Walt Disney Co.'s ABC is forging ahead with plans to air a miniseries starting Sunday despite controversy over its efforts to dramatize -- and some say unfairly politicize -- the events leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Producers said late Friday that they had finished making minor edits to "The Path to 9/11" amid a firestorm of protests from leading Democrats including Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who warned that telecasting "right-wing political propaganda" might violate the terms of ABC's government-mandated broadcast license.
Critics say that, among other things, the film fabricates scenes and unfairly blames the Clinton administration for failing to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. The network, for its part, has urged critics to withhold judgment until the final version airs.
Whatever viewers ultimately see, it's clear that the five-hour $40-million docudrama, highlighting years of intelligence failures and political bickering before the attacks, has detonated an election-year bomb that's reverberating from Hollywood to Capitol Hill.
The movie is also threatening the bipartisan work of the Sept. 11 commission, whose Republican chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, served as a paid consultant on the project and has played a key role in ABC's public-relations campaign.
At least two other commission members -- former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste and Jamie S. Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general under President Clinton -- have vehemently criticized the miniseries project. And two former Clinton officials, Madeleine Albright and Samuel "Sandy" Berger, expressed dismay with Kean's involvement. Clinton spokesman Jay Carson called ABC's actions "despicable" and said the film was "indisputably wrong."
Kean, in an interview Friday, continued to defend the movie as a "first-class project," adding that although the filmmakers took the recent criticisms seriously and made adjustments when warranted, much of the hostile reaction was political grandstanding from partisans who had seen little if any of the film. "That's the blogosphere, frankly," Kean said of the controversy.
The situation was further complicated Friday, when ABC and other networks agreed to carry live a 15-minute speech from President Bush on Monday night, the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. This speech will air at 9 p.m. Eastern time, forcing ABC to interrupt Part 2 of the miniseries in many markets, including New York and Chicago.
