By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
9/11 Docs, FCC Free Speech Chilling Effect
Five years after 9/11, television is offering a mass of documentaries and remembrances of the terrorist attack on New York and Washington, DC.
Watching them, it’s striking to notice what’s been excised from the news footage–not just the worst and most unbearable of memories (people jumping from the World Trade Center), but the exclamations of shock and horror of eyewitnesses.
Among the first and best TV documentaries was “9/11,” by Jules and Gedeon Naudet, the French brothers who happened to be following a downtown firefighter’s first year on the job. Their cameras caught the first plane hitting WTC1–and the reactions of all who saw it happen. “9/11” won an Emmy and a Peabody Award. CBS broadcast the documentary unedited on the six month and one-year anniversary of Sept. 11, but now censorship groups are poised to complain about the gutter language spoken by firefighters and eyewitnesses — as if that were the real obscenity that occurred on 9/11. To avoid any possible fines from the FCC, Sinclair Broadcasting, which owns some CBS affiliates, plans to show the documentary late at night rather than in prime time.
“This isn’t an issue of censorship. It’s an issue of responsibility to the public,” said Randy Sharp, director of special projects for the American Family Association which describes itself as a 29-year-old organization that promotes the biblical ethic of decency.
If this organization gets its way, will 9/11 will be remembered as the day that 4,000 died, and everybody minded their P’s and Q’s?
I guess it’s okay for fake GIs covered in Fullers earth (Saving Private Ryan) to talk dirty on the TV, but not real people covered with toxic ash.
Yes, the biggest threat to the children of America is hearing the word fuck on television. Obviously hearing the word fuck causes crime, abortion and homosexuality.