There's another inaccuracy there, too. Anyone who knows anything about Lynne Stewart knows that Tovah Feldshuh is way too gorgeous to play a character based on the rotund and unfashionable Stewart.
Tovah Feldshuh
Lynne Stewart
Posted on 12/26/2002 12:23:10 PM PST by mrustow
Toogood Reports [Christmas Weekender, December 29, 2002; 12:01 a.m. EST]
URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/
My previous column detailed a number of network TV series' campaign to demonize white men and romanticize black men, in the depiction of crime. But without a doubt, TV's champion white-baiter is persistent felony offender Dick Wolf, the producer of Law & Order, two Law & Order Lite spin-offs, and a pseudo-documentary crime show. This column has previously detailed a fraction of Wolf's offenses against decency and verisimilitude, and will no doubt return to him; criminals are creatures of habit, and Wolf has a long-term contract with NBC through the 2004-2005 season.
In one episode this season, Wolf re-created the May 10, 2001, execution-style, Carnegie Deli Murders ("Tragedy on Rye"). In the real case, Sean Salley and Andre Smith robbed genteel drug dealer Jennifer Stahl, who lived in an apartment above Midtown Manhattan's Carnegie Deli, and murdered Stahl, Stephen King, and Charles Helliwell. Salley and Smith also shot Rosemond Dane and Anthony Veader, both of whom survived. In June, Salley and Smith were convicted on multiple counts of murder, robbery, and weapons charges; in July, they were both sentenced to 120 years to life.
In the L & O version, the black suspects who were slated to be up for the death penalty for the killings, turned out to be innocent. The killer was white. This episode, written by William N. Fordes, was set up to be an object lesson on the dangers of racial profiling, via the "conscience" of the character of black NYPD "Lt. Joyce Van Buren" (S. Epatha Merkerson), but was actually a shameless exercise in propaganda: The real Carnegie Deli killers WERE black men!
Taking real crimes committed by blacks, and giving them the "ripped from the headlines" treatment, but with the killers' races changed to white, is a Dick Wolf trademark.
In the recent episode, "Open Season," a William Kunstler-like criminal defense attorney gets a black man acquitted, who was guilty as hell of shooting a white police officer, and is murdered — the lawyer, that is — as he is celebrating the acquittal. The killer is a white supremacist, who conspires with other supremacists to murder defense attorneys notorious for handling such cases.
This episode's story line resided entirely in the fantasy world of Dick Wolf and writer Richard Sweren.
One secondary aspect of this episode was, however, based on a true case. At one point, the jailed white supremacist, who has been forbidden from all contact with the outside world, except for his defense attorney (Tovah Feldshuh), uses her as an unwitting conduit to pass along the address of someone he has targeted for murder to an associate, who carries out the killing. However, Dick Wolf's creative team made a slight adjustment in the story. The subplot was based not on a white supremacist, but on the case of radical attorney, Lynne Stewart. Stewart has been arrested and charged with deliberately passing along instructions from one of her clients, Islamic terrorist Sheik Abdul Rahman, who was convicted of masterminding the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, to his confederates. Stewart was taped laughing about what she was doing.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that on occasion, Wolf crosses over, and abuses white women, too.
In an episode created last season by writers Terri Kopp, Aaron Zelman, and Eric Overmyer, and re-run on December 4, Myth of Fingerprints, the forensics chief from hell (Diana Scarwid), is caught after having spent years falsely testifying against innocent men (even white men!), all of whom were convicted based on her perjured testimony. Eventually, she is convicted of manslaughter, based on the prison murder of one of the men whom she'd framed.
That episode was based on the very real case of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma forensics chemist, Joyce Gilchrist, who was caught having falsified evidence for years. Based on Gilchrist's testimony, 23 men have been sentenced to death, and eleven have been executed. Unlike the fictional forensics boss on Law & Order, however, Joyce Gilchrist is black.
Dick Wolf and his creative team apparently see TV drama as an opportunity to create non-stop propaganda, and get paid handsomely for it.
There's another inaccuracy there, too. Anyone who knows anything about Lynne Stewart knows that Tovah Feldshuh is way too gorgeous to play a character based on the rotund and unfashionable Stewart.
Tovah Feldshuh
Lynne Stewart
and the product of lots and lots of elective surgery.
O.k., o.k., Detective. But if Tovah had never had ANY help, and I were single and had the opportunity, I still wouldn't throw her out of bed for eating crackers. Lynne, on the other hand, could get all the help in the world, and she'd still be ... Lynne. (I'm trying to mind my manners here.)
Will do.
I'll try and keep that in mind. Usually I don't look at the commericals.
thats why its fiction. for those who can't tell, there's a disclaimer. "the characters and events are fictional ...blah blah".
If you ever watched the show, and paid attention, you'd know that this particular show is built on the oft-repeated claim that its story lines are "fact-based." The small- print disclaimer is to protect the producers against law suits, and is directly contradicted by the commercials and opening titles' trumpeting that the shows are "ripped from the headlines" and "fact-based."
I guess I'll have to make a little note to be added to my local NBC station's Public Inspection file, to be considered as to whether the stations broadcastrs are *in the public goood* when their licence renerwal time comes around again.
Besides, that'll give me a chance to pull the info on who the local sponsors of that program are hereabouts. I wonder if they know what they've been buying with their advertising budget. Well, they will.
-archy-/-
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