Guess what the ‘C’ in CNN won’t stand for after the filmmaker behind a planned documentary on Hillary Clinton announced Monday that he was pulling the project.
In an explanatory statement posted to the Huffington Post, Charles Ferguson, whose 2010 work Inside Job nabbed the Academy Award for Best Documentary, wrote that he had cancelled his intentions to develop a documentary for CNN Films on the former First Lady, senator and Secretary of State. Ferguson alluded to myriad reasons for his decision, including the unwillingness of Clinton staffers to grant access and the difficulty of getting sources on the record.
“[W]hen I approached people for interviews, I discovered that nobody, and I mean nobody, was interested in helping me make this film. Not Democrats, not Republicans — and certainly nobody who works with the Clintons, wants access to the Clintons, or dreams of a position in a Hillary Clinton administration,” Ferguson wrote. “After approaching well over a hundred people, only two persons who had ever dealt with Mrs. Clinton would agree to an on-camera interview, and I suspected that even they would back out.”
Ferguson and CNN had received bipartisan displeasure and even pressure to abandon the documentary. He wrote that two of Clinton’s press personnel privately “interrogated” him after he signed on to the project, one of whom eventually took his concerns to POLITICO. This prompted Ferguson and CNN to publicly confirm the plans for the documentary, leading to protest from both Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus, who threatened that the GOP would boycott the network as a debate host for the 2016 presidential election — alongside a boycott of NBC for its plans to pursue a miniseries on Clinton — and David Brock, founder of the hard-left Media Matters for America, who parroted worries from the Clinton camp and said that the documentary would revive discredited scandals. The RNC later voted to approve the boycotts if the networks’ features aired.
“Neither political party wanted the film made. After painful reflection, I decided that I couldn’t make a film of which I would be proud,” Ferguson continued. “It’s a victory for the Clintons, and for the money machines that both political parties have now become. But I don’t think that it’s a victory for the media, or for the American people.”
The RNC signaled its approval of the move Monday, taking some of the credit and nudging NBC to follow suit.
“While CNN is not moving forward with its Hillary Clinton infomercial, it’s clearly not of their choosing but rather because the filmmaker quit in large part because of the RNC’s action,” spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski said in a statement. “The pressure is now squarely on NBC to cancel its Hillary infomercial.”
NBC executive Bob Greenblatt said in August that the miniseries was in its infant stages of development and may never come to fruition.
Update (5:30 p.m.)
NBC announced Monday evening that it was cancelling its plans for the miniseries.
“After reviewing and prioritizing our slate of movie/miniseries development, we’ve decided that we will no longer continue developing the Hillary Clinton miniseries,” the network said in a statement, as reported by Politico.
