Griper Blade: GOP 'Media Fairness Caucus' Not Really About Media Fairness

Entertainment critic Tom Shales wrote in the Washington Post, "Factually shaky, politically inflammatory and photographically a mess, The Path to 9/11 -- ABC's two-part, five-hour miniseries tracing events leading up to the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- has something not just to offend everyone but also to depress them." This won't be the first or the last time I admit to liking bad reviews better than good ones. A writer doesn't often go out of their way to really get you to understand how great something is, but their creative juices really flow when they try to get you to appreciate just how mindnumbingly awful something is. Maybe it's the need to punish a movie, TV show, CD, whatever for wasting the reviewer's time, but the best writing is almost always in the worst reviews.

And Shales is the master of the bad review; TPt9/11's camera work "isn't cinematography; it's vivisection." Aired in 2006 (September 10-11, of course), the miniseries itself was a "grueling assault... on the senses that may also be an assault on the truth." In short, it was pretty bad.

But the problem most had with it was that it wasn't its artistic merit, but its historical accuracy -- it didn't have any. Written and produced by a group of conservatives, it portrayed the Bush administration as nearly faultless and the Clinton White House as bumbling bureaucrats. Events that never happened were presented as fact -- at one point, Sandy Berger pulls a squad who has Osama Bin Laden in their sights, supposedly because Berger couldn't get authorization to take the shot. In another scene, Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright refuses to fire missiles at Bin Laden for the same reason. It wasn't true, but ABC defended the scenes as "dramatizations" -- The Path to 9/11 was fictionalized, which meant it'd have a lot of stuff that wasn't true, but was dramatic. ABC sent advance copies to and held pre-screenings for right wing bloggers and people like Rush Limbaugh. Albright and Berger requested advance copies, but never received them. TPt9/11 was, without any doubt, right wing propaganda and was sent and shown in advance only to those who could be relied on to praise its accuracy and historical importance. The fact that it aired in the fall of an election year wasn't lost on many. Maybe if it hadn't sucked so bad, the Democrats wouldn't have won so many seats. I'm not sure anyone other than conservatives even watched it... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]