Just 32 months after the Republican majority on the Supreme Court struck down campaign laws could that had prevented Citizens United, an anti-Clinton lobbying group, from airing a 2002 propaganda hit piece against then-Sen. Hillary Clinton — and just nine months after a campaign in which the Citizen United ruling helped the Republican National Committee and others raise millions of dollars for Mitt Romney’s failed presidential bid — the RNC has executed a dramatic 180-degree reversal on its position against censoring Hillary Clinton film bios.
To put it another way, Republicans were against censoring Hillary biopics before they were for censoring them.
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus has spent the last several media cycles loudly demanding that NBC and CNN abandon their plans to produce dueling biographies of Hillary Clinton, a miniseries at NBC and a theatrical documentary at CNN, to be released sometime prior to the 2016 elections.
Paradoxically, at the same time the RNC’s desperate campaign is reaching fever pitch in the media, word that another recent censorship effort backfired — an issue of Rolling Stone featuring the accused Boston bomber on the cover that was targeted for suppression doubled the magazine’s average newsstand sales — ought to provide the RNC with an object lesson. What part of “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” do Republicans not understand?
Priebus’ campaign to stop the biopics is, of course, harsh, ugly and comprised alternately of whining and threats. From a Hollywood perspective, however, every column inch and minute of cable airtime Priebus generates boosts their bottom lines in the form of millions of dollars in free advertising:
In one letter to CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker and another to NBC Entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt, both obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, Priebus writes: “If you have not agreed to pull this programming prior to the start of the RNC’s Summer Meeting on August 14, I will seek a binding vote of the RNC stating that the committee will neither partner with you in 2016 primary debates nor sanction primary debates which you sponsor.”
In both letters, Priebus attempts to paint the Clinton projects as little more than length, free campaign ads. In the letter to Greenblatt, he notes that David Cohen, who is an executive vp at Comcast, NBCUniversal’s parent company, has been a major donor to Clinton and other Democrats.
“Your company has expressly stated that your choice to air the miniseries in the near future would avoid concerns of running afoul of equal time election laws,” Priebus writes in his letter to Greenblatt. “This suggests a deliberate attempt at influencing American political opinion in favor of a preferred candidate, not to mention a guilty conscience.”
Now David Bossie, the 1990s-era Clinton-hater who runs Citizens United, has jumped on the bandwagon by trying to goad NBC and CNN into providing “balance” by airing “Hillary: the Movie,” the Clinton hit piece that was subject of the Supreme Court ruling, alongside the biopics.
“[The networks] get the benefit of people looking at movie stars, a star-studded cast, obviously it brings a very positive image of Hillary Clinton even before the movie starts,” Bossie told right-leaning Politico. “Then you have the leftist viewpoints of Hollywood writers and directors that will be guaranteed to be in the films, and you have the chemical make-up of bias.”
But Bossie’s bid to sell his 2020 Hillary hit piece to the networks in 2016 is a long shot. It would be unheard of for the networks to air a cheaply made 14-year-old video on any subject in primetime.
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