ABC follows a path to shame
SURVEYING the smoking ruin that is ABC's reputation after the "The Path to 9/11" debacle, it's hard to know whether you're looking at the consequence of unadulterated folly or of a calculated strategy that turned out to be too clever by half.
At the end of the day, it probably doesn't make much difference because, either way, the lacerating controversy surrounding the network's docu-dramatic re-creation of events leading to Sept. 11 is an entirely self-inflicted wound. For most of the week, ABC rather haughtily attempted to characterize itself as the victim of philistines, or self-righteously as a champion of free speech or, more pathetically, as just plain misunderstood by people who just don't understand how television is done.
It is none of those things.
It's an opportunistic and self-interested organization that somehow thought it could approach the most wrenching American tragedy since Pearl Harbor with the values that prevail among network television executives -- the sort of ad hoc ethics that would make a streetwalker blush -- and that nobody would mind.
That part of this whole shabby sequence of events is the hardest to fathom. It's well understood, of course, that docudramas are seldom documentary and only sporadically dramatic. As a rule, they're basically devices to free unimaginative writers from the burden of having to make up characters' names. You simply appropriate the names of real people, then make them do whatever attention-getting thing fills the allotted time.
But did the people who run ABC Entertainment -- the network division directly responsible for this mess -- really believe that Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger would watch themselves on television doing and saying thing they never did or said and not object? When these fictional incidents were portrayed as contributing to the deaths of nearly 3,000 innocent people, did they think that the former Clinton administration officials and others so caricatured simply would shrug and say, "Well, that's dramatic license for you?" Did they really expect anyone to accept the preposterous notion that -- as some at the network argued this week -- the film's facts were wrong, but its "essence" was true? These people really need to get out more.
