Since when is fiction newsworthy? When it is Fox News which is making the call. The Los Angeles Times reports that Fox News plans to air the portions of Path to 9/11 which were removed due to being inaccurate:
In a move that could rekindle a heated political debate, Fox News said Thursday that it planned to broadcast footage from ABC’s controversial miniseries “The Path to 9/11” that was edited out of the docudrama amid criticism that it inaccurately portrayed the Clinton administration’s response to the terrorism threat.
The outtakes, scheduled to air Sunday, depict then-national security advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger refusing to approve a CIA request to attack Osama bin Laden, an event that Berger and the Sept. 11 commission say did not occur.
Although ABC cut the inaccurate scenes, Fox managed to pirate a copy:
Fox News obtained the outtakes by taping a public talk that Cyrus Nowrasteh, writer and producer of “The Path to 9/11,” gave to a World Affairs Council chapter last Friday at Cal State Channel Islands. Nowrasteh discussed making the docudrama and played several minutes edited out of the movie…
Fox News does not have ABC’s permission to broadcast the unaired footage, but an attorney for the network said officials there believed that the newsworthiness of the material put it under the fair-use exception to the copyright statute.
Fiction is not news, and this is not newsworthy, except in the minds of Fox News. For Fox News the question isn’t really newsworthiness, but what makes good propaganda to protect the Bush administration and attack their opponents.
