SAG mouthpiece attacks Hollywood journalists

January 15, 2009 | 11:55 am

It's been obvious for some time, judging by her fawningly uncritical coverage of SAG's hapless attempts to pull off a strike, that Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Finke was in bed with the guild's current leadership. But her post late Wednesday, titled "Media Blames SAG on Eve of Sundance," took her one-sided embrace of the Screen Actors Guild--and her willingness to mindlessly attack rival journalists--to a new low. Finke actually accused New York Times reporter Michael Cieply and my colleague John Horn of being shills for the movie studios in their continuing dispute with SAG--without having even read their stories!

At issue: If a studio specialty division sees a great film at Sundance that's available for acquisition, should they buy it, even if it was produced under waiver agreements with SAG? As Finke put it in her blog post: "This really smells to me like just another attempt by the LA Times and the NY Times to bash the Hollywood guilds on behalf of the Hollywood CEOs." She took particular aim at Cieply, a meticulous reporter (who once worked at this newspaper) who has been scrupulously fair in his SAG coverage, claiming that "his anti-guild slant would be laughable if he weren't writing for a major media outlet or constantly distorting the facts." As is her custom, Finke didn't bother to cite any evidence of this alleged anti-guild slant or distortion of the facts. Finke says in the post that Cieply's story was already online (though she is so graceless that she refuses to link to stories from media rivals), but it seems clear that she hadn't actually read it, since it was--see for yourself right here--a typically sober analysis of the situation.

Finke also claimed that "clearly someone (the AMPTP?) has been whispering wrong information in the ears of reporters for both newspapers on the eve of the Sundance Film Festival." It seems pretty obvious who her source was for that accusation. Being real journalists, Horn and Cieply would have called SAG to get their side of the issue before writing their pieces. But SAG, eager to put their spin on the story, immediately tipped off Finke that the papers were working on stories. And Finke, who never lets the facts get in the way, posted a vitriolic item before seeing what both reporters had written.

Here's the gist of what John Horn had to say in his piece: "The specialized film units owned by the studios--which include News Corp.'s Fox Searchlight and Disney's Miramax Films--are concerned that if they buy a movie made under SAG's provisional deal with non-studio producers, the studios might be forced by SAG to adopt an interim agreement, which their parent companies did not negotiate." Horn cites this, along with the worldwide recession and the shuttering of a number of specialty divisions, as evidence that bidding for films at Sundance may not be as robust as in the past. Does that sound like studio shilling? It sounds like good reporting to me. I guess Finke has gotten so accustomed to being a partisan for her own convenient causes that she can't tell what real journalism looks like anymore.

Photo of print runner David Phillips at this year's Sundance Film Festival by Al Seib / Los Angeles Times

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SAG mouthpiece attacks Hollywood journalists