Republican PSA

ABC's Public Service Announcement for the Republican party still confuses many.

A Show That Trumpeted History but Led to Confusion
Many wonder why ABC spent $30 million on a 9/11 mini-series that amounted to a five-hour public service announcement. ... The network mailed copies to television critics in mid-August. It screened the first half of the film for audiences in Washington and elsewhere, and distributed thousands of copies to journalists, editorial writers, radio and television commentators and others.

Thousands of copies to right wing bloggers, and right wing media hosts (Vulgar Pigboy, et al), but none to left of center media outlets, liberal bloggers, or even to the offices of Clinton, Albright, Sandy Berger, etc. Strange on the surface, not so strange if the intent was always clear.

With millions spent on production, including two months of filming in Morocco and the building of more than 300 sets, ABC had little choice but to go forward with the broadcast.

In doing so, it likened “Path to 9/11” to other dramas that ran with little or no commercial support — “An Early Frost,” an NBC broadcast in 1985 about AIDS, and “The Day After,” an ABC drama in 1983 about the aftermath of a nuclear attack on the United States.

But the economic scale of those efforts was far smaller. An NBC executive estimated at the time that “An Early Frost” lost $500,000 in commercial revenue as advertisers stayed away — barely a fraction of the cost of “Path to 9/11.”

One person close to the project at ABC who spoke only on the condition of anonymity said the network believed that its 9/11 presentation fulfilled its purpose, and that compromises were necessary to squeeze more than eight years of history into five hours of television.

Mr. Thompson asserted that however that form of entertainment was categorized, it did little teaching about history. “ ‘Richard III’ is one of the greatest plays ever written,” he said, “but it is not very good history.”

Sorry, the Lies of 9/11 isn't really comparable to Richard III. Just ask The Dauphin, who claims to have “read him some Shakespeers this summer” (sic, no doubt)

Tags: 2006_Election, /media