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View Full Version : Has ABC been hijacked by the Far Right?


ndebord
September 8th, 2006, 11:19 PM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/discover-the-secret-right_b_29015.html

Max Blumenthal (Bio: Max Blumenthal is a Nation Institute Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow whose work regularly appears in the Nation. He is a Research Fellow at Media Matters for America.)

Is Blumenthal correct? Has ABC been hijacked by the far right, indeed even the evangelical right?


"In fact, "The Path to 9/11" is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11's director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to "transform Hollywood" in line with its messianic vision."

Lindsey
September 8th, 2006, 11:41 PM
There's an online clearinghouse site regarding this propaganda film here (http://openlettertoabc.blogspot.com/).

I sent an e-mail yesterday to the independent local ABC affiliate here to protest the hijacking of a national tragedy for partisan purposes, but have not heard anything back from them. But the rumor (courtesy of Variety) is that ABC is considering pulling it.

I don't know whether the Huffington Post addressed this or not, but the original plan was that Scholastic, in a joint venture with ABC, would distribute a classroom guide to the movie to use it as an "educational" tool. Scholastic, however, has since withdrawn its support (http://www.scholastic.com/aboutscholastic/news/press_09072006_CP.htm) and is instead working up a new classroom guide that focuses on "critical thinking and media literacy skills." One online commenter suggested that the curriculum should start with a reading of 1984.

Democratic leaders in the Senate have sent a letter (http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/09/senate-democratic-leadership-threatens.html) to ABC hinting that they could be putting their broadcast license in jeopardy if they proceed with airing the movie. Even Bill Bennett (http://thinkprogress.org/2006/09/08/video-bill-bennett-says-abc-should-correct-those-inaccuracies-in-path-to-911/) has criticized ABC's depiction of events.

--Lindsey

Lindsey
September 9th, 2006, 02:34 PM
Alternative viewing: Ted Koppel is hosting a feature on the Discovery Channel Sunday night at 8 pm Eastern time entitled "The Price of Security." (http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/koppel/koppel.html)

--Lindsey

Judy G. Russell
September 9th, 2006, 09:00 PM
Scholastic, however, has since withdrawn its support (http://www.scholastic.com/aboutscholastic/news/press_09072006_CP.htm) and is instead working up a new classroom guide that focuses on "critical thinking and media literacy skills."Oh good for them... what trash this is... and how sickening that anybody would so deliberately falsify the facts as to what happened up to and on 9/11.

Lindsey
September 9th, 2006, 10:33 PM
and how sickening that anybody would so deliberately falsify the facts as to what happened up to and on 9/11.
I agree, absolutely. Bad enough the right wing has taken possession of the flag and the national anthem. Now they want complete possession of the greatest national tragedy of my lifetime as well. I have been angry enough about it to spit nails.

--Lindsey

Judy G. Russell
September 9th, 2006, 11:38 PM
I can't believe they'd fictionalize the 9/11 report. I just can't believe it.

ndebord
September 10th, 2006, 10:32 AM
Democratic leaders in the Senate have sent a letter (http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/09/senate-democratic-leadership-threatens.html) to ABC hinting that they could be putting their broadcast license in jeopardy if they proceed with airing the movie.
--Lindsey

Lindsey,

And so they should, although the Democrats, at this point in time, do not have the votes to pull anybody's license. The Mighty Mouse in charge of ABC was never my idea of a good fit, even though I didn't think much of CAP City either when it ran things over there.

ndebord
September 10th, 2006, 10:33 AM
I can't believe they'd fictionalize the 9/11 report. I just can't believe it.

Judy,

Thank David Horowitz, former radical for the left, now the right.

MollyM/CA
September 10th, 2006, 03:10 PM
Horowitz is a gem, all right.

I get regular articles (and a lot of really good jokes) from my friend Mark Rutledge, a campus minister. Several of the articles lately have been on the theme that many of those pulling Bush's strings are not just Born-again Christians, not just leaders of the Rabid Christian Right, but believe that the world will, and should, come to an end in their generation, and that they are deliberately doing anything they can to hasten Armageddon, the Rapture, etc.

Maybe we should give them all tickets to the next spaceship--

Mark would probably be glad to add any of you who might be interested to his mailing list. Not all the articles seem to have links (I could probably go into the 'raw' version of the e-mails and find them?) and I'm not sure it would be legal to post them. Many, not all, are from various churchly journals and newsletters he gets. His own affiliations are Methodist and Episcopalian, also liberal and intelligent. He's been a bit down lately about the friends he thinks he's lost because of his screeds, which include articles from Islamic moderates pushing peace and trying to define modern Islam (as opposed to the medieval variety of, for instance, Al Qaeda or the Taliban) for Westerners as well as the above commentaries. Losing friends over an attempt to present an alternative view or responsible information is scary, given his position, and it might cheer him to find that others can still think.

Lindsey
September 10th, 2006, 04:10 PM
I can't believe they'd fictionalize the 9/11 report. I just can't believe it.
Hey why not? It's no different from what BushCo did with the intelligence about Iraq .

These neocons, remember, are the people who spoke with scorn of the "reality-based community," claiming that they would make their own reality. And so they do. :(

Dick Cheney was on "Meet the Press" today claiming that there was a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda under Saddam Hussein despite a report released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Friday that concludes the exact opposite:

VICE PRES. CHENEY: So you’ve got Iraq and 9/11, no evidence that there’s a connection. You’ve got Iraq and al-Qaeda, testimony from the director of CIA that there was indeed a relationship, Zarqawi in Baghdad, etc. Then the third...

MR. RUSSERT: The committee said that there was no relationship. In fact...

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I haven’t seen the report; I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but the fact is...

You know how this works -- repeat a lie often enough . . .

-Lindsey

Lindsey
September 10th, 2006, 04:14 PM
And so they should, although the Democrats, at this point in time, do not have the votes to pull anybody's license.
The tide, I think, is beginning to turn. It had better, if we want to retain some semblance of a liberal democracy.

--Lindsey

Judy G. Russell
September 10th, 2006, 05:42 PM
That report, by the way, was shepherded through by a Republican -- Roberts -- and not the Democrats. But that wouldn't even slow Cheney down...

Lindsey
September 10th, 2006, 10:28 PM
That report, by the way, was shepherded through by a Republican -- Roberts -- and not the Democrats. But that wouldn't even slow Cheney down...
Well -- it's a bipartisan report. And I don't think Roberts was particularly happy to be releasing it, but I don't think he had much choice, after he promised nearly a year ago to see to it that the rest of the committee's report was completed and released. But notice that Roberts has put the portion of the report dealing with how the Administration actually used the intelligence they were given (which was due to be released in 2004, and then postponed until after the 2004 election) on the back burner once again . . .

--Lindsey

Judy G. Russell
September 10th, 2006, 11:10 PM
But notice that Roberts has put the portion of the report dealing with how the Administration actually used the intelligence they were given (which was due to be released in 2004, and then postponed until after the 2004 election) on the back burner once again . . .Please. You don't expect them to hold themselves accountable in an election year, do you??? (Or at any other time, for that matter...)

Lindsey
September 11th, 2006, 12:42 AM
Please. You don't expect them to hold themselves accountable in an election year, do you??? (Or at any other time, for that matter...)
"Or at any other time" is the absolute truth. After the 2004 election, Roberts tried to declare that the promised report was now moot, and would probably not be issued. In late 2005, after a year of stalling, a group of Democratic senators used an obscure parliamentary maneuver to hold up all business in the Senate until they got an agreement from Republican leadership to release the second half of the report. Now here we are almost another year later, and they've been forced to eek out a portion of the Phase II report, but we still don't have the most important part of it. That's simply outrageous.

ThinkProgress has a timeline of broken promises and missed deadlines here (http://thinkprogress.org/roberts-coverup/) (scroll down to the topic "Iraq Intelligence").

--Lindsey