Should RNC have editorial control over Reagan movie?

From here:

“But in the official biography, entitled Dutch, by Edmund Morris, the former US president is quoted as saying of the condition Aids: ‘Maybe the Lord brought down this plague’, because ‘illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments’.”

Can this be equated with the “they that live in sin shall die in sin” quoted from the screenplay? Not exactly. But the Morris quote doesn’t put Reagan in an especially tolerant or compassionate light either, does it?

CBS is apparently thinking hard about scrapping the whole thing. Which shows you just how insidious the liberal media really is in this country.

Well, there are two ways of looking at this:

  1. CBS produced a more or less unbiased bio of Reagan, but found that it had to bend to the onslaught of highly partisan right wingers who overreacted to the show.

  2. CBS produced a shoddy (and possibly biased) bio of Reagan, and got it’s collective hand caught in the proverbial cookie jar.

I suspect we’ll never really know the answer.

CBS caves in

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The question is where do the embellishments end and the smear campaign begin? At some point, if you add enough negative embellishments, you’re just attacking someone. The AIDS line was uncalled for, IMHO. You might not think Reagan is all that, but the 80’s saw some good progress and economic improvements, he had a hand in it.

It’s not that hard to pick every negative moment of someone’s life, embellish it properly, and demonize them. Do that, and expect your target’s supporters to fight back.

I’m just wondering where you guys who hate this movie were when Braveheart came out.

That’s for the audience to decide – e.g., first you air the show, then the people judge it, and finally actions are taken as a result.

You do not pre-emptively supress the movie and prevent people from watching it (and drawing their own conclusions).

Well CBs has suppressed it, as reported by rjung, above. I can’t help but wonder what the fall out will be. More than that, I wonder what the spin will be—I’ll take a small bet that it will be something on the order of: liberal media folds when confronted with the truth (the truth being that there is no actual record of President Reagan saying anything as literary as” He that live by sin will die by sin,” or something like that).

My personal WAG is that the RNC got to General Motors and Ford Motors and Coors’s Beer and Budweiser and the people who keep telling us that we should ask our doctor about some pharmaceutical that we have never heard of and they passed the word that if CBS offended the memory/reputation of the past President their advertising revenues might just fall off precipitously. It’s not a liberal media, friends. It’s a spineless media that knows on which side its bread is buttered.

Might I add, anybody that looks to commercial television for analysis of current affairs or critical analysis of the past is living in a fool’s paradise. If you want the inside dope on sensational murders in Southern California, if you are looking for titillation and anxiety, then TV is where you want to be. If you are looking for critical analysis you are in the wrong place, friend. There is nothing on the tube that is not for sale, including CBS’s testicles.

  1. I dont think anyone here has any personal knowledge of the truth OR falsehood of the Reagan miniseries. None of us, not even the vaunted Shodan, were there in the Oval office to know what Ronnie said about homosexuals. None of us have even seen the movie, for chrissakes. We’re just repeating what the authority figures we respect have taught us. And so far, only GIGOBuster has let us know which authorities he is trusting.

  2. We don’t need to whine about whether the cure for offensive speech is censorship (explicit or implicit) or more speech; the Constitution makes it clear the latter is the case. Debunk the falsehoods with evidence. Getting offended because someone is portraying something you don’t believe to be true is counterproductive.

-C

Maximum C, just for kicks, let’s slap a case of Alzheimer’s on you, accuse you of doing something for which there would be precious few other witnesses, and see if you can prove you didn’t. I suggest you would find it difficult; in fact, I suggest you would find it impossible. Moreover, I suggest you shouldn’t be forced to prove you didn’t do something; rather, your accuser should have to prove that his accusation is correct. On such principles is our legal system established, and for perfectly good reasons.

Now, should CBS have pulled the miniseries?[sup]1[/sup] No, and I’m irked they did. Far better, in my opinon, would have been to air it as is with the disclaimer that it is not intended to be factual. But this is hardly a case of the eeeevil Republicans triumphing against all that is right and good and free in this world.

Indeed, were someone to slander me for fun and profit, it would be a crime. Naturally, this fails to go that far (one assumes), but whether something is legally slanderous or not, the moral issue abides: is it right to make things up about someone else, things which are defamatory, and to publicize these things for profit? Of course not!

Which is why I object to

It abdicates the network of any moral responsibility whatsoever. And of course, if the people aren’t given sufficient information with which to make an informed opinion (see, particularly, comments to Maximum C), I fail to see how getting a fair judgment from the people is even possible.

[sup]1[/sup] NB: as far as I’m aware, moving it to Showtime is not equivalent to failing to air it at all, lest we become totally alarmist.

Actually, I do not trust them, I am a skeptic first, then a liberal.

All those timelines were posted because they were better than the others I could find. However, I knew that dopers would quickly nitpick them if they were not accurate, or closer to the truth. (The timeline for the Bush activities on 911, has links to the news reports mentioned.)

I watched that feature-length glurge until the presidential wang-sucking eclipsed even Monica Lewinsky’s record. That was maybe half-way in.

Every single one of the Bush character’s lines is strong, purposed, and intellegent; the real Bush had and has the leadership skills of a cardboard cutout. Hell, at least you can count on the cutout to not say something stupid (crusade, bring 'em on, 9/11=Iraq, etc). Karl Rove is depicted as simply taking Bush’s natural abilities and presenting them to the public, which is the ultimate in irony, given his obvious influence over this movie. The movie was complete propaganda and I’m disgusted with every actor in it.

As to why you didn’t hear as much complaining when it came out as with this Regan thing, well, I think that’s obvious. Republicans are bigger whiners than Democrats. It’s a simple fact. Something doesn’t go their way? “Oh no, it’s the evil liberal media and valueless homosexuals trying to erode our moral fiber!” They pull one over on the American people and Democrats complain? “Man, liberals are race-baiting class-warfaring unpatriotic scum who love Saddam and are always pickin’ on us poor conservatives (smirk).”

rjung, the only problem with your theory is that all of the muckraking gets to be broadcast to the world without anybody fighting against it, until the cat’s out of the bag. If this is little more than an attack on Reagan, CBS shouldn’t run it for public review, they should be embarassed for producing it in the first place.

Reagan is a respected man in many circles, it should be no surprise that they would come to his defense over a perceived attack, even if that attack hasn’t happened yet. You do not attack someone like that lightly, it’s an easy way to alienate a lot of people. Sinead O’Connor learned that when she tore up the Pope’s picture on SNL.

jmonster, it’s easy to understand why there was less complaining about the 9/11 movie than Reagan. It’s the difference between positive spin and negative spin. Nobody complains that Playboy centerfold pictures are airbrushed to remove ugly blemishes. OTOH, you can bet there would be complaints to high heaven if the Enquirer airbrushed in ugly blemishes on a star’s photo.

Sure we know the answer. It’s number one. Easy as pie. I understand that conservatives don’t WANT to know the answer, but it’s there for those who are willing to see it.

Isn’t that what we get now? Newspaper tabloids repeatedly publish outrageous stories on public figures, and – when they step out of line – they get slammed with lawsuits that have big settlements. The system is already self-policing,(*) because there are courts and free speech rights where “corrections” can be applied.

(* = Well, mostly. I never understood why Jerry Falwell never got pimp-smacked for selling those anti-Clinton videos, myself.)

And that’s the key point here, isn’t it? Until we’ve seen the movie, we won’t know if it’s just a partisan slam or an honest appraisal (even with creative embellishments) of what happened. After all, it’s just as possible CBS has a fair-handed movie, but one that’s been smeared by the Right.

And Sinead got hit with the consequences of that stunt after she did it, not before. Key point.

True, we will get to see it (or a heavily edited version of it) on Showtime. CBS did send out a trailer and some of the script got out, I think that’s where most of the ‘evidence’ is coming from.

But, if SNL knew that she was planning the stunt beforehand, they likely would have canned her appearance.

Mulling this over, what would you say to this take on it? The backlash to the trailer and script served as a warning to CBS that the miniseries would go over like a lead balloon with their audience. CBS is saving themselves from extreme embarassment by finding this out beforehand, rather than having to try and spin it after.

Things have come to a pretty pass when we can’t lie about politicians!

This has been going on for a long time. Dante included slams at his opponents. Does anyone really believe the negative slant that Shakespeare gave Richard III is the plain, unvarnished Truth?

This isn’t in dispute. The writers have already admitted that they made the quote up. So we do know what he said, or rather, what he didn’t.

CBS says that this is what happened.

“The decision, they argued, was a ‘moral call’, reached after concluding that the four-hour television movie carried a liberal political agenda and treated the Reagans unfairly.” In other words, they are saying exactly what is being denied here - that it was biased, untruthful, and unfair.

Of course, they also deny that pressure from Reagan supporters had any role in causing them to change, but take that for what it is worth.

My take is that the writers came up with a bad product, and CBS told them to jazz it up. So they made up a bunch of lies, added them to the script, and figured since no one really cares how badly you smear the Reagans, it would make for great TV. They were quite wrong.

CBS was hoping to run a particularly biased piece of shit, and then take a lofty moral position when everyone complained about bias, deny everything, and hope it juiced the ratings. That way, they get to express their biases, they make money, and the liberals they support get some free lies about conservatives as the 2004 election cycle kicks into high gear.

But they got caught. I can’t in good conscience wish them “better luck next time”, but I am sure they will try.

Regards,
Shodan

I offered this quote above from Reagan: “Maybe the Lord brought down this plague’, because 'illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments.”

Can we not infer from this quote that Reagan believed that homosexuality was a sin, and further, that perhaps gays were being punished for this sin by the “plauge” of AIDS? What isn’t in dispute is if Reagan ever said “they that live in sin shall die in sin”. However, if you believe Edmund Morris, it also cannot be disputed that Reagan’s view of gays, was, shall we say, less than complimentary.

IIRC, according to a book(*) on the backstage history of SNL, when Siinead did her bit in the pre-show rehearsal, producer Lorne Michaels warned her that tearing up the Pope’s picture would probably piss off a lot of people, and Sinead told him she’d tear up a piece of white paper instead. So apparently someone did know about her stunt beforehand, but didn’t outright censure her for it.

It’s still cowardice IMO, because they are essentially admitting that they can be cowed into presenting one political group’s view of events if sufficiently threatened. A compromising solution would have been to run a disclaimer at the beginning of the movie stating that some events shown were unverified dramatizations.

To repeat from Fiddle Peghead, Reagan’s official biography, Dutch, has a similar quote/attitude from the Gipper:

Attribute here. I also wonder if Amazon’s new search-within-a-book feature could uncover the quote.

In any event, even if CBS had changed the embelleshed “they that live in sin” quote with the real “maybe the Lord brought down this plague” quote, I don’t think it would have stopped the GOP’s steamroller one iota.