Fox News to broadcast ‘The Path to 9/11’ fiction

January 26, 2007

As you probably recall, ABC aired a fairly ridiculous docudrama on the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks called “The Path to 9/11.” The film, written by a conservative partisan hoping to shift blame for the attacks to the Clinton administration, included a series of glaring inaccuracies, creating dialog that was never uttered, fabricating scenarios that never occurred.

After public officials, political observers from both sides of the aisle, and 100,000 Americans complained to ABC about the miniseries’ false smear, the network agreed to remove some of the more obvious fiction from a film ABC was touting as “an objective telling of the events of 9/11.”

Leave it to Fox News to pick up the lies and put them on the air.

In a move that could rekindle a heated political debate, Fox News said Thursday that it planned to broadcast footage from ABC’s controversial miniseries “The Path to 9/11” that was edited out of the docudrama amid criticism that it inaccurately portrayed the Clinton administration’s response to the terrorism threat.

The outtakes, scheduled to air Sunday, depict then-national security advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger refusing to approve a CIA request to attack Osama bin Laden, an event that Berger and the Sept. 11 commission say did not occur.

The final version of the movie that aired on ABC in early September still included the scene, but it had been toned down after protests from top Democrats.

A fictional scene from the original movie, for example, featured Berger hanging up on then-CIA Director George Tenet at an important moment. Because this never happened, ABC edited the scene out. Fox News, or more specifically, Sean Hannity’s new Sunday show, “Hannity’s America,” will broadcast what ABC didn’t.

As it turns out, neither ABC nor the miniseries’ producers gave Hannity or FNC the unaired footage — they got it from a lecture delivered at a school in California.

Fox News obtained the outtakes by taping a public talk that Cyrus Nowrasteh, writer and producer of “The Path to 9/11,” gave to a World Affairs Council chapter last Friday at Cal State Channel Islands. Nowrasteh discussed making the docudrama and played several minutes edited out of the movie.

Fox News had learned of his appearance from an article in a Ventura County paper, and it received permission from the World Affairs Council to record the event, “Hannity’s America” producer John Finley said. The council is a nonprofit educational group.

“We saw an opportunity and sent a crew out there,” Finley said.

Jay Berger, executive director of the California Central Coast chapter of the World Affairs Council, said that though Nowrasteh’s talk to his group was interesting, he was surprised that Fox News was doing a piece on the unaired footage. “I can’t imagine what the news is here,” he said.

What a good point. FNC believes it’s “news” to air fictional scenes from a docudrama aired on a different network nearly five months ago. Maybe Fox News can explain why this already discredited footage deserves airtime?

I’m playing coy, of course, to prove the broader point — FNC doesn’t care about news; in this case, the network isn’t even pretending.

Wouldn’t now be a good time for Dems to consider a boycott?

I’m in for a boycott, with a guilty admission that I don’t find it in the least difficult to resist watching, anyway.

  • Cal State Channel Islands? Couldn’t they afford the tickets to the Med School in Greneda? The only people who will be watching this are one who already believe it. Nothing to see here, move along.

  • What will be really telling is if ABC allows Fox News to show ABC’s copyrighted material on their network. ABC has been slowly moving to the right for sometime now (The Note would make any RW propogandist proud, the Disney owned KFSO – Melanie Morgan program has ruffled feathers with some hate filled speech, and ABC Good Morning hired the bigoted Glenn Beck last week).

    If ABC does not object to Fox News end around to broadcast this it will tell me all I need to know.

  • Sweet! Now I can finally put my “edited” clip of Sean Hannity blowing a goat on YouTube.

    Then, once the furor about *that* dies down, I can post the clip of him in a sex sandwich between Barbara Bush Sr. and a blow-up rhinoceros (if you look closely, you can see *both* strap-on horns).

    Hey, it’s all just free speech, right?

  • FOX has never been about truth. But if they’re digging through discarded footage of another network’s flop, maybe they’re running out of lies.

  • Wouldn’t now be a good time for Dems to consider a boycott?

    Just how many Democrats do you imagine watch Fox News on a regular basis, anyway?

  • I think a boycott of Fox “News” sponsors would be more effective. Someone should put together a quick video montage of Fox “News” atrocities, and compile a list of their biggest sponsors, and then put the whole thing online with an online petition for progressives to sign.

    The petition I would put up would be something like this:

    The disastrous war in Iraq was launched because of deliberate falsehoods told by the Bush administration, and more importantly, a failure in the major media to correct these falsehoods. America needs the news outlets to clean up their acts with regards to fact checking, and Fox News is by far the worst offender. (list examples) Until Fox News decides to operate as a news organization instead of a propaganda arm for the Republican party, I will actively avoid the following sponsors, who make Fox News possible.

    [List sponsors]

    I WILL support the following sponsors, who have cancelled their contracts with Fox News:

    [List sponsors]

    If a million Americans sign such a petition, it will cost Fox’s sponsors serious money. Only that will get Fox’s attention.

  • This kind of offhand provocation reminds me of when I was a kid and I would torture red ant bed colonies with all manner of plagues. You could get all sorts of chaotic response by kicking, burning, flooding or mowing over the mounds. It was stupid but mildly interesting for a few minutes.

    One of my favorites though was to just put a single straw or stick in the middle of the ant mound and then watch the ants scramble up the stick searching for the enemy. They would then get to the top and head back down while other ants crawled over each other to also fruitlessly seek an enemy.

    Fox is poking it’s detractors and despiser’s with no more intention than to rile those detractors and flaunt Faux’s power. They’re having fun at our expense and they could care less about boycotts or rightous indignation. We’re ants up a stick as far as they are concerned and they will poke us again at their leisure when relative calm returns once again. Why not? It’s so damn easy.

    I’m not sure what the right response is yet. But I know that they’re laughing at everything that’s been tossed their way so far.

  • Um, now that Congress is controlled by the Dems, why can’t they just send out about two billion subpoenas to investigate this crap. The more time spent waiting to testify, the less time they (FOX “news” personnel) have to cause mischief.
    Lawyer up, Rupert & associates!

  • As I said in an earlier section. Just change the rules to allow cable users to subscribe to the channels they want to pay for. Why let the average apolitical apathetic cable subscriber subsidize FNC and the echo chamber religoid channels?

    How many folks regularily watch the rants of Bill O’Reilly?

    Only the hardcore believers will want to buy it and any indication of their demographics is that they are on the wrong side of the demographic/education curve which don’t appeal to advertisers which reduces the ad rates which would be critical for the continued existence of FNC. Let capitalism do the dirty work.

  • I wonder if it’d be feasible (or wise) for Democrats to just not go onto Fox News Channel (I mean political personalities, etc., as guests). I suppose it’s the usual choice of not dignifying a charge with a reply or letting it go unanswered, but I’d feel better if there was some evidence that Democrats understood this dynamic, and didn’t just go on assuming that they were going to be treated fairly.

    I mean, if you had Republicans arguing with Republicans, they’d either go nuts – they have to argue to have something worth watching, right? – or they’d destroy each other, because that’s what they’re good at, and they don’t know not to attack each other – and either way, you’d have at least one, if not both, guests showing how far removed from reality they are. On the other hand, you’d be ceding a theoretically Democratic opportunity for visibility.

  • Yet another reason I don’t have cable (since I can see TDS online).

    I still say a massive e-mail/letter writing campaign to Faux News advertisers would do more to change their tact than a boycott of people they rarely have on anyway.

  • FNC believes it’s “news” to air fictional scenes from a docudrama aired on a different network nearly five months ago.

    It’s old news, yes, but it does have news value. That is, movie clips can be included in a newscast (if FOX ever had one, that is) to illustrate the very real controversy about them. To not show the controversial clips would be irresponsible.

    To show clips that are patently false and then imply that they are too true for network TV — that’s irresponsible too.

  • It’s sad really, how Hannity and Limbaugh, and Coulter, all still try to desperately cling to their obsession with the Clinton administration.

    But considering that it was their attacks on the Clintons during the 1990s that led to their (in)fame, I wouldn’t blame them for constantly going to that well.
    They obviously have nothing else to offer

    Chris,
    It isn’t Hannity blowing goats, but it’s still funnier than hell:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x9ejtfRimQ

  • Would there be any way for Sandy Berger to sue Spammity’s a$$ for slandering him in this manner? If so – let ’em run it. Spammity in financial hock for the rest of his life has a certain appeal from where I’m sitting…

  • Has anybody mentioned that “The Path to 9/11” is a badly acted, horribly directed piece of crap that makes your average Chuck Norris movie look like “Apocalypse Now”?

  • The Justice Foundation made an attempt in 2005 to run a “boycott the sponsors of Fox News” petition drive. Didn’t work.

    I say we try again.

  • Aw, 2Manchu, you got my hopes up and now I’m stuck wondering what could be nearly as funny as Hannity blowing a goat… and if idle hands are the devil’s workshop, I’m not sure *what* my imagination is…

  • Faux News to the World:

    Hey, lookit me! [hops up and down] Hey! I’m tellin’ fibs! Lookee, lookee, I’m doing a smear job on someone!! Neener, neener, I’m gonna air a crap movie to make people look bad!

    I believe this is called Negative Attention Seeking. My mom always smacked me on the head to register her Viewer Disapproval.

    Give it a year, crap like this and the Obama fiasco will seem endearingly silly. Think game shows called “Smear the Queer.”

    tAiO

    p.s. Who do I have to blow to get a better class of troll in this Blog? Seriously CB, can you block by ISP?

  • Rupert Murdoch is a very powerful, very wealthy, and IMO thoroughly amoral man. His amorality is rooted in his desire to become ever more powerful and more wealthy. I believe he will air anything that he thinks – on balance – will further that desire (OJ’s “If I Did It,” for example). Murdoch’s amorality escapes and therefore does not matter to viewers who will tune in to watch Sean Hannity confirm their belief that Bill Clinton is the antiChrist and Sandy Berger is a weak, document-stealing toady. Murdoch knows this. His advertisers know this. [I also know some intelligent Fox viewers who know that the “fair and balanced” slogan is irony, and they love to laugh along.] Like burro, I do not know if there is any silver bullet against Murdoch and his RPNC (Republican party news channel). Continue to “document the atrocities,” and cheer Barbara Boxer whenever she ridicules the dipsticks on Fox and Fiends about their so-called “objectivity” and obvious Republican agenda. Cheer anyone who beats them back.

  • Wondering why comment 15 was deleted. It referred to reports by NYC police and firemen of bombs going off in the WTC prior to collapse. Are not our “progressive” minds capable of considering an alternate conclusion regarding the collapse of the WTC on 9/11?

  • Late in the day here. This topic bugs me. Intelligence is losing out to stupidity.

    Murdoch’s money is going to be pretty hard to beat. I see Jon Stewart’s and Steve Colbert’s successes with satire and irony as being clues as to how Faux can be at least confronted. Like the scene in Cyrano de Bergerac where Cyrano slices and dices a fool who focuses on his substantial nose.

    Faux hates to be made fun of. Faux hates to be on the defensive. Faux hates to be cornered by it’s own stupidity and thus it will throw out the most inane and ridiculous crap just to get in the last word and outlast any credible attack by just talking until the other side gives up in frustration and disgust. Faux can and will do what it does…forever.

    And it’s not just Faux. Their M.O. is the M.O. of the whole Righty noise machine. Somehow, intelligence must overcome stupidity. They’re good with their lies but we have to be as good, (better), with the truth. Is there something inherent in lies that make them more appealing than truth? Is truth somehow inferior to lies just as a matter of fact? I don’t think so. It’s marketing. The lies are being marketed better. The truth must be marketed as well as the lies.

    Truth is better than lies. People have to buy that. They have to want truth more than B.S. They have to laugh at Faux, not with it. Faux has to be scorned and written off.

    Still no firm answer as to how. But I’m sure they’re taking bets in the “newsroom” as to whether or not the protest e-mails will surpass the quantities of previous protest e-mails and they’re yawning at the threats of boycotts. Faux is not enough of a joke on the world stage. It needs to become the biggest joke there is. How can that happen?

  • The Cyrano analogy being that Faux’s lies and exaggerations need to be put in their weasely, tiny brained place with some rejoinder(s) that shows how petty and lacking in imagination their poorly manufactured junk really is.

    It is junk. And we live in a country amongst a general population that buys a lot of junk.

    Wanders off muttering.

  • And on the subject of boycotts, this is the response I got from Office Depot when I wrote to them criticizing them for advertising on Glenn Becks Twilight Zone.

    Sponsors are listening. They don’t want customers being scared away. If a real boycott of sponsors could be targeted, defined, promoted and adhered to…it could make a difference.

    Thank you for taking the time to contact Office Depot.

    We value feedback from our customers and those who live in the communities in which we serve. One of our stated values is to build and sustain an inclusive culture that approaches all opportunities and challenges by respecting the diverse thoughts, beliefs, backgrounds, faiths and cultures of customers, suppliers, associates and shareholders.

    In terms of our marketing practices, our goal is to advertise in suitable, non-offensive programming which reaches our target audiences in an effective and efficient manner. We take reasonable measures to avoid airing advertisements on broadcasts that do not meet our general criteria.

    Occasionally, a program we’ve elected to include in our advertising mix may air an episode with content that some may find objectionable. Please understand that while we are generally able to select or reject programs based on the overall content contained in prior episodes, we do not know, nor do we have access to, the content of any future episodes.

    Further, Office Depot does not support or endorse the views expressed on any particular show or segment. As always, we will approach our business in a manner that is respectful to our diverse customer base and we will continue to advertise in a variety of outlets while following our general guidelines as stated above.

    Thank you again for writing to Office Depot. Sincerely, Casey J. AhlbumSr. Customer Relations ManagerExecutive Customer RelationsOffice Depot, Inc. 2200 Old Germantown RoadDelray Beach, FL 33445

    That part about the previous and future episodes is B.S. and I’ll write back to him tomorrow. Glenn Beck is the garbage man. He was last week and he will be next week. Anyone who doesn’t know what’s on that show should be fired from buying ad time.

  • And I know I said that boycotts would be laughed at that they could also be effective. I guess it’s just the difference I perceive between talking boycott and actually making a serious boycott happen. I don’t think Faux is too worried about a serious boycott coming to fruition.

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