The Greatest Story Ever Sold by Frank Rich

Author:Frank Rich
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction, Politics, War, Biography, History
ISBN: 9781594200984
Publisher: Penguin Press
Published: 2006-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

NINE

“WHEN WE ACT, WE CREATE OUR OWN REALITY”

SO STRONG WAS the perceived “moral values” juggernaut in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 election that within days it claimed an unexpected cultural casualty. A Veterans Day broadcast of Steven Spielberg’s 1998 World War II movie Saving Private Ryan, a sacred text of the pre-9/11 greatest generation/Band of Brothers craze, was scrapped by sixty-six ABC stations, even though it had been nationally broadcast by ABC on Veterans Day in both 2001 and 2002 without incident.1 Media owners who once might have disregarded complaints by the Parents Television Council or the American Family Association were now fearful that the Bush administration’s FCC would reward the Republican base and impose sanctions if actors playing American soldiers said curse words while dying on-screen. In McCarthyism, “moral values” style, merely the fear of reprisals was enough to push television stations or a network onto the slippery slope of self-censorship before anyone in Washington even bothered to act.

What made the Private Ryan case alarming was that it was not about sex but about the presentation of war at a time when the country was fighting one. Some of the companies whose stations refused to broadcast the movie also owned major American newspapers in cities as various as Providence and Atlanta. If these media outlets were afraid to show a graphic Hollywood treatment of a sixty-year-old war starring the beloved Tom Hanks because the feds might fine them, toy with their licenses, or deny them regulatory permission to expand their empires, might they curry favor with Washington by softening their news divisions’ efforts to present the ugly facts of an ongoing war? The pressure groups that were incensed by both Saving Private Ryan and risqué programming were often the same ones who campaigned against any news organization that was not toeing the administration political line in lockstep with Fox.

The same week that the ABC stations censored the Spielberg movie, the right extended its muscle into the news arena by targeting Kevin Sites, a freelance TV cameraman in the employ of NBC News, who caught on video a marine shooting an apparently unarmed wounded insurgent prisoner in a mosque during the new effort by American troops to retake Falluja. To NBC’s credit, it ran Sites’s report on its evening newscast. Sites avoided giving any snap judgment, pending the marines’ own investigation of the shooting, cautioning that a war zone is “rife with uncertainty and confusion.” But loud voices in red America wanted him silenced anyway. On right-wing sites such as freerepublic.com the cameraman was branded an “anti-war activist” (which he was not), a traitor, and an “enemy combatant.” Sites’s own blog, touted by the anchor Brian Williams on the air, was full of messages from the relatives of marines profusely thanking the cameraman for bringing them news of their sons in Iraq. But that communal message board soon had to be shut down because of death threats against Sites. The attempt to demonize and censor him simply for doing his job was no anomaly.

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