The Path, De-Fanged

In the run-up of The Path to 9-11, which bowed last night despite a sustained weeklong series of attacks on its legitimacy, the key opinion from conservative commentators who defended the program (which didn't even seem to be a majority) was that all this controversy did nothing but raise awareness of the show, and would drive ratings. Except Americans decided that partisan propaganda wasn't how they wanted to spend their Sunday:

SHOW RATING AND SHARE:
NFL Football (NBC) 15.1 23
9/11 (CBS, rerun) 8.2 12
Path to 9/11 (ABC) 8.2 12

An 8.2 is horrible for a "television event," especially one with this much hoopla around it. People just didn't tune in. And in addition, American Airlines is threatening to sue over a scene early in the movie that blames them for letting Mohammed Atta on their plane despite a warning flag. In fact that happened in Portland, Maine, on his first flight of the day, a US Airways shuttle to Boston.

I am actually involved in a sort-of secret project to criticize this film that we're planning to unleash in the next day or two, but after seeing those ratings, my enthusiasm for it is waning. What's the point now, it's a faded and dead issue. Except for the lawsuits.

Tom Schaller writes at TAPPED that there is some significance to this controversy:

For years now, the standard attack on liberals or liberal Democrats has been two-pronged. The first prong proceeds from the idea that the vast majority of liberals are weak, slow-to-learn political bunglers who repeat the same mistakes, chose the same dumb candidates, take lumps without fighting back, etc. The second prong of the attack is to assert that the small sliver of politically competent liberals are ruthless, shameless, rabid radicals bent on destroying the country and its values -- not to mention liberalism itself and the Democratic Party along the way. Call it the feckless-or-reckless critique: The smart, reasonable elements are weak, and the strong elements are unhinged lunatics. With this formula, there’s not a sane liberal and the only Democrat with any redeeming value is somehow Joe Lieberman.

Well, guess what? In the wake of the nationwide campaign to de-legitimize ABC’s 9-11 “documentary,” it will be increasingly hard for the mainstream talking heads, who normally opt for the feckless half of the critique, or the Limbaugh/Hannity/York types, who by reflex lean toward the reckless option, to be successful unless they adapt a new way of perpetrating their systematic demeaning and diminishing of the left. For what we saw in the past two weeks, led yet again by key actors on the left, from MoveOn to powerhouse blogs to Media Matters for America to key politicians, was a smart, measured, coordinated, savvy, sometimes cheeky but ultimately successful -- no less pre-emptive -- criticism of a national network, its key decision makers, and its corporate owners.

This feat would not have been possible even three or four years ago. But, regardless of when the clout threshold was crossed, a smart, coordinated, energized left is now here, and no more wait-and-see analyses or other postponed judgments will suffice because a decidedly non-feckless, non-reckless campaign was put together on the fly. And it succeeded.

This was a combination of collective action, Internet research, verbalized outrage, contextualized links to the past to bear out the hypocrisy of those who supposedly value "free speech" (whatever that's supposed to mean), creative dispensations of YouTube parodies and satires, and a closing of Peter Daou's triangle where the media and the political establishment participated in an issue first brought to them through the blogs. This is not your father's progressive left. And we're not going away.