Reply #3: That's another bone I'd have to pick with Palast over this piece [View All]

[Jack Rabbit]

EDITED for spelling of a proper noun

Being hard on Rather is like blaming the getaway driver for an armed robbery. Palast indicates that he was getting his marching orders from network executives and they got theirs from the executives at AOL/TimeWarner.

The film Network (Sidney Lumet, screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky, 1975) was prophetic in many ways. Most people can see in The Howard Beale Show the kind of tacky late-afternoon "news" program that dominated the airwaves years later, programs like Maury Povich, Ricky Lake, and Geraldo.

That's true enough, but what most people don't see how the network news went full circle under the direction of Frank Hackett (Robert Duval) and the corporation that bought the network. At the beginning of the film, Hackett gives a speech to stockholders calling the expectation that news division will lose money "an affront to fiscal responsibility" that he will reverse. He will do this by making the news more entertaining, even if that means it will be less informative. It is to that end that he takes the news program away from Max Schumacher (William Holden), a seasoned newsman, and gives it to entertainment director Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway). This works for a while, but soon the public gets tired of the program, the ratings fall and the network executives seriously consider canceling it. However, by this time The Howard Beale Show has staring delivering messages on behalf of Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty), the head of the corporation. At the end of the film, Hackett reports that Jensen will not allow the program to be canceled, no matter how much money it loses, because it is delivering a message to the public that he wants aired.

So in the end, the network news of the fictitious UBS goes from being a money loser justified as programming in the public interest (that also provides a lead-in to network prime time programming) to being a profitable program to being a money loser justified only because it provides an outlet for corporate propaganda.

As part of the film's publicity campaign, Paddy Chayefsky would appear on talk shows and state that Network wasn't satire, it was reality. Most people at that time, this observer included, wrote that off as a ludicrous remark aimed at getting attention. More and more, we see that Chayefsky was serious.