[MGP-Forum Announce] Brant's post re PBS Newshour on ABC's "The Path to 9/11": A Bad Idea From The Start

[Jon Garfunkel]

With all due respect... Steven Brant didn't add much to the discussion. He
gave a pointer to the link. Well, he didn't given the link, he ripped the
video onto YouTube (an ethical gray area to me; a friend of mine who's a
lawyer for a PBS affiliate has some interesting thoughts on that.) The
pitfall of blog commentary is that since it's so easy to cut & paste, many
people do.

Here's the transcript from PBS. Much easier to parse:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec06/docudrama_09-12.html

I'll add something to the public discussion I haven't seen yet. Compare
the metadiscussion around "Path to 9/11" versus that around the docudrama
"Good Night and Good Luck." George Clooney and Grant Heslov took this on
the road show, appearing at Columbia, on C-SPAN, and many other public
forums, taking questions, and hiding nothing.

So it seems to me that what might have satisfied Brant, Powell, and others 
would be if the Path to 9/11 filmmakers had participated in as many public 
forums. To my knowledge, they haven't. They have a blog on the ABC 
website, but their blog is used for the pretense of audience interaction, 
and not actual. (I left that point on Dan Gillmor's citmedia blog earlier 
in the week).

For the record, Good Night & Good Luck's website blog (part of 
Participate.net, part of Mark Cuban's effort) wasn't perfect, either. I 
participated on it for a time last December, and petitioned them to post a 
timeline of historical events in order to augment the movie's timeline. 
They didn't accede, and I remained disappointed, and as I have no sway 
with Mr. Cuban or Mr. Clooney, that was that.

see
 http://civilities.net/GoodNightAndGoodLuck

In conclusion, it seems to me that as censorship of media is
near-impossible, we the media-giraffe public should insist on responsible
post-production of docu-dramas: participation in public forums, and a full
website to deal with questions and issues about the facts of the film.

Jon


Jon Garfunkel
http://civilities.net/
Boston, Mass.

On Thu, 14 Sep 2006, Adam Powell wrote:

> So... the solution to bad speech is less speech? That doesn´t sound like a viable position in a free society

Bill Densmore wrote:
> > PBS Newshour on "The Path to 9/11": A Bad Idea From The Start
> > http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-g-brant/pbs-newshour-on-the-
> > path_b_29359.html