Sorry, they probably don’t want to get killed any more of than the rest of us do.

In other words, the only people who were invited were those who can be safely depended on to cover up the truth the instant it becomes politically expedient.

A bit more seriously, I’m wondering if ABC has plans for a ‘docudrama’ about Pearl Harbor including a scene where an American sub is watching the six Japanese carriers launch the sneak attack, and tries to reach the White House, but gets a personal response from FDR saying “You can do attack the carriers, but you’re on your own.”

Has ABC (or any other network) EVER broadcast a non-live/non-breaking news story without sponsorship?

If not, the decision to do this must have been made deliberately and at a very high level. The questions about who put up the production money, and how ABC will be paying that entity for the right to air the film are pertinent.

Over at Think Progress, someone pointed out that Steve Jobs is on the board of Disney, and its largest shareholder. Someone/someplace to complain? The effects of media consolidation should run two ways.

There is an effort to co-opt the minds of our kids, as Christy Hardin Smith pointed out earlier today here. I looked over the Scholastic teaching aides put out in concert with the film. In short: egregious propgaganda.

A brief summary I have also posted elsewhere:
Go after Scholastic also, which is releasing documents to support teaching around the film. They are awful and blatant propaganda (you can find them here).
Hit Scholastic in the wallet–email your concerns to the VP for investor relatiosn at investor_relations@scholastic.com.
You also might want to go to http://www.nea.org and rile the teachers to go after Scholastic.

Here are some things I found in scrutinizing the documents:

Student resource sheet 1: If you ignore one sentence near the top, this is a fairly benign introduction to the geography and demographics of the middle east.

There are big plugs for watching the docudrama, and a gratuitous picture of
Bush with his megaphone in the smouldering ruins of 9/11. There are actually rather good descriptions of Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Islam, Pakistan
, the Taliban, Syria, the US and Yemen. Conspicuously absent is Saudi Arabia.

Now, here is the offending sentence that renders the whole handout sneaky and sinister: in the second paragraph of the very brief introduction, we get

“Following are short descriptions of some of the countries and groups that
were involved in some way with the terrorist attacks.”

Iran was involved? Iraq was involved?
Syria was involved? And Saudi Arabia was not? Sheesh!

Student resource sheet 2: This discusses organizations in the government mentioned
by the 9/11 commission report and involved in investigating 9/11. It is not so bad-just bullet
points. There are a couple of oddities-
*The Department of Homeland Security is described as created by Pres. Bush in 2002. Uh,
didn’t this actually require an act of congress? And didn’t BushCo, after opposing it for a long time, use this to f***up the dems by throwing in a union busting poison pill, then turn around and claim the dems were soft on defense and fighting terror? Sheesh!
*The CIA, FBI, and NORAD are correctly slammed for the problems on 9/11. Curiously, the NSA is
only benignly praised and their failure to translate some key messages is ignored. Oh, is the NSA the one spying on us?
*No mention is made of the failures of the NSC to respond. Again, benign praise.
*The office of the president itself is absent completely–guess the 9/11 report on which this is based found no problems there.

Classroom discussion and debate, part 2:
Debate question-“The 9/11 Commission Report affords us hindsight.
Knowing what we know now, do you think the
attacks on 9/11 could have been prevented? Back up
your argument with examples from the miniseries or
The 9/11 Commission Report.”

This obviously (1) conflates the movie with the report, despite the one is a, uh, docudrama and the other is a, uh, highly documented nonfiction work, and (2) leads students loathe to read a giant report back to the movie that they all downloaded free from the web.

There is lots more–a lot of blame the media stuff–but you can look at them yourself.

It would be great to know who else was on that conference call. Was there a reporter from the Washington Post? Their chats are a good place to try to convince reporters a story is important.

I don’t know who all was on the call, but questions were asked by reporters at the New York Times, San Jose Mercury News, New York Post, John Ziegler from KIA in LA, Nico Pitney at ThinkProgress, and two women reporters from papers that I didn’t recognize. This is just from memory, but I’ll try to update it tomorrow with names. And ThinkProgress should have the recording of the call up tomorrow.

I am also including my email response.

Are any of you receiving similar responses from ABC network or ABC affiliates, and if so, is the language of the emails the same–or similar to–the wording Ms Barr used?

Just curious.

——-

— WLS-TV GeneralManager
wrote:

> I have watched the entire 5 hour production of The
> Path to 9-11 and
> found it to be extremely thorough, well crafted and
> not the least bit
> biased or partisan in anyway. Since it is not yet
> available to the
> public, I am assuming you have not seen it and
> therefore are basing your
> comments on something you may have read or heard. I
> can assure you,
> this docudrama was based on the 9-11 Commission
> Report and does not look
> to lay blame on any one individual or government or
> organization. It is
> extremely riveting in its presentation of the facts
> and will provide
> substantial context for viewers who have not yet
> been able to connect
> the events of the first world trade center bombing
> through to the 9-11
> incident and all that occurred here and around the
> world in between. I
> urge you to watch the special and then judge it for
> yourself. Thank you
> for taking the time to email us with your concerns.
> Emily Barr
> President & General Manager
> ABC 7 Chicago
>
> PS: The movie is running commercial-free without
> interruption.
>
—————-

My response to Ms Barr:

> To: WLS-TV GeneralManager
> Subject: Path to 9/11 Mini-Series

Dear Ms Barr,

Your reply to my original email contained numerous
inaccuracies.

1. As of this writing, ABC has distributed advanced
copies of the miniseries only to rightwing blogs and
pundits (Rush Limbaugh and others) while not providing
it to progressive blogs and media sources that
requested access to it. This appears to have been
deliberate.

2. You claim the film to be an accurate reflection of
the 9/11 Commission Report and nonpartisan in nature;
yet it was revealed in news today that at least
one key scene of the work was entirely fabricated.

In the scene, the character representing Sandy Berger
freezes when a CIA agent radios in from Afghanistan to say that he and his band of local tribesmen have Osama bin Laden within sight and begs for the green light to terminate him with extreme prejudice. In the film, the line goes dead before Berger offers any reply.

THIS EVENT IS SIMPLY MADE UP!

News reports today stated that during a post-screening
question-and-answer session, Richard Ben-Veniste, a
9/11 Commission member, stood up to say that the
Berger-bashing scene didn’t square with the research
he and the other commissioners had conducted.

“There was no incident like that that we came across.
I am disturbed by that aspect of it,” Ben-Veniste, a
Democrat, told the panel, which included both the
producer and the commission’s GOP chairman, former
Gov. Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey. Lee Hamilton, the
Democratic co-chair did not participate in any
capacity with the production of the movie.

Former NSC-head Berger, reached by phone after the
screening, seconded Ben-Veniste’s criticism. “It’s a
total fabrication,” he said tersely. “It did not
happen.”

Richard Clarke, who served as head of counterterrorism
under four presidents, also has stated that no such
event took place.

3. In another section of the film, a leak of
classified information regarding OBL’s habitual use of
telephone and computer communications is attributed to
the Washington Post. It was, in fact, the rightwing
newspaper the Washington Times that published the
leaked information.

4. The official ABC/Disney defense of the miniseries
is that it has strived for “reasonable accuracy.” What does that mean? It sounds like a slick way of saying that it isn’t really accurate, period. The statement smacks of PR spin and lawyerly (read, weasely) wording.

5. Notwithstanding the alleged inaccuracies and bias
of its avowedly conservative director and producer,
ABC has undertaken an aggressive marketing program to
distribute the miniseries to the nation’s schools
under the guise of the program being historically
valid.

That ABC and WLS-TV are participating in a highly
controversial portrayal of the events surrounding the
9/11 attack 60 days before the midterm elections is a
misuse of the public airways.

As NYT reporter and bestselling author William Rivers
Pitt wrote in a recent article critical of “The Path
to 9/11″: “At no time should a conservative producer
with an anti-Clinton axe to grind be allowed to use
public airwaves to broadcast a rank distortion of the
truth, especially on the anniversary of the worst day
in our history.”

Any fairminded person should be able to agree with that position.

Sincerely,
XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

>