Do you really want to make a movie in which you unwittingly depict people who are fools?
…let me put my own cards on the table: I voted for Bush in 2004. If I were a character in Mapes’s book, this would mean you should ignore me, because she repeatedly disqualifies statements that hurt her case by pointing out that the person speaking is a Republican or a Bush supporter. However, I should note that I also supported Al Gore in 2000 and Barack Obama in 2008, and I do not view either liberals or conservatives as presumptive liars.
Nor do I view Mapes as a presumptive liar. That would require implausible levels of evil and stupidity: evil, because she’d be trying to alter an election result with a massive lie; stupid, because the odds of getting away with such a scheme are vanishingly small. We’re talking a supervillain-who-leaves-hero-in-a-remote-quarry-to-be-devoured-by-carnivorous-GMO-squirrels level of evil and stupid. Too evil and stupid to get as far as Mapes did in the cutthroat world of television production.
I do think she made a very bad mistake, which could have been averted had she been more skeptical about the documents she received from Bill Burkett, a disgruntled National Guard retiree who reportedly had it in for Bush. I think that she has become unable to recognize that mistake, for the same reasons that we all cling to our own self-serving narratives rather than admit that we have screwed up. After reading through all the contemporary reports, the report from CBS’s independent panel and Mapes’s book, I think Mapes fell prey to the journalist’s two worst enemies: confirmation bias and motivated cognition.
There is no way to make this flick without it being either truthful (in which case they won’t want to do it) or embarrassing:
Well, some of them (unlike you, apparently) were smart enough to call the fax number on the memo, and determine that it came from a Kinko’s in Texas. And though there was in fact analysis of what the documents actually said, which also helped torpedo them, it was in fact enough, Mary. It’s hard (perhaps impossible) to prove that a document is authentic, but it only takes one solid strike against its validity to show it to be inauthentic. And the fact that you still don’t understand that, or understand basic logic at all, is why you are now out of a job, and should never have had that job to begin with.
Ah, the best and the brightest.
Jeepers. Amazing.
I remember when my young son read “The Da Vinci Code”. He was amazed: “you know that it must be true on some level!” I gently explained to him that everything he thinks he knows about the subject comes from the author of that one book. He presents the background, he presents the theory, he presents what he claims are the arguments against it, he refutes them… Anytime you see only one side, and your view of the other side is what the first side tells you it is, you are bound to know nothing and think you know everything.
Still, it’s hard to believe. Is it actually possible that not one human being will gently direct Redford to glance at the wikipedia page on Rathergate, at any time in the process of planning and making the movie? It’s hard for me to believe that someone can read that page and not draw the obvious conclusion. It’s just _so_ clear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy#Authentication_issues
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_authenticity_issues
What ever happened to Charles Johnson at LGF?
He always claimed to be an iconoclastic Left-Liberal and that we shouldn’t interpret his support for President Bush and the War on Terror that he became Conservative, but at some point he switched from picking on the Palestinians during the Second Intifada to finding an assault-weaponed winger militia dude under every bed.
Maybe these militia dudes are every bit as crazy as some of the Middle Eastern fellows, but there was this kind of weirdness to his shift in emphasis that had a lot of us shaking our heads, shrugging our shoulders, and falling away from reading his blog. It wasn’t that any of us were pro-crazy-militia-dudes. Charles was always iconoclastic and politically incorrect, it is just that he stopped being coherent.
Although the words were spoken about the Duke Lacrosse (non) Rape Case, they certainly apply here as well: “The narrative was right but the facts were wrong.”
Some people want to believe, no matter what the facts indicate.
The phrase “fake but accurate” was first used in a NYT headline about Rathergate.
Yes, and those two statements tell you about all you need to know about the current state of journalism. The narrative is a way to shape carefully selected (or fabricated) facts to advance a particular storyline. The fact that the storylines are in line with leftist views is purely a coincidence, I’m sure.
Well, human beings are complicated, and can be really annoying. On those wikipedia pages I linked, which are completely convincing to any rational being, you can go to the Talk pages and see the thoughts of some irrational ones. Same as the 9/11 Truthers – experts in the abstruse details of a really absurd and unconvincing narrative. And sure of themselves and contemptuous of the rest of us.
The fact that the “original” documents were “destroyed” by Burkett should have been a clue that they were walking into some serious bull scat. My guess is that if someone had produced “evidence” of the same quality against Gore (who’s campaign was smart enough to show Burkett the door), they might have been a bit more skeptical.
As so often with the left, the facts are of no concern and can be wittingly or unwittingly forgotten in the interest of promoting The Righteous Cause.
Redford hasn’t been the star of a major movie since 2001 (Spy Game). He’s nearly 80 years old. I was watching a Firefly ComicCon panel the other day, and Nathan Fillion said something like “as an actor, the roles you choose are the ones they offer you”.
All this is a roundabout way of saying that this is probably the only decent starring role Redford’s been offered in a while.
Redford is a wealthy director and producer. He can play whatever role he wants.
In this case, the role of the fool who is soon parted from his money.
Which leaves us with the mystery of why he is doing it. From the leftist perspective, it looks like a no win situation. If Redford tries to play Dan and company as heroes, the reality of the situation will bite him in the ass. If he’s truthful, that won’t help the cause either. In any case, we are talking about a story that is over a decade old, involving a president no one really cares about any more. So I fail to see the up side on this one.
He likes political themes. He did The Company You Keep that was about the Weather Underground, IIRC.
He has been in a number of movies even as the main star over the last few years, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000602/#actor
His last big movie was All is Lost, where he played a guy trapped on a sailboat or something.