Disney's 'mockudrama' controversy

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 3:51 PM on September 7, 2006.

MSNBC Host [on a scene in which Clinton official refuses to give the CIA the go-ahead on killing bin Laden]: "From your understanding, is this entirely accurate?"

Mitchell: "No, actually it's entirely made up. Which is one of the problems."

In this clip Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell notes that Disney's "Path to 9/11" takes some liberties with the facts.

As in: it ignores some of them and creates some new ones. In fact, as Lindsay noted earlier, "An FBI consultant quit the project because producers were just making things up."

Mitchell is among the privileged few who have seen the film [full coverage of the film is HERE]. The reason, as he notes in the clip, is that ABC only distributed screeners to sympathetic right wing sites and pundits -- a clear sign that something is amiss.

ABC now claims that the film, which airs on Sunday and Monday, is still being edited and that "criticisms of film specifics are premature and irresponsible." Funny. Some might call a film about our national tragedy that incorporates fake history a fairly irresponsible decision. Potato/po-tah-to I guess...

ABC's statement:

The Path to 9/11 is not a documentary of the events leading to 9/11. It is a dramatization, drawn from a variety of sources including the 9/11 Commission Report, other published materials, and personal interviews. As such, for dramatic and narrative purposes, the movie contains fictionalized scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue, and time compression. No one has seen the final version of the film, because the editing process is not yet complete, so criticisms of film specifics are premature and irresponsible. The attacks of 9/11 were a pivotal moment in our history, and it is fitting that the debate about the events related to the attacks continue. However, we hope viewers will watch the entire broadcast of the finished film before forming an opinion about it.

Finally, as Justin Rood notes, Scholastic Inc, which had arranged a companion guide for classroom discussion, has now shifted its material to address -- cue the irony -- media literacy.

Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.