he number of lenses through which people are looking at the movie "Pearl Harbor" just keeps multiplying.
Ten days ago, the Disney movie opened to the syncopated sounds of critics hissing and cash registers ringing. Quickly, commentators noted that the priorities of marketing the re-creation precluded anyone from dwelling on the pesky moral questions about right and wrong. And historians have been doing triage to repair the record on questions like why, exactly, the Doolittle raid on Tokyo was launched.
How, exactly, should journalists respond?
For Sam Donaldson, the senior ABC News correspondent who also has a weekly 30-minute Webcast on abcnews.com, the film was an excuse to do a full-dress digital review of the history of Dec. 7, 1941 - from interviews with veterans to historic film to some of the movie's state-of-the- art explosive battle scenes.
But for Mr. Donaldson, an employee - sorry, cast member - of ABC's corporate parent, the Walt Disney Company - news judgments involving a film from Disney's Touchstone Pictures are fraught.
J. D. Lasica, a senior columnist at the University of Southern California's Online Journalism Review, caught Mr. Donaldson and his producers splicing some of the movie sceens, unannounced, into the documentary film and called Mr. Donaldson on it. In an interview on Friday, Mr. Donaldson agreed, "We made a mistake."
An easy thing to do, of course, when: (a) history is being turned into a product; and (b) that product itself becomes an excuse to do journalism.
As Mr. Donaldson said of his trip to Hawaii: "We can't go out there and ignore the movie. That would be ridiculous. But we're not saying we're part of the movie crew" or its promotional apparatus.
For other journalists, the issue raised by "Pearl Harbor" was simpler: how to describe what happened. Top editors at The Los Angeles Times last week officially discouraged the phrase "sneak attack."
Melissa McCoy, the newspaper's assistant managing editor in charge of the copy desk, said on Friday: "You cannot say that `sneak attack' is not accurate. But especially, I think, in California, this era in our history is particularly painful. This is true not just for veterans of the war. First of all, I'm talking about the veterans who suffered.
"But there were other Americans who suffered, and they were Japanese Americans," she said, referring to the wartime relocation and internment of citizens of Japanese descent. " `Sneak' conjures up images" of the racial hatred and racial epithets of the 1940's, she added. "Particularly in the western U.S., it resonates." The preferred alternative for describing the events at Pearl Harbor in The Los Angeles Times is now "surprise attack."
