BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
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Friday, September 05, 2003
Rewriting history -- just in
time for the campaign. News Dissector Danny Schechter has written
a
must-read exposé on
Mediachannel.org about the making of DC
9/11: Time of Crisis, a
docudrama about the Bush administration's response to the terrorist
attacks that will debut this Sunday at 8 p.m. on Showtime.
This is a media scandal of the
first order, and Schechter connects all the dots. Showtime is part of
the Viacom media empire, headed by Sumner Redstone and Mel Karmazin,
media executives who have repeatedly and actively sought favors from
the federal government in the form of deregulation by the FCC. Bush's
political mastermind, Karl Rove, was personally involved in getting
DC 9/11 up and going, and the film was put together by Lionel
Chetwynd, who has "a long history of serving Republican
causes."
As Schechter notes, this is the
first occasion that a fictional movie about a living president has
been made since John F. Kennedy's leadership of the PT-109 was
lionized some 40 years ago.
So here we have a favor-seeking
media conglomerate making a propaganda film of the Bush presidency
just as his re-election campaign gets under way. The idea of using
that footage from last spring aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln
is getting a little dicey, given that we're losing two or three
American soldiers every day.
What we'll get instead is a
fictional treatment of 9/11 that is guaranteed to make Bush look a
lot more heroic and decisive than the real Bush did two years
ago.
Here is Schechter's depressing
conclusion:
DC 911 illustrates the
direction our propaganda system is taking because it is also the
direction that our news system has already taken. More story
telling instead of journalism. More character oriented drama. More
narrative arcs. More blurring of the line between fiction and
truth.
DC 911: Time of Crisis is also a
sign of the crisis in our media system. Made by a "liberal
company," it may help re-elect a conservative president. It is
the latest tool in the media drift to the right, but it is not the
last.
posted at 10:58 AM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
