Clinton Officials Have a Point on Docudramas - Let's Clean Them All Up

Let's take this opportunity to try to seek consensus that the rules for docudramas should be cleaned up no matter whose ox is being gored.
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

There's lots of controversy over ABC's "The Path to 9/11." Former Clinton officials Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright believe the makers took severe liberties with the historical record in discussing their role in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. As someone who was forced to evacuate my office across the street from the World Trade Center on 9/11, I don't view the debate over "Path to 9/11" as being left vs. right. An event as searing and recent as 9/11 deserves to be treated with complete fidelity to the facts, end of discussion. Many conservatives, including Bill Bennett and John Podhoretz, agree. There's enough drama in 9/11 that its makers shouldn't have had to take any kind of dramatic license to tell the story of the intelligence failures that affected both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

So let's take this opportunity to try to seek consensus that the rules for docudramas should be cleaned up no matter whose ox is being gored. Recall the ill-fated 2003 CBS miniseries that clearly invented scenes that claimed President Reagan said AIDS victims deserved their fate. In my column for OpinionJournal.com I make some suggestions on how we can bring back shaming to try to better police the "overdramatization" of history.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot