NEW YORK, Sept 10: ABC news television network faced pressure on Friday about its planned miniseries on the buildup to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Former Clinton administration officials, historians and a Democratic petition with nearly 200,000 signatures urged the network to scrap the five-hour drama.
The network said the movie, scheduled to air commercial-free on Sunday and Monday, is being edited to deal with concerns that it distorts history. ABC had no response to the calls to abandon it.
A group of historians, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Princeton University’s Sean Wilentz, wrote to ABC parent Walt Disney Co. CEO Robert Iger, urging him to scrap the series.
They said that permitting inaccuracies to heighten drama is ‘disingenuous and dangerous’.
“A responsible broadcast network should have nothing to do with the falsification of history, except to expose it,” they wrote.
The Democratic National Committee said it delivered a petition with nearly 200,000 signatures to ABC’s Washington office urging the network drop its ‘right-wing factually inaccurate mocudrama’.
Former national security adviser Samuel R. Berger and former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, whose depictions are at the centre of the controversy, asked Thomas Kean, the Republican ex-governor of New Jersey who led the commission looking into the attacks, to use his influence with filmmakers to pull it.
The film’s executive producer, Marc Platt, responded that many of the film’s most vocal critics haven’t yet seen it.
“I’m not sure that what they think is there, is there,” he said on Friday by phone from London.
Platt called the growing uproar ‘a distraction in some ways from the bigger intentions (of the film), which is a shame. And that’s quite frankly what the whole 9/11 story is about’.
Stressing that the miniseries is a docudrama, Platt said ‘elements and issues that are outside the boundaries of what we believe to be fair and reasonable will be addressed’ until airtime. “I hope people will watch the film and draw their own conclusions’.
In a statement on Thursday, ABC said the editing process for the $40 million film was ongoing.
