ABC's Untrue Path
"Docudramas" are the worst draft of history.
Monday, September 11, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
Five years after 9/11, it's easy to find partisan divisions. But here's an issue we should be able to agree on: Docudramas--the portrayal of real events and people by actors--are a poor way to teach children and adults history. It's especially iffy to take dramatic license in telling the story of events in which many of the principal players are still living, such as 9/11 or President Reagan's administration.
Just ask ABC. Last night, it aired the first part of a six-hour miniseries, "The Path to 9/11." Sandy Berger, who served as President Clinton's national security adviser, bitterly complained about a fictional scene in which he stopped CIA agents who were about to kill Osama bin Laden. Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright had similar complaints. Both persuaded ABC to alter the scenes involving them. It's not known if the network also altered scenes in tonight's installment that portray Bush administration officials such as Condoleezza Rice in a negative light.
The makers of docudramas always have smooth explanations for why they need to adjust history for the purposes of storytelling. Cy Nowrasteh, the screenwriter for "The Path to 9/11," told National Review: "The Berger scene is a fusing and melding of at least a dozen capture opportunities. The sequence is true, but it's a conflation. This is a docudrama. We collapse, condense, and create composite characters. But within the rules of docudrama, we're well documented."
That's the problem with docudramas. Their rules simply aren't good enough when dealing with events that are still fresh in the minds of so many. At worst, they can be used by ideological gunslingers like director Oliver Stone, who smeared the reputations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in paranoid fantasy films.
It's a shame that many of the people who are most exercised about "The Path to 9/11" were silent or worse back in 2003, when CBS produced a television movie fictionalized at the expense of President Reagan. Among the scenes in the version that was originally scheduled to air was one that showed Nancy Reagan begging her husband to help AIDS patients, only to be told, "They that live in sin shall die in sin." Elizabeth Egloff, the playwright who wrote the script, admitted that there was no evidence such a conversation took place. She justified her fabrication as follows: "We know he ducked the issue over and over again, and we know [Mrs. Reagan] was the one who got him to deal with it."
CBS eventually decided not to air the Reagan docudrama and shifted it to its sister cable network Showtime. ABC has chosen to make adjustments rather than drop "The Path to 9/11." But another clear difference between the two programs was the reaction of government officials.
Back in 2003, CBS officials said they received virtually no official inquiries about the program. Michael Powell, then chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said he had "absolutely not" even considered contacting the network over the show. The most visible government official on the controversy was Tom Daschle, then Senate Democratic leader, who criticized CBS for having "totally collapsed" by pulling the show, a decision he called "appalling."
By contrast, Harry Reid, Mr. Daschle's successor as minority leader, joined other top Democrats in issuing a thinly veiled threat to ABC. They wrote Robert Iger, the chairman of ABC's parent company Disney, to urge him to cancel the program. They reminded him his network enjoyed "a free broadcast license predicated on the fundamental understanding of your principle obligation to act as a trustee of the public airwaves in serving the public interest. Nowhere is this public interest obligation more apparent than in the duty of broadcasters to serve the civic needs of a democracy by promoting an open and accurate discussion of political ideas and events." Commentators across the political spectrum called the letter by Democratic leaders a form of intimidation.
Let's agree that censorship isn't the way to combat the pernicious spread of historical docudramas. Instead, both sides should shame moviemakers into honesty. The reaction to "The Path to 9/11" is an encouraging start. In addition to all the Democratic critics, conservatives such as Bill O'Reilly, Bill Bennett and John Podhoretz weighed in with their reservations about the fictionalized scenes, even though many of them agree with the broader point: that both the Clinton and Bush administrations dropped the ball in pursuing Osama bin Laden.
Here's hoping this fragile consensus can be extended to other controversies in the future. Next month, Britain's Channel 4 will air a docudrama of a different sort, depicting the fictional assassination of President Bush. Using digital camera techniques, it superimposes an image of the president's face on that of an actor to present what appears to be news footage of Mr. Bush being killed by a sniper as he leaves a Chicago hotel in 2007. "The Death of the President" premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last week. Noah Cowan, one of the festival's co-directors, called it "a classic cautionary tale." He said the film's real message is "how the Patriot Act, especially, and how Bush's divisive partisanship and race-baiting has forever altered America."
Mr. Cowan is kidding himself. Surely the film's makers and promoters know the film will be viewed around the world by many people who will have a more visceral reaction to it. "This is Bush-hatred as a snuff film," says Jeff Jacoby, a columnist for the Boston Globe. "The fantasies it feeds are grotesque and obscene; to pander to such fantasies is to rip at boundary-markers that are indispensable to civilized society."
No one is going to stop Channel 4 from airing the film. But it's in the long-term interests of both Republicans and Democrats to encourage American networks to think carefully before they bid on U.S. broadcast rights.
In a visual age, responsible docudramas can often illuminate distant historical events where precious little film footage exists. But when it comes to hot-button debates about contemporary history, the "rules" of docudramas should ensure a greater fidelity to the facts. Given how badly our public schools teach civics, history is too important to be left to storytellers who emphasize drama ahead of accuracy.
Clarification: In my Aug. 21 column, I should have attributed a point about specific personalities who lacked verbal skills but were nonetheless intelligent to blogger Terry Cowgill, who made that point first. (http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110008824)
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