The (winding) Path to 9/11

The controversy about ABC's semi-fictionalized account of the 9/11 attacks, the two-part docudrama The Path to 9/11 (airing tonight and Monday nights on KSTP Channel 5), hasn't gotten much coverage locally. The lone locally written piece in the Star Tribune was a Neal Justin-penned blurb that says the movie "does a credible job of humanizing the 9/11 Commission report." (That notion isn't one held by star Harvey Keitel, three members of the 9/11 Commission, many Clinton Administration staffers, educational publisher Scholastic, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and a host of Ivy League historians.) A call by Minnesota Monitor to KSTP's Mike Smith has not been returned, but Talking Points Memo publishes a note from the station's programming director that suggests viewers call or email network headquarters:

[A]s the ABC affiliate, Channel 5 broadcasts ABC network programming but does not determine the content of it. We are the only locally-owned television station serving the Twin Cities, and hope that you will judge ABC network offerings separately from Channel 5's own local news and public affairs programming... We also suggest that you make your opinion known to the originator of the program: ABCNEWS.

That drew a miffed-seeming reply from ABC News:

That's flat-out false, says an ABC News spokeswoman. "ABC News did not participate in any way in the production of this movie," Cathie Levine told me earlier today. In fact, she said, the news division didn't even let the production use its file footage, following ABC News policy.