Bush's record is fair game, but citing Kerry's record is dangerous.
Its plan sounds like the plot of a bad political novel, or an actual election in post-Soviet Russia. The Times and other newspapers reported this week that Sinclair, a Maryland-based company that reaches nearly a quarter of American households, would broadcast a propaganda film in the next two weeks that labels Senator John Kerry a liar, a traitor and a "willing accomplice" of the enemy during the Vietnam War. It claims, falsely, that his antiwar statements inspired the North Vietnamese to step up the torture of American prisoners, and it is filled with other distortions about the war in Vietnam.
Sinclair has instructed its stations, which are heavily represented in swing states like Florida and Wisconsin, to run the film without commercials in the evening. The company already compels them to broadcast editorials and commentaries favorable to Mr. Bush and his policies. But this is a whole new arena, and little different from making the stations give donations to the Republican campaign.
Could this be the result of the Campaign Finance Reform laws the New York Times pushed for. The mainstream media loved it back then because free citizens would be limited in their speech and media outlets could broadcast whatever they wanted. Here's a news outlet doing just that.
We would be just as appalled if one of the major networks forced its affiliates to broadcast "Fahrenheit 9/11" next week and call it a news program.
Oh, would you? Here's what Times critic A.O. Scott said in his positive review of Farenheit 9/11:
That Mr. Moore does not like Mr. Bush will hardly come as news. "Fahrenheit 9/11," which opens in Manhattan today and in the rest of the country on Friday, is many things: a partisan rallying cry, an angry polemic, a muckraking inquisition into the use and abuse of power. But one thing it is not is a fair and nuanced picture of the president and his policies. What did you expect? Mr. Moore is often impolite, rarely subtle and occasionally unwise. He can be obnoxious, tendentious and maddeningly self-contradictory. He can drive even his most ardent admirers crazy. He is a credit to the republic.
Oh, so Moore is all of those things and still a credit to the Republic? Why isn't Sinclair a credit to the Republic? Scott concludes his review with this:
The most moving sections of "Fahrenheit 9/11" concern Lila Lipscomb, a cheerful state employee and former welfare recipient who wears a crucifix pendant and an American flag lapel pin. When we first meet her, she is proud of her family's military service — a daughter served in the Persian Gulf war and a son, Michael Pedersen, was a marine in Iraq — and grateful for the opportunities it has offered. Then Michael is killed in Karbala, and in sharing her grief with Mr. Moore, she also gives his film an eloquence that its most determined critics will find hard to dismiss. Mr. Bush is under no obligation to answer Mr. Moore's charges, but he will have to answer to Mrs. Lipscomb.
Moore may be disingenuous, but Bush still has to answer to an individual he interviews? This is the very point of the Sinclair film. Kerry hasn't answered the Vietnam Veterans that he defamed in his testimony. The Times takes it as an afront that Sinclair stations pre-empted the Nightline show naming the war deaths, but the only story that Nightline has done on the Swift Vets were putting together a list of witnesses that contradict just one charge in the book. Nightline hasn't seemed all that interested in having a dialogue with the men on the larger issues in the book. They don't want Kerry to have to answer for anything.
Back to the Times Editorial:
The movie that caught Sinclair's eye, a 45-minute diatribe called "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal," rehashes Republican charges that are familiar to everyone from the latest round of ads attacking Mr. Kerry's antiwar activities: primarily that he lied to the Senate in 1971 about atrocities in Vietnam and that his testimony and the antiwar movement in general aided the North Vietnamese and harmed American soldiers. This line of reasoning neatly dovetails with the Bush campaign's assertions that criticizing Mr. Bush's conduct of the war in Iraq is unpatriotic and harms American soldiers.
Because Bush agrees with the premise the film is has no merit true or not.
Sinclair says it is just trying to give its viewers news. Unfortunately, this film is not news, and not journalism. It makes no attempt at balance or fairness. Its interviews with 17 men who were imprisoned and tortured in Hanoi are powerful. But the narrator and producer, Carlton Sherwood, a former journalist on leave from his job in a company that provides "homeland security" services to the government, exploits these brave men and their distinguished service for a cause that he openly says is personal.
What was it that Michael Moore did to that poor lady who lost her son? Did the Times think she was exploited? No, she needed to be answered. And who will disagree that Moore's entire film is personal?
Sinclair's First Amendment defenses lack credibility because it denied those rights to "Nightline." At the time, Sinclair's spokesman, Mark Hyman, who doubles as a conservative commentator, said Mr. Koppel's program did not deserve to be broadcast because it had "no proportionality" and ignored other aspects of the issues. It was hard to see how that could describe a tribute to the war dead, but it's a perfect description of "Stolen Honor."
Sinclair didn't deny first amendment rights to NIGHTLINE. Ted Koppel has to no right to broadcast his program on an affiliate just because they also show Peter Jennings. Sinclair owns the stations and can pick programming according to whatever they want to see. The only reason they are showing this on Sinclair stations is that the networks that gladly showed Koppel's war dead show denied the makers of this film the same opportunity.
The Times talks about gigantic Sinclair and how dangerous it is. But Mainstream Hollywood has produced and distributed three anti-Bush Documentaries (Farenheit and Bush's Brain, highjacking catastrophe) and one pro-Kerry documentary (Going Up River) during the campaign. And don't forget that Pro-Clinton documentary (The Hunting of the President) that was supposed to remind us how Great America was before Bush.
Meanwhile other documentaries that are pro Bush or anti-Michael Moore aren't getting the same treatment. Both Michael Moore Hates America and Celcius 41.1 aren't finding their way into theatres. Censorship? The Times probablly thinks that's just the free market.
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