behind the news

ABC Gives a Free Handout to "Wolves"

A story on ABC’s Web site crosses from reporting on a commercial phenomenon into the realm of free, uncritical publicity.

February 16, 2006

Reporting on the success of a commercial product is always a tricky enterprise. When considering the news value of a hot consumer product or a movie hit, journalists ought to tread carefully in order to report the phenomenon without stepping over the line into free and uncritical publicity.

A Tuesday story from ABC News on a virulently anti-American film currently drawing big crowds at Turkish box offices went way over that line.

“Anti-Americanism is everywhere you look in the Middle East and many other parts of the world,” begins the article, in the first of many sweeping generalities. “Now it’s a box-office hit in Turkey, an important American ally.”

A $10 million production, Valley of the Wolves: Iraq is “the most expensive Turkish movie ever made,” reports ABC’s Sudia Musa, “an action-packed movie based on actual events.” The movie takes as its starting point a July 2003 raid by American Marines on the offices of Turkish Special Forces in Sulimaniyah, Iraq, in which the Marines “threw hoods over the soldiers’ heads and held them in custody for a number of days, claiming they mistook the soldiers for insurgents” — a national humiliation for Turkey.

ABC soon turns to the heart of its article: a lengthy description of the film’s twisted plot and message. “The plot continuously plays the good Turks against the bad Americans, creating a cocktail of fact and fiction stirred with nationalistic edge,” ABC reports, with U.S. soldiers attacking a wedding, killing dozens and dragging survivors to Abu Ghraib. There, “the Turkish imagination gets the better” of Abu Ghraib’s disgraceful real-life abuses; in the movie, “the prisoners have their organs removed by a Jewish-American doctor who sells them to rich clients in New York, London and Tel Aviv, Israel. Not only does the film depict multiple executions and an attack on a mosque during evening prayers, but it typecasts the Americans as evil and psychotic.”

In perhaps not the smartest of career moves, Gary Busey and Billy Zane are the American headliners. Busey plays the Jewish organ-harvesting doctor, and Zane a self-righteous American commander “driven by God as he kills thoughtlessly.”

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The film’s “mega-success” is based on numerous factors, ABC tells us, coming as it does after a cult television series and a bestselling novel concerning a war between Turkey and America over Kurdish Iraq. Exploiting that atmosphere, Valley of the Wolves has been able to “win at the box office,” and, concludes ABC, “Fact or fiction, it is clear that the Turkish audience has taken a liking to this film as the packed theaters house crowds cheering, clapping and whistling while their action hero Polat Alemdar gets the better of the Americans.”

This is one of the oddest stories we’ve seen on ABC’s Web site. Packaged and presented like a standard news story, it features the minimal reporting and uninspired, overblown writing one might expect from a bad blog. The two people the network actually takes the time to quote are an ABC contributor in Ankara, and the Valley of the Wolves screenwriter who, predictably, defends his film. We do not hear from the apparent masses of Turkish people currently enjoying the film, or from Turks who might distance themselves from it, or from anyone who thinks that a hyperbolic, unthinking reiteration of an inflammatory film is pointless.

The consequence is that ABC inadvertently gives free, uncritical publicity to a movie that is offensive to its core audience, without giving a compelling reason why this is necessary — besides sheer sensationalism.

Would the network ever report a comparable story about a virulently anti-Turkish or anti-Arab film playing in the United States, not bothering to offer a semblance of a counterpoint to its horrendous message? Would ABC ever broadcast a story like this?

Networks and newspapers alike are pouring more resources than ever into their Web sites, as they strive to hop aboard the Internet Express. The ABC logo represents a brand — a brand that we trust. But grade B stories like this — which appear too frequently on ABC’s site — only serve to unintentionally belittle that brand.

Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.