ABC - BUMPY ROAD FOR ABC'S PATH

BUMPY ROAD FOR ABC'S PATH

ABC is reportedly making edits in its upcoming miniseries The Path to 9/11 in response to numerous complaints from former members of the Clinton administration who claimed that the film included depictions of events that never happened and distortions of others that did. Today's (Friday) New York Times reported that two former Clinton aides, Bruce R. Lindsey and Douglas Band, mounted what the newspaper described as "an unusual attack" on former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean, a co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission and a consultant on the miniseries. The pair sent a letter to Kean charging that his defense of the miniseries "is destroying the bipartisan aura of the 9/11 Commission" and suggested that it was motivated by payments he had received from ABC or by his own partisan politics. Kean told the Times that he had defended the series because he thought that it would draw attention to the commission's recommendations, many of which have not been put into effect. However, Kean acknowledged that the work of the commission might be diminished by the miniseries. Meanwhile, in a letter to Disney chief Robert Iger, the Senate Democratic leadership called for the program to be canceled, saying that airing it "would be a gross miscarriage of your corporate and civic responsibility." The New York Post reported that Clinton himself had written to ABC disputing allegations in the drama that he was so preoccupied by the Monica Lewinsky scandal that he was unable to focus his attention on terrorism. Meanwhile, in an interview on CNN, Harvey Keitel, who stars in the miniseries, expressed his own concern about some of the events depicted in it. "you cannot cross the line from a conflation of events to a distortion of the event," he remarked. "No. Where we have distorted something, we have made a mistake, and that should be corrected."

08/09/2006