Blurring Line Between Fact, Fiction

“Contact” director Bob Zemeckis cast 13 CNN staffers as themselves for the same reason he digitized Bill Clinton into the movie: to make it seem more real. Real reporters, real CNN logo, real president--all that authenticity is meant to rub off on the story, making it easier for audiences to suspend disbelief (“No Executive Privilege,” Calendar, July 21).

I can see why Zemeckis wanted CNN. But why did CNN want Zemeckis?

For six years, CNN President Tom Johnson refused to allow CNN correspondents to work in movies. I know; I tried to cast CNN anchor Bernard Shaw in a cameo, announcing Eddie Murphy’s election victory in “The Distinguished Gentleman,” and Johnson turned us down. In retrospect, he was right.

This year, as an “experiment” in “cross-promotion,” Johnson lifted his ban; now he regrets it. “Contact” may be good product placement for the low-rated CNN brand, but it also risks the perception that CNN’s journalistic legitimacy is for rent, especially within the Time-Warner-Turner family, which produced “Contact” and owns CNN.

If an able, hard-news veteran like Johnson is willing to roll the dice with CNN’s credibility, what will less-exacting media executives try next?

The line between news and entertainment barely exists anymore, let alone the difference between information and opinion, or authority and celebrity. Huge lecture fees cast a shadow on the independence of journalist-pundits who also populate the Sunday morning shows. Candidate-pundits like Pat Buchanan have rendered quaint the distinction between analysis and advocacy. Television’s leveling effect has promoted a strange equivalence between talk-show host Maury Povich and “Nightline’s” Ted Koppel.

There is a direct line from E.L. Doctorow’s commingling of fact and fiction in “Ragtime” to Joe Klein’s in “Primary Colors”; from Oliver Stone’s in “JFK” to Robert Reich’s in “Locked in the Cabinet.” Who’s to say what the standards of objectivity should be? Today, even the prestige press peg stories to reporting by the National Enquirer, and impeccable Pierre Salinger has become a conduit for the wildest of cyber-rumors. If talk radio has made everyone an expert, the Internet has made everyone an editor and publisher; its rise marks the death of elite ownership of the meaning of news.

People aren’t stupid, of course. They know the difference between watching a movie and watching the news. But a gifted illusionist like Zemeckis knows the difference between casting actors as reporters or presidents and getting the real thing. People may not be stupid, but they are susceptible. That’s why Plato banned the poet from the Republic: Poets can make people mistake illusion for reality.

Anything you can imagine, you can now show. The tricks that Zemeckis plays with presidents can be played with anyone, living or dead, public or not. You can make Fred Astaire dance with a Dirt Devil. You can digitize a celebrity’s face--or yours--into a porno film. The last technological barriers to depiction have fallen; the only limits now are money, taste and the ludicrously inadequate law of intellectual property.

Recent experience with cloning suggests what the future of infotainment holds in store: If it’s possible, someone will try it. Acceptable practice will be defined as what you can get away with. Johnson was right to rethink CNN’s course, but surely there are others eager to improvise new standards. Zemeckis didn’t put words in the president’s mouth, but someone else will. When that happens, who will have the moral authority to cry foul?