Curiouser and Curiouser

This appeared Friday in "Eat the Press" in The Huffington Post, but I only got to it today:

Bush Announces Sept. 11th Primetime Address, Asks ABC To Interrupt "Path Of 9/11"

Posted Friday September 8, 2006 at 10:45 PM

Yet another wrinkle was thrown into the factually-challenged ABC "Path Of 9/11" drama today: President Bush is planning a prime-time address from the Oval Office on Monday to mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11 — and has asked the networks for time to broadcast his remarks. If all goes according to controversially-scheduled plan, ABC will be entering the final hour of the five-hour, two-part, commercial-free miniseries, which has been hotly debated over the past few days when it was revealed that elements of the film were fabricated, improvised, and not remotely grounded in proven fact.

Read the whole article here.

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In an otherwise fine article about The Path to 9/11 controversy at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website, "Fudged facts put 'Path to 9/11' on a slippery slope," Melanie McFarland makes an all-too-common mistake. See if you can spot it. She writes,

Some groups, including members of Congress, also requested the show be pulled from broadcast altogether. Wrong move. No political body in a free society has the right to pressure any network into censoring entertainment, even one with factual misrepresentations. What made-for-TV, ripped-from-the-headlines drama doesn't?

Did you spot the all-too-common mistake? It's this: Not understanding the concept of "censorship." Too many people too often cry censorship at the drop of the proverbial hat. To my knowledge, no one is proposing censoring ABC Television. I know I'm not. I'm asking them not to air fiction as if it is fact; I'm asking them to voluntarily do the right thing, the responsible thing, and restrain themselves from airing this smear job. That's not censorship: censorship would be the government moving to stop them from broadcasting this right-wing propaganda. Something the current government is unlikely to do.

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Back to The Huffington Post (and having nothing to do with ABC Television): this item by John Kerry, with a link to the text of a speech by him in which he details "the five biggest things that need to happen to get the war on terror right." In case you're interested, Kerry says they are:

1. Redeploy out of Iraq.
2. Recommit to Afghanistan.
3. Reduce our dependency on foreign oil.
4. Restore our moral authority.
5. Reform Homeland Defense.

Interestingly, not a single one of those seems to be on the Bush administration's to-do list.