Dead Mousies
Sep. 7th, 2006 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
filkertomThe scandal over the bullshit propaganda and anti-Clinton hit piece Disney/ABC mockudrama The Path To 9/11 is getting more interesting by the hour. Lots of different blogs are covering it, but the most comprehensive and relatively-easy-to-follow coverage seems to be on ThinkProgress and AmericaBlog. (Thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cheshyre for the heads-up.)
The current short form seems to be:
cheshyre for the heads-up.)The current short form seems to be:
- Disney/ABC admits it made up a bunch of stuff, with a strange reading of the 9/11 commission report and several other sources having nothing to do with it.
- The film was in fact made by several die-hard conservatives with an agenda. (Yes, just like Michael Moore... except Moore's work stands up quite nicely to fact-checking.)
- Several Congresscritters sent them a letter yesterday demanding an explanation of why they did this and calling for corrections of the misinformation.
- Bill Clinton, who is portrayed as being too involved with the Lewinsky scandal to do jack, is lawyering up.
- He, Madeline Albright, and Richard Clarke have all gone on record showing how specific incidents in the film were counter to reality... or never took place.
- Scholastic Books is getting ready to distribute a "teaching guide" to fill schools with this misinformation.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-07 04:52 pm (UTC)Also, don't know if you read
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-07 05:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-07 04:54 pm (UTC)Not to mention that Moore's films were films -- shown in movie theaters. Theater owners could and did refuse to show them; people could buy tickets or not.
Path to 9/11 is being broadcast over the free airwaves.
Censorship is bad no matter who does it
Date: 2006-09-07 04:55 pm (UTC)Re: Censorship is bad no matter who does it
Date: 2006-09-07 05:06 pm (UTC)The problem with letting the false propaganda, the demonstrable lies, hit the airwaves like this is that, even if challenged, the lies will stick to an extent. That's what the propagandists are counting on.
And... I've got a blog. Other people have blogs. They've got fuckin' ABC. There's a reason we have to fight this at the outset -- they're immense and powerful, and you want to tie their shoelaces together before they climb into the ring and heft the club.
I agree in 6 words
Date: 2006-09-07 06:32 pm (UTC)Re: Censorship is bad no matter who does it
Date: 2006-09-07 05:08 pm (UTC)"The correction to yesterday's front-page news story can be found on page C7 of the newspaper."
Re: Censorship is bad no matter who does it
Date: 2006-09-07 05:22 pm (UTC)That, and that I have seen people buy into the most idiotic nonsense that was presented on TV... because it was presented on TV. That is a whole different bucket to open sometime else, though.
All political comments made are meant in a respectful manner.
Re: Censorship is bad no matter who does it
Date: 2006-09-07 05:32 pm (UTC)Yeah. You can't unring a bell. I don't care if ABC airs this thing. I do not want them calling it a "documentary," however, as that implies that they are attempting to stick to the facts. A documentary doesn't change events; a documentary shouldn't even film dramatizations of events that cameras were not there to cover. If an opinion is expressed by a documentary, it should be clearly delineated as commentary rather than being allowed to color the presentation of the facts themselves. If ABC wants to argue their own version of what happened, then they can certainly do so... but let them call it "fiction" up front where people can get a good strong smell of it.
Re: Censorship is bad no matter who does it
Date: 2006-09-07 05:35 pm (UTC)Re: Censorship is bad no matter who does it
Date: 2006-09-07 05:40 pm (UTC)If this is stating as a fact that someone's personally responsible for the deaths of three thousand people when he isn't, then yes, I have no problem with a rhetorical or legal curbstomping of those pushing the "documentary," provided it's also being refuted.
Re: Censorship is bad no matter who does it
Date: 2006-09-07 05:43 pm (UTC)Re: Censorship is bad no matter who does it
Date: 2006-09-07 05:45 pm (UTC)Oh, goodie, an absolute.
I don't think censorship of child pornography is bad, no matter who does it. But I'm quirky like that.
Calling on ABC to not present an opinion piece as fact is in no way, shape, or form censorship. Make clear who funded it, who put it together, and that it's not factual, and they can run it in a 24-hour September 11th marathon, ala the annual "A Christmas Story" marathon on cable, for all I care. But I'm tired of things getting out in the name of "free speech," and then I spend 6 years explaining to people that Al Gore didn't actually claim he invented the internet, nor did he ever actually claim he believed himself to be the basis of the male character in "Love Story."
There's a line between censorship and slander/libel, and I think that line is more important than this "documentary."
Re: Censorship is bad no matter who does it
Date: 2006-09-07 06:28 pm (UTC)So you have no problem with the teenagers who are getting placed on sex offender lists for producing/distibuting child pornography? That is, for taking pictures of *themselves* or their friends and passing them around.
See, you have to be careful. Just because you are against X, that doesn't mean that what you think is X agrees with what others think X is.
In this case "child pornography" doesn't involve children. Legally, it involves folks under *18*.
Re: Censorship is bad no matter who does it
Date: 2006-09-07 06:35 pm (UTC)Whether I have a problem with the punishment doled out to the teenagers in your example is irrelevant to the fact that I believe that possessing or distributing child pornography is wrong, and should not be permitted under the cry of "censorship!" I don't care how old the person doing so is.
What the punishment for such acts should be doesn't really enter into whether or not it is or isn't censorship.
Re: Censorship is bad no matter who does it
Date: 2006-09-07 07:05 pm (UTC)There does need to be some reasonability applied, here.
Re: Censorship is bad no matter who does it
Date: 2006-09-07 07:22 pm (UTC)Does that include absolutely completely childless 3D simulations? That is, what if someone's done pics or video using, say, Poser to model children, regardless of whether any actual children were abused?
I'd say that situation, among others, is not quite as black and white as it may seem. And I'm a father, with two kids (5 and 8), so believe me, very attuned to anything child-abuse-wise.
Re: Censorship is bad no matter who does it
Date: 2006-09-07 07:01 pm (UTC)Censorship is bad. Censorship is always bad, more or less definitionally.
However, there are plenty of speech/communication restrictions that aren't censorship, and aren't bad. This includes, but isn't limited to directly harmful speech (fire+crowd+theatre), fraud, slander, and libel.
Additionally,
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-07 04:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-07 05:11 pm (UTC)...
... I'm never gonna live this one down, either, am I? ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-07 05:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-07 04:56 pm (UTC)Osama Bin Ladin is still free,
Al-Qaeda is recruiting at record levels,
The Taliban is being re-established in Afghanistan,
Iran is seeking nuclear proliferation,
Our country's name is mud as far as the world community is concerned,
And we can't do a Goddamned thing about it because we're stuck losing soldiers in a war in a country that posed no serious threat to us whatsoever, based on a rationale of damned lies, that we have no chance of winning because nobody can even remember why we went there in the first place anymore.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-07 05:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-07 05:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-07 05:30 pm (UTC)Furthermore, which do you think has the potential to reach a wider audience;
A programme available for free on a nationally-broadcast television station,
Or a film produced by a man that everyone's mind is more-or-less made up about that one must go to a theatre and pay admission for?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-07 09:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-07 06:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-07 06:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-07 06:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-07 10:14 pm (UTC)__________
¹ No, that's not a typo.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-07 11:05 pm (UTC)It got canceled after one year because the kids were using the techniques to call adults on *all* propoganda. Including our side's!
Which is why I don't see that sort of thing happening any time soon. Politicians (at least the modern kind) don't dare have an electorate that can spot the BS.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-07 07:24 pm (UTC)