Fox News is running a puff piece promoting ABC’s docudrama Path to 9/11.

Former 9/11 Commission Co-Chair Tom Kean — a paid advisor to the film — has been defending its many inaccuracies by saying the film uses fictionalized composites and is based on many sources besides the 9/11 report.

But that’s not what ABC is telling Fox. In a segment this afternoon, Fox reported it was told by ABC producers that the film was “based solely and completely on the 9/11 Commission Report.” Watch it:

In fact many scenes from the movie are directly contradicted by the 9/11 Commission report.

Write ABC and tell them to tell the truth about 9/11.

Transcript: Read more

ABC won’t give President Clinton, Madeleine Albright or Sandy Berger a copy of its 9/11 docudrama, “The Path to 9/11.” But there is virtually nothing about the film ABC won’t share with the right-wing blogosphere.

For example, an ABC insider sent this missive to right-wing blogger Hugh Hewitt about potential edits to the film:

The Disney execs met all through the weekend – unheard of in this business – debating what changes would be made and what concessions should be given. Here is what looks to be the conclusion:

- There will be a handful of tweaks made to a few scenes.
- They are minor, and nuance in most cases – a line lift here, a tweak to the edit there.
- There are 900 screeners out there. When this airs this weekend, there will be a number of people who will spend their free evenings looking for these changes and will be hard pressed to identify them. They are that minor.
- The average viewer would not be able to tell the difference between the two versions.
- The message of the Clinton Admin failures remains fully intact.

Read the full email to Hewitt here.

Right now, former Gov. Tom Kean (R-NJ) — a paid senior advisor to this film — is digging in and defending ABC. If the network is making edits to the film to correct errors, they should tell everyone, not just right-wing bloggers.

The fact that ABC continues to cater to Rush Limbaugh and conservative bloggers, while refusing to show even the most basic courtesy to a former President of the United States, says a lot about what this “docudrama” is really about.

Okay, I said no more Lee Siegel, but Leon Wieseltier’s views on the matter as found at the end of The New York Observer‘s coverage are just too bizarre not to note:

Mr. Wieseltier was sanguine about the situation. He described Mr. Siegel as a “fiendishly gifted critic and an unusually cultivated individual,” and saw the issue more as one having to do with the nature of the Internet itself.

“The larger problem, of course, is that we planted our flag over a piece of the Wild West known as the blogosphere. This left us divided against ourselves,” Mr. Wieseltier said. “Since we do make ourselves factually and morally responsible for what appears under our flag, we have to apply the same stringencies to our blogs, too. I don’t like the blogosphere for many reasons; one of them is its assumption that a person’s first thoughts are his best thoughts, which is quite obviously false.”

Seriously? The larger problem is that the blogosphere is the Wild West? Because pre-internet it wasn’t possible for people to lie? I was a young kid back before there were blogs, but my understanding is that it was always possible to, say, write a letter to the editor and sign a false name. It’s also always seemed to me in my personal history of internet use that it’s not especially difficult to avoid lying. Nor do I think anyone in the blogosphere believes that a person’s first thoughts are his best thoughts. This is, as they say, quite obviously false.

The striking thing about Siegel’s blogging, however, was the unbelievably low quality of his second thoughts. It’s one thing to toss off the notion that bloggers are like fascists and then, after getting criticized for it and thinking some more deciding that was an unwise overstatement. Siegel’s approach, however, was to think about the issue and pen an elaborate defense of the proposition that Markos was, in fact, a fascist. Similarly with the Kincaid matter. Siegel went from a perhaps thoughtless and sloppy expression of some critical thoughts on Kincaid to an elaborate, yet evidence free, accusation that Kincaid was a pedophile. It’s a curious manner of behavior, but one that has everything to do with Siegel’s own pathologies — seemingly a hefty dose of status-anxiety — and very little to do with the blogosphere as such.