact that ABC has scheduled simultaneous airings throughout the British Empire. The various promotions have emphasized that the show is based on the 9/11 Commission Report, and on fact. One must wonder just how well this squares with ABC's insistence that (a) the film is fiction, and (b) the film is still being edited, and (c) how a jury might consider that as evidence in a libel lawsuit.
In any case, Blumenthal and Dean and Justin Rood all acknowledge that the story was uncovered by several bloggers, DU and DailyKos and Digby and "elsewhere." Alas, that last not even a faint reference to yours truly, except perhaps by the one or two degrees of separation from Joe.
3 comments:
Hee. Our guy Joe. That is so true.
Except--wait. Joe's still with us, right? He didn't um, get "Roved" or anything, did he?
Joe,
I cannot encourage people enough to let the impact of The Path to 9/11 movie be felt locally. It is great to sign petitions to ABC corporate. Where the proverbial rubber really meets the road is with the local ABC affiliates. They can sometimes be much more sensitive to their market than the fat cats high in the boardrooms. Keep the local affiliate number by the phone and register your complaint concisely, forcefully but politely at the end of each show.
I have also just found out that Scholastic has backed out of the proposed Study Guide to accompany the Path to 9/11.
This from the Scholastic website:
“After a thorough review of the original guide that we offered online to about 25,000 high school teachers, we determined that the materials did not meet our high standards for dealing with controversial issues,” said Dick Robinson, Chairman, President and CEO of Scholastic. “At the same time, we believe that developing critical thinking and media literacy skills is crucial for students in today’s society in order to participate fully in our democracy and that a program such as ‘The Path to 9/11’ provides a very ‘teachable moment’ for developing these skills at the high school level. We encourage teachers not to shy away from the controversy surrounding the program, but rather to engage their students in meaningful, in-depth discussion.
The new guide clearly states that Scholastic had no involvement with developing the ABC docudrama, and that the company is not promoting the program, but that the program can provide a springboard to discussion about the issues leading up to 9/11, terrorism and the Middle East. “
- http://www.scholastic.com/aboutscholastic/news/press_09072006_CP.htm
This still sounds like a sort of a left-handed endorsement. I guess we have to look at the new study guide….
Bob Boldt
Upon further consideration...
I believe Scholastic is not out of the woods yet – not by a long shot.
As Paul Harvey says, here is “the rest of the story…”
It’s beginning to look like a goddamned shell game.
Would anyone care to tell me how the new study guide presented by Scholastic is any different from the old one? Of course no one I know has seen the old one.
The new guide
http://content.scholastic.com/browse/unitplan.jsp?id=175
still requires the viewing of The Path to 9/11 and would seem to validate it as a convincing, if controversial, source of historical information. After all, the perspicacious Mr. Robinson would not subject the tender minds of our children to deliberate mistruths – would he? The new Scholastic study guide that I have read encourages students in the time allotted for this module to take a given scene from the film, The Path to 9/11 and look up the documentation from the downloadable 9/11 Commission report in order to check for possible disparities between the film and the Report. Not to be satisfied with this, students are encouraged to seek out stories that might refute the “docudrama” from such hard-hitting administration critics as CNN, Fox News, National Public Radio (NPR), New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Parade Magazine, TV Guide, or the students’ local newspaper. Hard-hitting NPR - Wow!
Now I am assuming that this exercise authorized and administered by Scholastic presupposes the viewing, in its entirety, of The Path to 9/11 by each student. When the requisite five hours viewing time will be satisfied and under whose aegis this requirement will be accomplished is left to speculation – at least by this reader of their website. I could find no links that allowed for more detailed instructions or further elaboration of existing instructions. So taking the Study Guide on its face I still see it as a de facto endorsing of The Path to 9/11.
I hold no secondary education degrees and am in no position to recommend how such a study guide should ideally be set up or what it should contain. I have done some teaching of media and media literacy in connection with film and video production courses on the college level. Were I still in the education-biz, I would welcome a film like The Path to 9/11 as a wonderful vehicle to study propaganda. And I would definitely approach it far differently than the Scholastic people are doing. Once again I have no idea how outrageous this “docudrama” (as CEO, Robinson insists on mislabeling it) is. The techniques employed to further its agenda is a mystery as no one to the left of Rush Limbaugh has seen it. Lets just say that, based upon the credentials of the writer/producer and the reaction by the right-wing pundits that have seen it, I believe, it will be a first class piece of pure propaganda.
I certainly expect it to be better than the pre-election release of that forgotten comedy, DC9/11:Time of Crisis where George W. Bush is portrayed as positively heroic. The exchange that nearly left me in convulsions went something like this:
George is being urged to stay away from Washington by fearful staff that believe the terrorists are not finished with the worst of their villainy. George finally has enough of this caution and cowardice and bursts out,
“If some tin-horn terrorist wants me, tell him to come on over and get me. I’ll be home. I’ll be waitin’ for the bastard!” A timid aid starts to object, “But Mr. President...” Bush smartly interrupts, “Try ‘Commander and Chief’ – whose present command is ‘take the president home!’”
I have often wondered if the writer of DC911might have had a line from Casablanca in mind when the penned his horrid bit of fiction: Rick, Ilsa, and Sam are in that bar drinking champagne, and Rick and Ilsa are making plans to take a train out of Paris to escape the Nazi invasion. Sam says something like, "They'll be looking for you," and Rick replies, "I left a note, they'll know where to find me." – Casablanca 1942
George W. Bush = Humphrey Bogart. Yeah, that works.
I guess Penny Johnson Jerald seems to have a permanent lock on the infamous Condi Rice role. She played her in both Path to 9/11 and DC9/11. Variety has reported that she has an exclusive option on the role when Condi becomes Commander in Chief in ’09. I guess her momma didn’t warn her that if you play enough whores, you might just end up one yourself.
If I were the executives and the curriculum advisers at Scholastic, I would put as much daylight between my organization and this piece of unmitigated political misinformation as possible. At this stage of the game, I think the only way Scholastic can extricate its corporate self, unscathed from this controversy, is to remove any references to The Path to 9/11 from its study guide altogether. If they fail to do so they should be subject to the same condemnation as the producers of The Path to 9/11, the American Broadcasting Company and that dirty little rat (er - mouse) himself.
Bob Boldt
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