Censoring 9/11?

August 29, 2006

Yesterday, the American Family Association was whining about Wal-Mart and the non-existent “war on Christmas.” Today’s AFA target is a 9/11 documentary that includes (gasp!) actual profanity uttered the day of the attacks.

As my friends at Right Wing Watch noted, Don Wildmon and the AFA hope to stop CBS from airing the documentary, which the network is scheduled to broadcast on the fifth anniversary of the attacks, and sent this alert to its membership this week.

It is time to tell CBS and the other networks that enough is enough!

Not content with all the profanity already on TV, CBS has decided to air the profanity-laden unedited version of “9/11” on Sept. 10. The decision by CBS is a slap in the face to the FCC and Congress, which recently raised indecency fines to $325,000 per incident.

“9/11,” which will be shown in prime-time, contains a tremendous amount of hardcore profanity. CBS has stated they have not, and will not, make any cuts in the amount and degree of profanity. CBS will ignore the law. The network is suing the FCC over the indecency law, saying they should be able to show whatever they desire whenever they desire. CBS wants no limits.

These guys really aren’t well.

The documentary, “9/11,” was shot by two French filmmakers who were filming a documentary on a rookie New York City firefighter when they noticed a plane overhead — which was one of the hijacked planes that hit the World Trade Center. It includes the only known footage from inside the Twin Towers that morning, and features real-life dialog from heroic firefighters who were on the scene. It’s an important contribution to the public’s understanding of the day.

The AFA is apparently worked up about Americans hearing firefighters, responding to terrorist attacks, using profanity?

Oliver Willis offered a good take on this.

That’s right, because when confronted with terrorist bastards who sought to kill thousands of us, a firefighter, a cop or a regular citizen might have been compelled to use a four letter word.

Because they are human.

But the “American Family Association” is a soft-minded association of nincompoops whose slavish devotion to censoring the world knows no bounds. And so they’ve launched a campaign to censor CBS’ broadcast of 9/11 because – oh no, someone is going to use a naughty word.

The one thing I’ll never really understand is what, exactly, activists like those at the AFA are afraid of. What do they think will happen if CBS broadcasts a 9/11 documentary with some profanity? It’s not gratuitous and it’s not about making some crude joke — it’s a 9/11 documentary. Are the AFA’s leaders really so bored that they can think of nothing better to do with their time?

“Oh [fudge] those [nasty men] are crashing their [darned] airplanes into the towers. Oh, [stink] the [mucking] building is coming down on me.”

The AFA have trouble with non G-rated reality.

  • Amendment I

    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

  • It seems pretty clear that the AFA wants to launder reality before it reaches anybody. “Hardcore Profanity”? I suppose than that “Darn and Frick and Crap” qualify as “Softcore Porfanity”?

    Or maybe they just want to avoid having to answer the question from a six year old: “If a fireman swears as the World Trade Center falls on him, will he go to Hell?”.

  • Next up: the war on televised football. Oh, don’t think we can’t read the lips of P.O.’d coaches and players in those close-up shots! At $325,000 a crack, I think the NFL might go broke in a few weekends.

    I remember when it was the left that used to get tarred and feathered for being so “PC” about language and how the right was telling everyone to ease up. Funny, no one on the right seems to be so relaxed about language anymore.

    And as for the their war on “happy holidays” … the etymology of holiday is the old english word for “Holy Day” or religious day of celebration. What the religious wingnuts need to wage is a war on the Fourth of July, because it’s a secular celebration cloaked as “Holy Day.”

  • Or maybe one of the firefighters observed that the ravaging terrorists were ramming their hard cylinders of metal through the tender membranes of the city’s Center.

  • I have seen this film. it is the best coverage of that event I have ever seen.
    It better than any hyped drama could ever hope to be and I highly recomend seeing it. Take the phone offf the hook if you are going to watch it.
    It is understated, scary, and even hopeful at the end(I won’t give it away if you havent seen it)
    I would like to thank the (expletive deleted)American Family Association for bringing it to my attention and now I will tell all my friends to watch for it.

  • The cursing is worse than the sound of bodies hitting over head walkways?

    What the hell is wrong with these people? Seriously what pathology is going on that they are obssessing over curse words taped on one of the worst days of this country?

  • It never ceases to amaze me how much of an issue these people make out of nothing. It’s like they’ve convinced themselves that if they can just put blinders on and ignore reality it will go away. I guess the question that needs to be asked is, who is the intended audience and when does CBS plan on showing the documentary. I’m going to assume that a 9/11 documentary is aimed at adults and will be shown at night. Now, the problem with first ammendment/censorship/decency arguments is when someone does not the option of not partipating, such as being caught by surprise. The Janet Jackson superbowl incident is such an example. The superbowl is something that is considered ‘safe’ for family viewing and no one expected an exposed breast. (of course, the whole thing was blown way out of proportion and the result was what would have been a 3 second airing of Janet Jackson’s exposed breast from a relative distance was plastered all the news for the next month, blown up and in full color, just in case you missed it the first time. But I digress…) In the case of a 9/11 documentary, the subject matter is very serious and deals with real life violence and tragic human death. I will never forget the images of people trapped in the burning towers jumping to their deaths. It’s safe to say that there was more than one incidence profanity uttered by those involved in the event. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that the documentary is prefaced with the standard warning for adult content and/or language. In this context, it becomes clear that you may see or hear some things that you find offensive. You are given the option to simply not watch.

  • If the 18 people who take this seriously don’t watch the program, I’m sure CBS won’t notice the dip in ratings.

  • This is what I can not understand.

    The AFA has no issues with showing real humans falling to their deaths and unheard of death & carnage, but they feel it should be done in a format that does not include swearing.

    I will be watching and I do have an issues with news that involves showing people in their last throws of life, but this seems to be an exception that am willing to overlook. Plus that whole first amendment thing, and that thingamajig called a remote.

    My point is no one is making these idiots watch it, they are telling them (unlike the super bowl) there is going to be swearing, did they ever just sit back and think, hey, maybe we should just tell the other nutballs to watch ‘Who Loves Raymond’ ??

    It reminds me of that infamous little girl in Vietnam who is running naked because of some horrific incident. Wonder where they AFA stands on that issue. I actually don’t, but it would be a good laugh to hear them denounce the nudity as inappropriate.

  • The one thing I’ll never really understand is what, exactly, activists like those at the AFA are afraid of.

    IMO they’re afraid of becoming irrelevant. They’re afraid that everyone will notice that they’re just as bad about violating the “principles” which their theology imposed on everyone only a few years back. They continually rail against the secular humanist, because that’s the guy who keeps pushing them towards being… more humane. They also get more donations from people if they think they’re being persecuted.

    These same people who faint if they hear “the f-bomb” vote in droves for Cheney (who uses it on the Senate floor) and they support the dropping of real bombs on innocent civilians.

    And they preach at the humanists about obscenity.

  • These right wing nuts are tyrants and spoilers. I am going to e-mail CBS right now and encourage them to air the uncut film. I hope all of you do likewise.

  • It’s finally happened; they’ve flipped their lids and turned on their allies. Wal-Mart and 9/11 are supposed to be the far right’s best friends.

    Looks like capitalism and reality are not welcomed in their world.

  • I’d like to see an AFA spokesperson try to defend this in a interview with any comperent, sane reporter.
    I bet it would be just sad.

  • Dale: Oh [fudge] those [nasty men] are crashing their [darned] airplanes into the towers. Oh, [stink] the [mucking] building is coming down on me.

    think of the children, dude — that’s sooo much more acceptable than ‘these bastard pricks are crashing fucking aeroplanes into the Towers. i’m about to fuckin’ die. goddammit to hell…’

    Dale: Or maybe one of the firefighters observed that the ravaging terrorists were ramming their hard cylinders of metal through the tender membranes of the city’s Center.

    LMAO!

    after reading this new AFA bullshit assault, now i wish more than ever that they could actually see UK TV. they’d prolly drop dead in frustration and/or shock.

  • I’m actually quite insulted by the AFA’s stance on this. I knew a guy who died that day and I had some friends who were down there that I was concerned about. If they can’t live in the real world, maybe they should set up tent in La La Land. I can suggest Greeland, Antarctica or the Arctic as places where no one will utter profanities for thousands of miles.

  • Oh, come on, can’t you understand how our civilization has coarsened in the last 50 years from all the profanity?! You know no one swore at all during Pearl Harbor!

    In fact, I’m pretty sure there was no profanity at all during WWII.

    Patton in particular was always pious and never crude.

    Right.

    I just want the righties to work it all out amongst themselves and get back to me. Am I supposed to think we’re fighting (islamo-) fascists but we’re not supposed to swear while we do it this time? It’s hard enough trying to grasp one of their nonsensical world-views without having to try and reconcile them with each other…

  • The editing of any part of history, no matter the reason, is the first step down the horrid path of revising history—and historical revisionism is the ultimate goal of any who find Freedom and Truth to be their enemies.

    Josef Stalin. Adolf Hitler. Pol Pot. And yes, even Don Wildmon….

  • I haven’t seen the film, but I’ll bet you can hear a lot worse in the girls rest room at any high school — or middle school — in the country. Including those in the wholesome midwest and the bible belt.

  • The AFA is a bunch of otherwise-unemployable Mississippi peckerwoods whose existence proves what happens with ten unbroken generations of procreation with siblings.

    “I’ll huff! And I’ll puff!! And I’ll blloooowwww your house down!!!” Except these Big Bad Wolves couldn’t blow a fart out of their collective ass if you stuck the airhose down their throats and turned it on “high”.

  • That post above is too snarky at a bunch of worthless morons.

    I lost a friend that day, a very good writer whose work I would bet all of you know: David Angel, the creator of “Frasier.” He and his wife were on the first airplane taken from Boston, where they had gone to take their son for his enrollment as a freshman at BYU.

    I first met David in 1988, during the Great Writer’s Strike here in Hollywood. It went on six months longer than it should have, and it drove wedges between members of the WGA that have yet to heal 18 years later (it also pretty much destroyed unionism in Hollywood as anything that really meant anything). About three months into it, tempers flared easily at meetings. I was on a strike committee he was on. Every time things would get tense and the situation would start to blow, David would come up with some deadpan bit of humor that cut right to the heart of what was the issue and what was going on, which would break everyone up. Did you know it’s really hard to have a fight when you’re laughing really hard? By the time everyone recovered, we all knew we had to deal with reality as it was, like it or not.

    He and I weren’t drinking buddies or anything, I always admire the hell out of good comedy writers because it’s something I couldn’t do if you put a gun to my head and pulled back the hammer. I ran across him over the years at WGA events. He went on to be enormously successful, yet it never seemed to go to his head. He was always just a good, decent man.

    I am absolutely certain that the words of that last sentence could have been used by anyone who knew any of those who died on 9/11. And every time I think of that day, every time I remember hearing the next day from a friend who told me what had happened, I swear like the sailor I once was. Not to shock or offend, but because there are some things for which there are no words, and yet something must be said.

    That’s the kind of cursing that will be on this show. And I am sure I will be cursing the motherf*cking Al Qaeda scum who killed my friend, as purely as I did that day five years ago.

    And fuck those peckerwood morons at the AFA if they can’t figure it out.

  • It’s not as if profanity can achieve its desired effect anymore. Who is shocked by it these days? Too much of it can be very tiresome. I avoid the more extremely profane comedians. I was raised to consider its usage to be an admission of low intelligence and a limited vocabulary(so of course as a youth I used it constantly).

    Certainly 911 evoked a fair amount of it, but if the movie is nothing but, it will be a distraction not an enhancement.

  • The documentary (surprise!) documents the every day people who were in or rushed into harm’s way when the planes struck the towers. Those people (as do so many of the people I interact with every day) use profanity. The low intelligence / limited vocabulary argument is a familiar one – used by adults to influence children not to swear. Sorry, but I think it is not useful here, but you can watch the film and decide for yourself. I agree with those who have pointed out that the sounds of bodies hitting building canopies / awnings/ walk ways is much more obscene (but as integral to the truth of that day as other parts of the film) than any four letter word that the unwitting cast might have uttered that terrible morning.

    I wonder if these busy-bodies are the same bunch that pressured PBS stations to censor a fairly sympathetic “Frontline” piece on a group of soldiers stationed in Iraq? The same group that could not stomach and protested against the uncut airing (nudity obscene but the brutality that demanded it not so much) of “Schindler’s List”? I am offended by these people. I think their attempts to sanitize history – for God knows what ends – only serves to cheapen it and pass sanctimonious judgement on people who used profanity when the world was ending around them. I say “F*ck the f*cking f*ckers!” Let them put themselves and their children to bed or watch something else that night.

  • AFA head Don Wildmon’s razor-sharp discernment has been a boon to our civic life ever since the day 20 years ago when he began shrieking at NBC because Saturday Night Live featured Spinal Tap performing “Christmas With the Devil.”

    Spinal Tap, of course, being a parody heavy-metal group.

  • I find it interesting that AFA can overlook the objectionable content in such a horrifically violent movie as “The Passion of the Christ,” because they consider the message to be of greater significance, but are unable to look beyond the language of the rescue workers in the 9/11 documentary. They even released an official statement encouraging churches to bring their youth to Mel Gibson’s film. Shouldn’t they be protesting the two simultaneously? From AFA’s simplistic viewpoint, it seems that both are affronts to the morals of good Americans everywhere. This is clearly not their position, and AFA evidently believes that standards of decency are negotiable. Fine, AFA. Just stop screaming at the world for not abiding by guidelines even you don’t faithfully acknowledge.

  • The COPs show features victims and perpetrators of crime, both of which routinely use profanity on the show which is bleeped out.

    Why should the 9/11 documentary be any different?

    CBS is obviously aware that it will be breaking the law, but it is going forward anyway. I am not comfortable when any powerful entity, be it an individual, political entity or corporation feels it is above the law.

    If a psycho recorded their exploits of kidnapping, repeatedly raping and murdering a woman, would you think CBS should air that too? Maybe the psycho leaves the camera running and sets a booby trap that kills or maims the cops finding the body… I’m sure you’d all want to watch all the ensuing cursing and gore with your children, right?

    That so many of you claim your children use obscenity on a routine basis is nothing to be proud of.

    If CBS doesn’t like the law, there are ways to change it. Playing chicken with the FCC while using the broken bodies of the victims of 9/11 as a shield isn’t acceptable.

    There is plenty of other “real” footage that is censored. I guess if someone on a reality show curses, has sex or takes a dump you’d want that broadcast too?

    I don’t agree with all the laws, but that doesn’t mean I break them while simultaneously expecting others to obey the laws I do agree with. Maybe someone else’s idea of free speech is driving by your house in the middle of the night using the 1st ammendment to wake up everyone at 3 am with loud music… or littering by tossing 1,000s of flyers over your lawn, or tagging your house with graffitti.

    I don’t really like the idea of the 9/11 documentary airing even if censored, because I know those terrorists and their supporters will be sitting around eating popcorn watching our people die. I’d rather they air 2 hours of gun footage from Iraq and Afghanistan of terrorists being sent to meet allah.

  • The Frenchmen who filmed this documentary are better Americns than Wildmon and his minions. I counted 2 F-bombs and 3 “Holy Sh*ts”. Maybe if they had said “Sh*t” instead of “Holy Sh*t” Wildmon and his kool-aid drinkers wouldn’t have their panties up in a wad.

  • Ted: The COPs show features victims and perpetrators of crime, both of which routinely use profanity on the show which is bleeped out. Why should the 9/11 documentary be any different?

    On the off-chance that that wasn’t a rhetorical question and you really DON’T understand the difference between an entertainment show (albeit reality-based) and a documentary, I’ll answer your question.

    Oh, wait. I just did.

    Ted: CBS is obviously aware that it will be breaking the law, but it is going forward anyway. I am not comfortable when any powerful entity, be it an individual, political entity or corporation feels it is above the law.

    CBS is breaking no law. It is breaking a regulation of dubious constitutionality whose penalties are utterly disproportionate to the damage caused by the infraction. To the extent that such ridiculous government behavior in passing laws or promulgating rules fosters disrespect for “the law,” the government deserves what it gets.

    Ted: If a psycho recorded their exploits of kidnapping, repeatedly raping and murdering a woman, would you think CBS should air that too? Maybe the psycho leaves the camera running and sets a booby trap that kills or maims the cops finding the body… I’m sure you’d all want to watch all the ensuing cursing and gore with your children, right?

    Oh, that’s good. You had me there for a second. You almost had me accepting your premise that there’s any kind of moral equivalence between broadcasting the incidental odd crudity as part of a public-service (as defined by the Federal Communications Act of 1934) broadcast and broadcasting a violent felony for entertainment purposes.

    Ted: That so many of you claim your children use obscenity on a routine basis is nothing to be proud of.

    True. But I can think of a lot of worse things that no one’s doing anything about, too, and I don’t hear you bitching about them.

    Ted: If CBS doesn’t like the law, there are ways to change it. Playing chicken with the FCC while using the broken bodies of the victims of 9/11 as a shield isn’t acceptable.

    It is when there’s reason to think that the FCC has promulgated these regulations as a way of driving broadcasters out of live television altogether. And why might the administration want to do that? Two words, baby: Tiananmen Square. Our government would never do that? Don’t be so sure. Remember, we used to think it would never lie us into a war, either.

    Ted: There is plenty of other “real” footage that is censored. I guess if someone on a reality show curses, has sex or takes a dump you’d want that broadcast too?

    OK, I really think we’ve reached a point of diminishing returns here. Yo, Steve: Smarter trolls, please.

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