Sean Penn on the Media vs. the Spin Machine

By: (AP) While Hollywood shied away from reminders of Sept. 11, 2001, Sean Penn figures the terrorist attacks added urgency to produce his film "The Assassination of Richard Nixon."

Set in 1974, the film stars Penn as the real-life Samuel Byck, a business failure who blamed his shortcomings on societal corruption and attempted to kill President Nixon by hijacking a plane to crash it into the White House.

Penn sat down with The Associated Press at last fall's Toronto International Film Festival. His comments related to media issues follow:

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AP: Has corruption in government grown worse since Nixon?

Penn: No question about it. The arrogance with which it's played out. I think you'd have a very difficult time Watergating George Bush. The spin and the manipulation of media, the distraction of planned emergencies, is on a whole new level. And there's a kind of general lack of diversity of principle within the Congress. So I think when you can get something like the Patriot Act passed, it would be kind of like child's play to pull off a Watergate ...

AP: How about news media, then vs. now?

Penn: That philosophy that sells best in a sound bite reigns, so very black-and-white, dramatic, hyperbolic ideas are going to get through.

The other thing is, you have such demand in immediate storytelling today. Where investigative journalists covering the Vietnam War...a correspondent there would play detective, and one event in and of itself was rarely the story. It was connected to things that played out over a week, two weeks, while that journalist put together his piece. Now, it's, "Get that thing on the wire service by tonight. We've got to get it out by this time. Give me footage of the last 24 hours."

Yet there are journalists who are still trying very hard, people who are very good. They're up against that spin machine, and it's a tough one.

AP: What did you think of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11"?

Penn: All of that footage -- how long was it, seven plus minutes [when Bush sat in the classroom]? ... That's who George Bush is. I think it speaks very specifically to something that not everybody has. Forget politics, forget Republican, right, left. But it speaks to his unfitness to lead anything.