Friday, September 15, 2006

Determining the leanings of Path to 9/11 without actually watching it

I've been skimming the Internet Movie Database's reviews of "Path to 9/11," and if you believe that the truth is generally somewhere between the two extremes, then the truth is, Path to 9/11 had a conservative bias.  
It's very simple.  A lot of people give the movie either 1 or 2 stars or, on the other hand, 9 or 10 stars.  It's unlikely some TV movie written by some TV writer who did shows like Pacific Blue and Falcon Crest is going to write a 10-star movie.  Not impossible, but unlikely.  At the same time, it appears an awful lot of people who gave the movie 1 star didn't actually watch it.  They just read about it and wrote to complain.  Which I think goes against the spirit of user reviews.
Anyway, reviews are pretty much divided into, "this movie is a pack of lies trying to blame terrorism on Clinton" or "this is an even handed portrayal of the events leading up to 9/11."
So right wingers are saying, hey, the movie was critical of Bush too, so it was fair.  But let's be realistic.  When television is harsh on conservatives, even when it's fair, well-documented criticism, they throw a hissy fit.  And I can't seem to find any conservatives throwing hissy fits about Path to 9/11.  No one's complaining about a single thing in the movie regarding the Bush administrations handling of terrorism.
Of course, you could argue that even conservatives realize how badly Bush has botched things and thus would consider any criticism to be reasonable, but that seems highly unlikely to me.
Therefore, the only logical conclusion is the movie has a strong conservative bias.  If not a single conservative is bitching that the movie is unfair to Bush, it's because it is bending over backwards to be fair to Bush.  And I don't think anyone is claiming the movie is bending over backwards to be fair Clinton.
One last note about inaccuracies in the script. I learned on What's Next that the show confused American Airlines with US Airways, and AA is really pissed about it.  Apparently ABC didn't feel a 4-hour docudrama about one of the most significant events in American history required any sort of fact checking at all.    

1 comment:

  1. HAH! I've also wondered why, if this Path movie was so even-handed, conservatives weren't screaming themselves blue in the face about it.

    I didn't watch it, so I can't comment on it. I'm usually very leary of made-for-TV movies, especially ones that are about true events. Besides, made-for-TV movies rarely approach any sort of artistic merit. Why waste my time on unedifying crap!

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