Category Archives: Media

Webloggers Salon at UBC

Here’s the video (via Blip.tv) of the Webloggers Salon at UBC held way back in February. Thanks to Brian Lamb for putting the salon together and getting the video up.

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‘Devastating’ Bill Moyers Probe of Press and Iraq Coming This Week

Editor & Publisher: ‘Devastating’ Bill Moyers Probe of Press and Iraq Coming This Week

By Greg Mitchell

Published: April 21, 2007 9:00 PM ET

NEW YORK (Commentary) The most powerful indictment of the news media for falling down in its duties in the run-up to the war in Iraq will appear next Wednesday, a 90-minute PBS broadcast called “Buying the War,” which marks the return of “Bill Moyers Journal.” E&P was sent a preview DVD and a draft transcript for the program this week.

While much of the evidence of the media’s role as cheerleaders for the war presented here is not new, it is skillfully assembled, with many fresh quotes from interviews (with the likes of Tim Russert and Walter Pincus) along with numerous embarrassing examples of past statements by journalists and pundits that proved grossly misleading or wrong. Several prominent media figures, prodded by Moyers, admit the media failed miserably, though few take personal responsibility.

The war continues today, now in its fifth year, with the death toll for Americans and Iraqis rising again — yet Moyers points out, “the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush Administration to go to war on false pretenses.”

Among the few heroes of this devastating film are reporters with the Knight Ridder/McClatchy bureau in D.C. Tragically late, Walter Isaacson, who headed CNN, observes, “The people at Knight Ridder were calling the colonels and the lieutenants and the people in the CIA and finding out, you know, that the intelligence is not very good. We should’ve all been doing that.”

At the close, Moyers mentions some of the chief proponents of the war who refused to speak to him for this program, including Thomas Friedman, Bill Kristol, Roger Ailes, Charles Krauthammer, Judith Miller, and William Safire.

But Dan Rather, the former CBS anchor, admits, “I don’t think there is any excuse for, you know, my performance and the performance of the press in general in the roll up to the war&hellipWe didn’t dig enough. And we shouldn’t have been fooled in this way.” Bob Simon, who had strong doubts about evidence for war, was asked by Moyers if he pushed any of the top brass at CBS to “dig deeper,” and he replies, “No, in all honesty, with a thousand mea culpas&hellip.nope, I don’t think we followed up on this.”

Instead he covered the marketing of the war in a “softer” way, explaining to Moyers: “I think we all felt from the beginning that to deal with a subject as explosive as this, we should keep it, in a way, almost light – if that doesn’t seem ridiculous.”

Moyers replies: “Going to war, almost light.”

Walter Isaacson is pushed hard by Moyers and finally admits, “We didn’t question our sources enough.” But why? Isaacson notes there was “almost a patriotism police” after 9/11 and when the network showed civilian casualties it would get phone calls from advertisers and the administration and “big people in corporations were calling up and saying, ‘You’re being anti-American here.'”

Moyers then mentions that Isaacson had sent a memo to staff, leaked to the Washington Post, in which he declared, “It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan” and ordered them to balance any such images with reminders of 9/11. Moyers also asserts that editors at the Panama City (Fla.) News-Herald received an order from above, “Do not use photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties. Our sister paper has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening emails.”

Walter Pincus of the Washington Post explains that even at his paper reporters “do worry about sort of getting out ahead of something.” But Moyers gives credit to Charles J. Hanley of The Associated Press for trying, in vain, to draw more attention to United Nations inspectors failing to find WMD in early 2003.

The disgraceful press reaction to Colin Powell’s presentation at the United Nations seems like something out of Monty Python, with one key British report cited by Powell being nothing more than a student’s thesis, downloaded from the Web — with the student later threatening to charge U.S. officials with “plagiarism.”

Phil Donahue recalls that he was told he could not feature war dissenters alone on his MSNBC talk show and always had to have “two conservatives for every liberal.” Moyers resurrects a leaked NBC memo about Donahue’s firing that claimed he “presents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. At the same time our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”

Moyers also throws some stats around: In the year before the invasion William Safire (who predicted a “quick war” with Iraqis cheering their liberators) wrote “a total of 27 opinion pieces fanning the sparks of war.” The Washington Post carried at least 140 front-page stories in that same period making the administration’s case for attack. In the six months leading to the invasion the Post would “editorialize in favor of the war at least 27 times.”

Of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news in the six months before the war, almost all could be traced back to sources solely in the White House, Pentagon or State Dept., Moyers tells Russert, who offers no coherent reply.

The program closes on a sad note, with Moyers pointing out that “so many of the advocates and apologists for the war are still flourishing in the media.” He then runs a pre-war clip of President Bush declaring, “We cannot wait for the final proof: the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Then he explains: “The man who came up with it was Michael Gerson, President Bush’s top speechwriter.

“He has left the White House and has been hired by the Washington Post as a columnist.”

***
Greg Mitchell’s most recent column on Iraq: “Sorry We Shot Your Kid, But Here’s $500”

Be nice to America or else

My buddy Paul O sent this in after his latest visit to The States…

Interview on “Room 101”

“Room 101” is hosted by Michael Baker on KZUM 89.3FM in Lincoln, Nebraska and features interviews and talk about issues of education and schooling.

This interview focuses on NCLB and the racist, elitist, and imperialistic consequences of the legislation. Wayne also suggests steps to counter NCLB. (March 14, 2007)

Gilberto Gil and the politics of music

Gilberto Gil is best known as a founder, with Caetano Veloso, of the art/political movement known as Tropicalismo, which developed in the late 1960s and encompassed theatre, poetry and music, among other forms.

Now, Gil is a cabinet minister in Lula’s government in Brazil and in that role is integrating the “share, reuse, remix” approach of the Creative Commons movement into Brazilian policy on intellectual property.

Here’s a story about Gil’s current work from the International Herald Tribune.International Herald Tribune
Gilberto Gil and the politics of music
By Larry Rohter
Monday, March 12, 2007
Click here to find out more!

SALVADOR, Brazil: On Wednesday the Brazilian minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, is scheduled to speak about intellectual property rights, digital media and related topics at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Texas. Two nights later the singer, songwriter and pop star Gilberto Gil begins a three-week North American concert tour.

Rarely do the worlds of politics and the arts converge as unconventionally as in the person of Gil, whose itinerary includes a solo performance at Carnegie Hall on March 20. More than 40 years after he first picked up a guitar and sang in public, Gilberto Passos Gil Moreira is an anomaly: He doesn’t just make music, he also makes policy.

And as the music, film and publishing industries struggle to adapt to the challenge of content proliferating on the Internet, Gil has emerged as a central player in the global search for more flexible forms of distributing artistic works. In the process his twin roles have sometimes generated competing priorities that he has sought to harmonize.

As a creator of music, he is interested in protecting copyrights. But as a government official in a developing country celebrated for the creative pulse of its people, Gil also wants Brazilians to have unfettered access to new technologies to make and disseminate art, without having to surrender their rights to the large companies that dominate the culture industry.

“I think we are moving rapidly toward the obsolescence and eventual disappearance of a single traditional model and its replacement by others that are hybrids,” Gil said in a February interview at his home here in northeast Brazil, one day before the start of Carnival. “My personal view is that digital culture brings with it a new idea of intellectual property, and that this new culture of sharing can and should inform government policies.”

Raised in the poor, arid interior of the Brazilian northeast, Gil, 64, has been straddling disparate worlds most of his life. No black Brazilian had ever served as a cabinet minister before he was appointed four years ago, and as a young man fresh out of college, he worked for a multinational company at a time when few black Brazilians had access to such jobs. Later, during a military dictatorship, he was jailed and then forced into exile in Britain.

After returning to Brazil in the 1970s, he made records that urged black Brazilians to reconnect with their African roots, and was an early champion here of Bob Marley and reggae. But Gil has also read widely in Asian philosophy and religions and follows a macrobiotic diet, leading the songwriter, producer and critic Nelson Motta to describe his style as “Afro-Zen.”

In person Gil is warm, calm and engaging, a slim, dreadlocked figure with an elfin, humorous quality that tends to disarm critics. As both individual and artist, he has always tended to be open-minded and eclectic in his tastes; the poet Torquato Neto once said of him, “There are many ways of singing and making Brazilian music, and Gilberto Gil prefers all of them.”

A fascination with technology has been another constant in Gil’s long career. He wrote his first song about computers, called “Electronic Brain,” back in the 1960s, and has regularly returned to the theme in compositions like “Satellite Dish” and “On the Internet,” which was written in the early 1990s.

One of Gil’s first actions after becoming culture minister in 2003 was to form an alliance between Brazil and the nascent Creative Commons movement. Founded in 2001, Creative Commons is meant to offer an alternative to the traditional copyright system of “all rights reserved,” which the movement’s adherents believe has impeded creativity and the sharing of knowledge in the Internet age.

In its place Creative Commons has devised a more flexible structure that allows artists to decide what part of their copyright they wish to retain and what part they are willing to share with the public. With input from Gil and many others, the organization has created licenses that permit creators and consumers to copy, remix or sample a digital work of art, so long as the originator is properly credited.

As culture minister Gil has also sponsored an initiative called the Cultural Points program. Small government grants are issued to scores of community centers in poor neighborhoods of some of Brazil’s largest cities to install recording and video studios and teach residents how to use them.

The result has been an outpouring of video and music, much of it racially conscious and politically tinged rap or electronica. Since Brazilian commercial radio, which is said to be riddled with payola, will not play the new music, the creators instead broadcast their songs on community radio stations and distribute their CDs independently, at markets and fairs, rather than through existing record labels.

Brazil’s official stance on digital content and intellectual property rights is in large part derived from Gil’s own experience. In the late ’60s he and his close friend Caetano Veloso, along with a handful of others here and in São Paulo, started the movement known as Tropicalismo, which blended avant-garde poetry, pop influences from abroad and home-grown musical styles then scorned as corny and déclassé.

Since Gil became minister, Brazilian government spending on culture has grown by more than 50 percent, testimony both to his prestige and negotiating skills. As minister he has devoted time to selling Brazilian music abroad, but has also labored to draw attention to Brazilian film, painting, sculpture and literature in foreign markets.

“One thing to remember about Gil,” said Hermano Vianna, an anthropologist, writer and a leading figure in Brazil’s digital culture movement, is that “he sees culture not just as art, but also as an industry. To Gil culture is not just an accessory but an important part of the economy and even a motor of economic development.”

Over the last four years, though, Gil has cut way back on his own performances, the part of being a musician he says he enjoys most, and nearly stopped recording. His most recent disc, “Gil Luminoso,” is a collection of 15 of his songs that he rerecorded in 1999 with just voice and guitar, to accompany a book about him.

Why give up something as gratifying as playing music for the wear and tear of public administration? “Life is not just pleasure,” he said. “The first phrase of the Vedic scriptures is that ‘All is suffering.’ Difficulty is stimulating, challenging, it’s an element of the pulse of life.”

Besides, he is at a point in life “where I no longer want to have a commitment to my career, in the classical sense of a profession,” he said. “I no longer see music as a field to be exploited. I see it now as an alternative area of action, part of a broad repertory of possibilities that I have. Music is something visceral in me, something that exudes from me, and even when I’m not thinking about it, I will still be making music, always.”

The 2007 Webloggers Salon @ UBC, February 15

You’ve seen the UFC and the WWE, but nothing will compare to the spectacle of:

The 2007 Webloggers Salon @ UBC, February 15

Most outrageous comments of 2006

From MediaMatters.org: The Most outrageous comments of 2006

Summary:

How extreme were conservative commentators in their remarks this year? How about calls to nuke the Middle East and an allegation that a “gay … mafia” used the congressional page program as its own “personal preserve.” Right-wing rhetoric documented by Media Matters for America included the nonsensical (including Rush Limbaugh’s claim that America’s “obesity crisis” is caused by, among other things, our failure to “teach [the poor] how to butcher a — slaughter a cow to get the butter, we gave them the butter”), the offensive (such as right-wing pundit Debbie Schlussel’s question about “Barack Hussein Obama”: is he “a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?”), and the simply bizarre (such as William A. Donohue’s claim that some Hollywood stars would “sodomize their own mother in a movie”). Since there were so many outrageous statements, we included a list of honorable mentions along with the top 11, which, if not for Ann Coulter, we might have limited to 10.

The top 11 (in chronological order):

William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights: “Well, look, there are people in Hollywood, not all of them, but there are some people who are nothing more than harlots. They will do anything for the buck. They wouldn’t care. If you asked them to sodomize their own mother in a movie, they would do so, and they would do it with a smile on their face.” [2/9/06]

Fox News host John Gibson: “Do your duty. Make more babies. That’s a lesson drawn out of two interesting stories over the last couple of days. First, a story yesterday that half of the kids in this country under five years old are minorities. By far, the greatest number are Hispanic. You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic. Why is that? Well, Hispanics are having more kids than others. Notably, the ones Hispanics call ‘gabachos’ — white people — are having fewer.” [5/11/06]

Right-wing pundit Ann Coulter on The New York Times’ decision to report on the Bush administration’s warrantless domestic wiretapping program and a Treasury Department financial transaction tracking program: The Times had done “something that could have gotten them executed, certainly did get [Julius and Ethel] Rosenberg[] executed.” [7/12/06]

Coulter responding to Hardball host Chris Matthews’ question, “How do you know that [former President] Bill Clinton’s gay?”: “I don’t know if he’s gay. But [former Vice President] Al Gore — total fag.” [7/27/06]

Nationally syndicated radio host Michael Savage: “That’s why the department store dummy named Wolf Blitzer, a Jew who was born in Israel, will do the astonishing act of being the type that would stick Jewish children into a gas chamber to stay alive another day. He’s probably the most despicable man in the media next to Larry King, who takes a close runner-up by the hair of a nose. The two of them together look like the type that would have pushed Jewish children into the oven to stay alive one more day to entertain the Nazis.” [8/7/06]

Coulter on Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), an African-American: “Congresswoman Maxine Waters had parachuted into Connecticut earlier in the week to campaign against [Sen. Joseph I.] Lieberman because he once expressed reservations about affirmative action, without which she would not have a job that didn’t involve wearing a paper hat. Waters also considers Joe ‘soft’ on the issue of the CIA inventing crack cocaine and AIDS to kill all the black people in America.” [8/9/06]

Nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh, blaming America’s “obesity crisis” on “the left,” “liberal government,” and “food stamps”: “Because we are sympathetic, we are compassionate people, we have responded by letting our government literally feed these people to the point of obesity. At least here in America, didn’t teach them how to fish, we gave them the fish. Didn’t teach them how to butcher a — slaughter a cow to get the butter, we gave them the butter. The real bloat here, as we know, is in — is in government.” [8/29/06]

Coulter on Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI): “They Shot the Wrong Lincoln.” [8/30/06]

Conservative pundit and former Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan: “Look, [Rep. Jim] Kolbe [R-AZ] is gay. He is an out-of-the-closet gay. [Rep. Mark] Foley [R-FL] was gay. The House clerk who was in charge of the pages [Jeff Trandahl] was gay. Foley’s administrative assistant, Mr. [Kirk] Fordham, The New York Times tell us, was gay. You hear about a lot of others. What’s going on here, Joe [Scarborough, MSNBC host], is basically these, this little mafia in there looked upon the pages, I guess, as their — sort of their personal preserve. And it stinks to high heaven what was done. And it stinks to high heaven that it was not exposed and these types of people, thrown out by the Republican Party.” [10/9/06]

CNN Headline News host Glenn Beck to Rep.-elect Keith Ellison (D-MN): “OK. No offense, and I know Muslims. I like Muslims. … With that being said, you are a Democrat. You are saying, ‘Let’s cut and run.’ And I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’ ” [11/14/06]

Right-wing pundit Debbie Schlussel on Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL): So, even if he identifies strongly as a Christian … is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father’s heritage, a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?” [12/18/06]

Honorable mentions (also in chronological order):

Beck: “Cindy Sheehan. That’s a pretty big prostitute there, you know what I mean?” [1/10/06]

Republican strategist Mary Matalin: “I mean, you know, I think these civil rights leaders are nothing more than racists. And they’re keeping constituency, they’re keeping their neighborhoods and their African-American brothers enslaved, if you will, by continuing to let them think that they’re — or forced to think that they’re victims, that the whole system is against them.” [2/8/06]

Pat Robertson, host of the Christian Broadcasting Network’s The 700 Club: “But it does seem that with the current makeup of the court, they still don’t have as many judges as would be needed to overturn Roe [v. Wade]. They need one more, and I dare say before the end of this year there will be another vacancy on the court.” [3/7/06]

Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and host of the daily Christian radio show The Albert Mohler Program: “Well, I would have to say as a Christian that I believe any belief system, any world view, whether it’s Zen Buddhism or Hinduism or dialectical materialism for that matter, Marxism, that keeps persons captive and keeps them from coming to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, yes, is a demonstration of satanic power.” [3/17/06]

Nationally syndicated radio host Neal Boortz on Rep. Cynthia McKinney’s (D-GA) hairstyle: “She looks like a ghetto slut. … It looks like an explosion in a Brillo pad factory. … She looks like Tina Turner peeing on an electric fence. … She looks like a shih tzu!” [3/31/06]

Boortz on McKinney’s hairstyle (again): “I saw Cynthia McKinney’s hairdo yesterday — saw it on TV. I don’t blame that cop for stopping her. It looked like a welfare drag queen was trying to sneak into the Longworth House Office Building. That hairdo is ghetto trash. I don’t blame them for stopping her.” [3/31/06]

Limbaugh discussing a videotape released by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the then-leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq: “[I]t sounds just like the DNC [Democratic National Committee] is writing his scripts now.” (4/26/06)

Beck: “Blowing up Iran. I say we nuke the bastards. In fact, it doesn’t have to be Iran, it can be everywhere, anyplace that disagrees with me.” [5/11/06]

Jonathan Hoenig, managing member of Capitalistpig Asset Management LLC, on Fox News’ Your World with Neil Cavuto: “I think when it comes to Iran, the problem is we haven’t been forceful enough. I mean if you — frankly, if you want to see the Dow go up, let’s get the bombers in the air and neutralize this Iranian threat.” [6/5/06]

Fox host Geraldo Rivera: “I’ve known [Sen.] John Kerry [D-MA] for over 35 years. Unlike me, he is a combat veteran, so he gets some props. But in the last 35 years, I’ve seen a hell of a lot more combat than John Kerry. And for a smart man like that in a political ploy to set a date certain only aids and abets the enemy, and the Democrats are at their own self-destructive behavior once again.” [6/22/06]

Savage: “I don’t know why we don’t use a bunker-buster bomb when he comes to the U.N. and just take [Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] out with everyone in there.” [7/21/06]

Boortz: “I want you to think for think for a moment of how incompetent and stupid and worthless, how — that’s right, I used those words — how incompetent, how ignorant, how worthless is an adult that can’t earn more than the minimum wage? You have to really, really, really be a pretty pathetic human being to not be able to earn more than the human wage. Uh — human, the minimum wage.” [8/3/06]

Syndicated columnist and Fox News host Cal Thomas on businessman Ned Lamont’s victory in Connecticut’s Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate: “It completes the capture of the Democratic Party by its Taliban wing. … [T]hey have now morphed into Taliban Democrats because they are willing to ‘kill’ one of their own, if he does not conform to the narrow and rigid agenda of the party’s kook fringe.” [8/10/06]

Fox News host Sean Hannity, two months before the November midterm elections: “This is the moment to say that there are things in life worth fighting and dying for and one of ’em is making sure [Rep.] Nancy Pelosi [D-CA] doesn’t become the [House] speaker.” [8/29/06]

Beck: “The Middle East is being overrun by 10th-century barbarians. That’s what I thought at 5 o’clock this morning, and I thought, ‘Oh, geez, what — what is this?’ If they take over — the barbarians storm the gate and take over the Middle East (this is what I’m thinking at 5 o’clock in the morning) — we’re going to have to nuke the whole place.” [9/12/06]

Savage: “My fear is that if the Democrats win [in the November midterm elections], and I’m afraid that they might, you’re going to see America melt down faster that you could ever imagine. It will happen overnight, and it could lead to the breakup of the United States of America, the way the Soviet Union broke up.” [10/13/06]

Republican pollster Frank Luntz on Nancy Pelosi’s appearance: “I always use the line for Nancy Pelosi, ‘You get one shot at a facelift. If it doesn’t work the first time, let it go.’ ” [10/31/06]

Limbaugh on the Middle East: “Fine, just blow the place up.” [11/27/06]

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly (on his radio show): “Do I care if the Sunnis and Shiites kill each other in Iraq? No. I don’t care. Let’s get our people out of there. Let them kill each other. Maybe they’ll all kill each other, and then we can have a decent country in Iraq.” [12/5/06]

New York Post columnist Ralph Peters on Iraq Study Group co-chairman James Baker: “The difference is that [Pontius] Pilate just wanted to wash his hands of an annoyance, while Baker would wash his hands in the blood of our troops.” [12/7/06]

Conservative syndicated radio host Michael Medved on the animated movie Happy Feet: The film contains “a whole subtext, as there so often is, about homosexuality.” [12/11/06]

Fox captions

Additionally, although these are not examples of specific conservative commentators making outrageous comments, we would be remiss if we did not mention that Fox News made a regular practice of attacking Democrats or repeating Republican talking points in on-screen text during its coverage of political issues. Some examples:

“All-Out Civil War in Iraq: Could It Be a Good Thing?” [2/23/06]

“Attacking Capitalism: Have Dems Declared War on America?” [2/18/06]

“Dems Helping the Enemy?” [5/22/06]

“A Lamont Win, Bad News for Democracy in Mideast?”

“Have the Democrats Forgotten the Lessons of 9/11?”

“Is the Democratic Party Soft on Terror?” [8/8/06]

“The #1 President on Mideast Matters: George W Bush?” [8/14/06]

“Is the Liberal Media Helping to Fuel Terror?” [8/16/06]

— M.M.

Posted to the web on Friday December 22, 2006 at 6:12 PM EST

The false path to 9/11

Salon.com: The false path to 9/11

Despite a few tweaks, ABC stands by its deceptive miniseries, and in tonight’s episode, all the lies make Bush look better.

By Joan Walsh

Sep. 11, 2006 | Despite right-wing claims that ABC edited the series to make it easier on Bill Clinton, the worst distortions went uncorrected — and there are plenty more to come.

“ABC bows to Bill & friends,” the New York Daily News blared Monday. But that’s only the latest media distortion of the dishonest docudrama “The Path to 9/11.” As everyone knows by now, the two-part miniseries is an anti-Clinton hit job written by a conservative Iranian-American, Cyrus Nowrasteh, a friend of Rush Limbaugh, that lards blame for the tragedy on President Clinton and his cabinet and airbrushes the culpability of George W. Bush and friends.

Although ABC has been widely depicted as caving to Clinton administration veterans by editing the movie in the days before it aired, in fact, the changes in Sunday night’s Part 1 were minimal, and didn’t fix the biggest falsehoods. And Monday night’s installment is arguably more unfair and inaccurate, ignoring the Bush administration’s own missteps around al-Qaida and propagating a well-debunked 9/11 lie — that the president gave Vice President Dick Cheney the order to shoot down hijacked airliners.

In Sunday night’s segment, one of the biggest distortions was that the CIA and Northern Alliance fighters had a clear shot at bin Laden in early 1998, but the Clinton Cabinet dithered. (In fact, the 9/11 Commission report found widespread doubt about the U.S. capacity to actually get its target at the time.) In the original version of “Path to 9/11,” the situation is drained of ambiguity — we’ve got bin Laden in our sights — and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger is the clear bad guy, insisting, “I don’t have that authority” to OK the operation, and hanging up the phone on CIA director George Tenet.
In the final version aired Sunday, there’s still no doubt that we can get bin Laden. Berger says the very same line, but doesn’t hang up on Tenet. Instead, he passes the buck to him, and Tenet whines that he’ll get all the blame if the operation goes awry, like Attorney General Janet Reno after she authorized a move on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. The scene stands as a monument to Clinton-era impotence, with Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud intoning darkly, “Are there no men in Washington?” Soon thereafter we see shots of a bouncy Monica Lewinsky as the president intones, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman…”

Arguably the worst distortion in Part 1 of “The Path to 9/11” went utterly uncorrected. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, depicted as a high-WASP bitch on wheels, neutralizes what little testosterone the Clinton men have (at least when it comes to bin Laden rather than interns) any time she’s on the screen. She hectors and lectures, but a Tomahawk assault on a bin Laden campsite is authorized despite her reservations. When it misses the al-Qaida leader by a few hours, it’s clear he was warned by Pakistan (in fact, U.S. officials did warn Gen. Pervez Musharraf, for fear he’d see missiles in his airspace and suspect India had launched an attack.) The film clearly fingers Albright as having warned the Pakistanis, and in fact she seems downright proud of blowing the operation. But it was (Republican) Defense Secretary William Cohen who asked vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Henry Hugh Shelton to warn Pakistan.

What does Monday night hold? Another big ABC lie has been that the second half of the film apportions blame more fairly, laying out the mistakes of the Bush administration as well. That’s only true if you think Condoleezza Rice is the president. Like Albright, she comes off as a schoolmarmy, hierarchy-obsessed smarty-pants more interested in protecting the president — who is described as really, really wanting to get bin Laden — than protecting Americans. But Bush himself gets off unbearably easy.

There’s no reference to his monthlong vacation after receiving the Presidential Daily Briefing “Bin Laden determined to strike in the United States.” There’s no scene showing Rice or Cheney ignoring the warnings of former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman’s terrorism commission, as they did. There’s certainly no scene of the president reading “The Pet Goat” for many painful minutes after he’s informed of the attack on our soil the morning of Sept. 11.

Maybe the worst lie I haven’t seen critiqued has to do with whether Bush gave the go-ahead for American fighter jets to shoot down hijacked airliners. In fact, though Cheney bragged he and Bush made that decision, the NORAD tapes acquired by the makers of “United 93” and published in Vanity Fair showed that never happened. Military officials waited in vain for such an order, but it never came.

The liberal blogosphere is either blamed or credited with getting ABC to at least slightly alter the docudrama. (One important change is that it no longer presents the fictionalized work as representing the findings of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission.) In fact, despite the howls of bloggers and Clinton administration officials, the network hung fairly tough. I’m always a little uncomfortable when public pressure forces a media company to edit a piece of work because of politics — certainly I wouldn’t want Salon edited by a team of Pat Robertson and Harry Reid. But in this case, given the number and seriousness of the inaccuracies and the distortion of the 9/11 Commission’s work, the network should have listened to its critics. ABC’s decision to stand behind a damaging, distorted version of Sept. 11 makes a sad day that much sadder.

— By Joan Walsh