POLITICS: Hands Off Reagan America
Fund, John H.
POLITICS JOHN H. FUND Hands Off Reagan America FAR FROM BEING TRIGGER-HAPPY, conservatives were at first complacent about the now infamous four-hour CBS movie on Ronald and Nancy Reagan. When...
...Since that history won't come from CBS, it sounds like a great opportunity for some part of the new media that helped derail the project and forced CBS to learn that in the coming Information Age ordinary people will be able to make their voices heard...
...Moonves conceded that no amount of editing could create a balanced portrait of the Reagans and he ordered the film shipped off to Showtime, the pay cable network that's also owned by CBS's parent company Viacom...
...Nancy in turn is guided by her "special friend," an astrologer...
...As for CBS, Tom Shales of the Washington Post says, "Someday, I hope someone will write a detailed history of just how things could go so wrong" in the making of the Reagan film...
...When the project was first announced last July, CBS was given the benefit of the doubt...
...The unspoken message of the film is that Reagan was another Nixon, and only escaped his fate for his presumed unconstitutional violations of the law through his ability as The Great Communicator...
...No one challenged the veracity of Bela Bajaria, CBS's vice president of miniseries, when she assured people it was all about the love story between Ron and Nancy: "This project will not take a position on (Reagan's) politics one way or the other...
...Today, only about one viewer in three regularly watches one of the three major network evening news shows...
...There everything goes and nothing is noticed— Showtime is seen in only 12 million homes versus CBS's reach of 110 million homes...
...I'm not...
...When a gay hairdresser who's with her expresses nervousness, she carelessly points it at him and wonders if the safety is on...
...This outpouring of opposition to the Reagan film fueled by the democratization of media forced CBS to blink...
...We don't expect this to be controversial...
...When Secretary of State George Shultz asks Reagan aide Mike Deaver why the president is watching movies he is told: "He doesn't like to read, and he gets bored listening...
...Later, during the movie's depiction of the IranContra scandal, Reagan is told impeachment is a danger and he should hire a criminal lawyer...
...the movie's Reagan rages...
...So there are some edits being made trying to present a more fair picture of the Reagans...
...By Monday night, I was getting, 10, 12 e-mails a minute, and I've never seen anything like that...
...Ronald Reagan is seen as being pushed into politics by a hectoring wife and then constantly deferring to her wishes ("You're running the show," he tells her...
...No one cast aspersions on the motives of producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, even though they had co-produced several pro-gay dramatic projects with Ms...
...The problem was compounded on October 21 when the New York Times ran excerpts from a shooting script that it had obtained...
...They got Nixon, and now they're going to get me...
...I launched it on a Sunday," Paranzino says...
...The uproar forced CBS President and CEO Les Moonves, a well-known friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, to backtrack...
...There was grumbling but no outcry after James Brolin, the husband of liberal diva Barbra Streisand, was cast at the Gipper...
...Judy Davis, a left-wing Australian actress, has a field day with her scenechewing portrayal of Nancy as a harridan...
...Tom Shales, the liberal media critic for the Washington Post, said the trailer made clear this "ain't no love story, unless it's Nancy's love story with herself...
...These outrageous excerpts were enough to touch off a popular fury that went beyond conservatives...
...It reported the film's most infamous moment came when Nancy Reagan approached her husband to plead for funding for AIDS sufferers and was rebuffed: "Those that live in sin shall die in sin...
...Streisand...
...John H. Fund is a columnist for OpinionJournal.com, the website of the Wall Street Journal editorial page...
...The movie's scriptwriter, Elizabeth Egloff, admitted to the Times there was no evidence that Ronald Reagan had ever uttered those cold-hearted words...
...I mean, she's just yelling at everybody...it clearly implied that President Reagan was suffering the effects of Alzheimer's while in office...
...James Brolin plays Reagan as a doddering fool who as early as 1981, his first year as president, is constantly forgetting things...
...Michael Paranzino, a former congressional staffer who is now a work-at-home dad, started a website called BoycottCBS.com...
...In one scene she pulls a small pistol out of her handbag in the White House as she cleans out her purse...
...Ron Reagan ominously asks his father as he prepares to run for president: "What if you turn into another Richard Nixon...
...One had Reagan calling himself "the anti-Christ," another had him following "God's will" in insisting on visiting a cemetery in Germany where SS soldiers were buried, yet another falsely indicated he supplied names to the Hollywood blacklist...
...It reported a CBS source had complained "it's being edited with a machete...
...Even though he had approved the original script and the trailer, he showed up on CNBC on October 29 to assure viewers that "there are things we think go too far...
...Nixon also looms large over the film...
...His foreign policy briefings in the White House consist almost entirely of movies prepared by the State Department, accompanied by simple-minded narratives...
...CBS did anything but bore people when details of this biographical cartoon movie leaked out...
...The breakup of the monopoly on news and information that it, the other networks and major newspapers used to enjoy began to erode in the 1990s as Rush Limbaugh and other talk show hosts led a renaissance of AM radio, the Internet brought computer users a variety of news sources through sites like the Drudge Report, and the Fox News Channel provided a 24hour alternative to traditional network news...
...The ramifications of the success that the Internet, cable television and talk radio had in making CBS blink will take a long time to sink in...
...But the controversy isn't over yet...
...Throughout the film, bizarre references to Hitler and Nixon, two obsessions of the left, are sprinkled in...
...Don Regan, President Reagan's chief of staff, refers to Nancy Reagan as "Madame Fiihrer," and Patti Davis, her daughter, is greeted at boarding school by a classmate who says, "Hitler's been elected governor...
...Then in early October CBS made the mistake of sending out an eight-minute trailer of highlights from the movie accompanied by a press release touting the film's "importance...
...Newsweek magazine reported that 18 different edits had been made and that the show's director had walked off in protest...
...It recorded so 54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004 JOHN F ND many hits it crashed several times...
...DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 55...
...World magazine chuckled that such treatment was appropriate given that the film was a hatchet job...
...The Drudge Report quickly followed up with more excerpts...
...Reagan is shown picking Bill Casey as director of the CIA upon Nixon's recommendation...
...Shales concluded the film was an "idiotic, gratuitous trashing" of the Reagans and that CBS had "exercised extremely bad judgment in putting the movie on its schedule...
...Well, I'm not Nixon...
...CBS was flooded with over 80,000 angry e-mail complaints about the series...
...A reading of the full script is replete with historical howlers...
...He was sort of lying around helplessly, while Nancy ran the country...
Vol. 36 • December 2003 • No. 7
