Remember the Crooked E?

Doc-u-drama and elections


Airdate: January 5, 2003; Executive Producer: Robert Greenwald; Co-Executive Producer: Alys Shanti; Supervising Producer: Philip Kleinbart; Writer: Steven Mazur; Director: Penelope Spheeris; Cast: Brian Dennehy, Mike Farrell, Shannon Elizabeth, Cameron Bancroft, Christian Kane

MR. BLUE (Brian Dennehy): This is America--life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--you see something you want, you just take it.

Curious thing about the airdate of this 2-hr made-for-TV depiction of the Enron collapse, it was pulled from it's original airdate just before the 2002 mid-term election.

Here's how the Washington Post reported the story at the time it did finally air, safely into January 2003:

CBS originally scheduled its movie about the Enron corporate scandal for broadcast two days before the November elections, and the movie's director is questioning whether politics was behind a last-minute decision to move the air date to this Sunday ...

"The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth About Enron" had been on CBS's schedule for Sunday, Nov. 3, just ahead of the Nov. 5 midterm elections.

Director Penelope Spheeris said today that she was surprised and unhappy when she received a call two weeks ahead of the broadcast informing her that the movie had been postponed.

"I didn't ever get a reason why," she said. "We were under such pressure to get the thing done. We were supposed to have it done in the last part of October when it was suddenly canceled. . . . We just dropped it."

A spokeswoman for CBS said the election played no part in the decision to move the air date. "I don't think politics had anything to do with the scheduling decision," she said, adding that she was unsure of the reason for originally scheduling the Enron movie just before the election.

But other people close to the project said they learned that CBS President Leslie Moonves and Entertainment President Nancy Tellem got cold feet as the November air date neared, growing uncomfortable at the prospect of appearing to criticize the Republican administration. Moonves is an active contributor to the Democratic Party but has also forged relationships in the Bush White House.

Darn media liberals, always out to get Bush and the Republicans, can't have that.

Meanwhile ABC's right-wing-friendly fictionalized doc-u-drama ``The Path to 9/11'' is, according to the rightist website NRO, ``locked and ready to air'' in its prime-time slots this Sunday and Monday. Media Matters is following the details of the story, with everything they have so far accessible here.

I think the reasons for the observed behavior of corporate media in these circumstances is clear. The orientation of executives is to curry favor with the government in power. As soon as it looked like media-consolidation-friendly Republicans might be threatened in the close 2002 Congressional election, no CBS exec felt like embarrassing them by waving their biggest scandal in front of them just prior to the voting.

On the other hand, ``The Path to 9/11'' reinforces Republican 9/11 mythology. The Terror War response to the attacks has always been the Republican strong suit with a voting public seeking power over an uncertain world. Slyly portraying Democratic weakness through scenes of not-enough-blood-and-guts moments prior to 9/11 in the previous administration serves this right-wing narrative well.

The lets-bomb-them-just-to-be-safe approach to the Terror War cuts across all political lines. It is the most powerful thing the Republicans have over the public, as is demonstrated by the way the Democrats whimper in the corner as Terror War measures are forcefully promoted by the Administration. ``The Path to 9/11'' seems to be out there to bash down ``September 10'' political notions that seem to be making a comeback following the Iraq debacle.