Print this post.Fox’s series 24 called prescient
How the Killing of Osama bin Laden Mirrored a Popular TV Show
Hillary Atkin ■ Posted May 3, 2011 on TvWeek
Hillary Atkin at the Cartier 100th Anniversary In America bash with a fellow sophisto.
Prefatory Note: Talk about being clueless about the reality that defines the world today! The below, reproduced in its totality, is a good example of what abounds in the infotainment industry these days. Not only a ludicrous gushy accolade to a repugnantly fascistic show, “24″, which, like the smelliest miasma, suitably emanates from Fox, but florid prose toward folks who seem to spend more time going to awards and receiving awards than doing serious work. In other words an eloquent document of how appallingly mediocre the mainstream media personnel have become, even discounting for the fact that Ms. Atkin obviously doesn’t see herself as Cronkite’s heir.
Why do we run this rubbish? Simply to remind our readers how the corporate-dominated mind sees current events, and how obviously seductive the bubble they inhabit is. In fairness, the author of this article is no more obtuse, vapid or evil than the average corporate media apparatchik. Perhaps the main difference is that Atkin makes a few grand a year while Couric and Brian Williams walk away with millions. As for TVWeek, this is one more of a bunch of gossipy trade publications, chiefly directed at fellow media people. Being online, however, has now diversified its audience. Here’s what the Wiki tells us:
TelevisionWeek is a trade magazine delivering news, analysis and data on television and media. It was founded in 1982 as Electronic Media. It is currently owned by Crain Communications Inc., the same firm that owns Advertising Week, long the bible of Mad Ave practitioners. The current editor is Greg Baumann. The corporate and circulation departments are based at Crain’s headquarters in Detroit, Michigan. However, the editorial department is based in Los Angeles, California.
Now, returning to Ms. Atkin, there’s no doubt she’s a happy camper in the cozy folds of the American media system. Her resume is eloquent in that regard (as posted on TvWeek):
Hillary Atkin is an award-winning journalist who began her career as a television news writer, reporter and producer at KOB-TV. As a broadcast producer at KCBS in Los Angeles, she won numerous Emmy, Associated Press and Golden Mike Awards for live coverage and entertainment special events programming, and then produced biographies on Robert Duvall, Elizabeth Montgomery, Linda Darnell and Nicolas Cage for A&E and E!. She has written extensively for USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, Television Week, Entertainment Weekly, Daily Variety, The New York Observer and LA Confidential. ..She is the editor and publisher of The Atkin Report, (www.atkinreport.com) a trend newsletter focusing on beauty, fashion, entertainment and lifestyle topics. Ms. Atkin graduated cum laude from the University of New Mexico with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Speech Communication. Her continuing education credits include courses in movie marketing at AMPAS, music video production at UCLA and film directing and producing at AFI.
James Brooks and Paddy Chayesfsky had it right. They warned us in classics like Broadcast News and Network that with people like these in the tv producer’s cockpit we’d end up seeing the world totally upside down, and we do. That’s real prescience. —P. Greanville
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How the Killing of Osama bin Laden Mirrored a Popular TV Show
By Hillary Atkin | Exactly as published on TVWeek
There couldn’t have been a more apropos blending of fact and fiction on Sunday night as the astonishing news broke that U.S. Special Forces had assassinated Osama bin Laden nearly 10 years after the devastating attacks he ordered on Sept. 11, 2001, that forever changed the world.
I happened to be catching up on season two of “24,” the part where a nuclear bomb has gone off in Los Angeles and Jack Bauer is on a quest to find evidence that will prevent President Palmer from attacking three unnamed Arab countries that are believed responsible. Bauer, as would become his trademark M.O., is on a rogue mission running up against the powers that be at the fictional CTU, while around the president, subterfuge brews as the drumbeats for war grow louder and louder, and in fact warplanes have already been launched for the Middle East.
About to settle in for another episode of this dramatic, dearly missed program for which I didn’t come to the party until later in the game, I decided to bail out and check the news at 10 p.m. on, fittingly, Fox11LA. Shock of all shockers. There was president Obama announcing the news that quickly reverberated around the globe, that bin Laden had been executed in a firefight, a revelation that quickly translated into impromptu, cathartic celebrations at the White House, Ground Zero and Times Square.
The Los Angeles Fox station did an excellent job of immediately providing some perspective on the fast-breaking news, lining up live interviews with terrorism experts, experts on the Middle East, and the brother of the pilot of the doomed American Airlines jet that crashed into the Pentagon.
As details begin to filter out, including word that only a very few people inside the U.S. government knew about the operation, which began in earnest last fall when a trusted courier to bin Laden was tracked to the fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, beginning a series of five top secret national security hearings led by the president, they echoed some of the fictional plot lines of the early days of “24.” With timing that couldn’t have been more fortuitous in mirroring real-life events, the “real-time” actioner premiered less than two months after Sept. 11.
Looking back on those dark days, it’s easy to see why the Fox drama resonated so strongly with the American public, and how the character of Jack Bauer as played by Kiefer Sutherland became the face and the flash point for the fearless, fierce, win-at-all costs bravado that was the antidote to the fear and victimization that 9/11 engendered across many segments of the population. Naturally, the show became a political hot potato as well, with accusations that its creators cultivated a right-wing agenda that villainized Muslims and condoned torture–issues that still reverberate across political debates today.
Yes, here we are in the present–and episodes from nearly 10 years ago seem so prescient that it’s almost spooky.
With President Obama thanking the counterterrorism experts who paved the way for the mission and former President George W. Bush, for whom the battle against Al Qaeda was the cornerstone of his presidency, saying, “America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done,” the words could have been taken right out of a “24” script book.
The reality of it all is just sinking in, even as bin Laden himself has been quickly buried at sea. He is this generation’s Hitler, a maniacal mass murderer who is certain to remain a hero for some.
But for the vast majority of the world, there is glory and relief in his demise, even with the long delay in redemptive justice after his most deadly of deeds–a turn of events that surely has given the folks behind the upcoming “24” movie creative inspiration–and even further validation of their past work.
[H.A.]___________________________________________
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1 comment
“Talk about being clueless about the reality that defines the world today.” This prefatory comment on Hillary Atkins in particular and mainstream media in general speaks to what we’ve both come to increasingly see over the years: Mencken had it precisely right, as this culture is hopelessly ignorant.
Forget about a pinhead like Atkins, but even what the larger society refers to as the “best and brightest” (the late Halberstam addressed this subject adroitly) are essentially illiterate in creative capacity to transcend their myopic vision, or even question with genuine humility their limitations in exploring imaginative alternatives to the hegemony of our foreign policy and criminal neglect of our own citizens in dire need. We do not produce a populace, even among the bourgeoisie, who could carry on two minutes of discourse on subjects ranging from historical materialism to Camus.
In brief, we produce factoids, who largely operate in a contaminated cultural vacuum–woefully lacking in depth and breadth, with the critical analysis skills of a rock. So besides the stranglehold of the oligarchs, we’re also faced with a highly conditioned populace who, in the main, are brain-dead in even questioning their script, much less actively opposing societal norms.
It’s a privilege to devote our lives to fighting inequity, exploitation, oppression, apathy, and the rest, but how do you fight against this kind of massive ignorance? As axiomatic as it is in its simplistic and convoluted manifestations, even many of our progressive brothers and sisters reinforce the obscenities, mindlessly defending the indefensible–such as Obama’s transparent duplicity in projecting himself as a man of change and character.