Much hullabaloo has been made of late over the “Path to 9-11” mini-series running last night and tonight on ABC. It is being positioned as “fictionalized”, which gives license for the makers to create most any reality they want within the historical context. And apparently they have taken such license.

But this is hardly the first such media attempt to take dramatic license with historical events. This happens all the time. So it would be unwise to pass judgment on this one movie in isolation. Moreover, I can’t in good conscience even limit my concern to the genre of docu-dramas. Human beings are inherently visual learners. What we see tends to become real, even if we are informed upfront and completely believe that the depiction contains fiction. The trouble is that there is truth depicted which resonates with things we already know to be true from independent sources. The fictionalized parts then become bound by proximity and continuity to the truthy parts in our mind. The line inherently blurs.

9-11 is a politically volatile and emotionally fresh area right now, so it’s hard to look at “The Path to 9-11” objectively. So let’s step back. Consider the following works of fiction and the historical event or period they are set in. Ask yourself if your view or the views of people you know have been colored by the fictional work.

• Oliver Stone’s “JFK” – The Kennedy assassination
• “The DaVinci Code” – The early history of the Catholic church
• “Clan of the Cave Bear” – Human history in the Ice Age
• “A Tale of Two Cities” – The French Revolution
• “Tora Tora Tora” – The bombing of Pearl Harbor
• “The Passion of the Christ” – The execution of Jesus
• “Munich” – The Munich Olympic massacre

This list could go on forever. And it spans the history of fiction, making it clearly not a recent phenomenon. The point being that the effect of fictionalized stories on history cannot reasonably be in dispute. This is even happening in indirect ways. Courts are finding that juries are treating crime lab findings as increasingly credible, and this has been linked to the success of the CSI shows on TV where the labs’ results are indisputable. Fiction influences reality.

So what can be done? Should we censor “dangerous” fiction? Hell no. I cannot advocate book banning, movie banning, or any other form of censorship based on the perceived volatility of the ideas expressed. No one is qualified to decide where that line is. For cryin’ in your beer, there are still people out there who think that Harry Potter is inspiring the practice of witchcraft. If there’s confusion over whether or not JK Rowling writes fiction, who’s going to draw the line for Michael Moore’s work?

It would also be unreasonable to require truth to be told in all historical contexts. Minimally, it would beg the question of which truth? Should the Battle of Little Big Horn be told from the perspective of the US Calvary or the Sioux? And I can’t advocate anything that would stifle the creativity that fiction offers.

But I don’t think that leaves us in an intractable situation. The solution can be reasonably simple. Where it’s not obvious, fiction should be clearly labeled as such. This means that the CBS Evening News can’t run a story they made up without a clear acknowledgement of it being fiction. But the ABC Monday Night Movie can be as fictional as it chooses without disclaimer. In addition, extant libel laws should be used where specific defamatory fictional actions or statements are attributed to actual people. And the courts should allow for a sufficiently liberal application of these libel laws to discourage writers, directors, and producers from using actual characters outside of what would generally be accepted as an accurate historical context.

Madeleine Albright, among others, are complaining that there are scenes in “Path to 9-11” depicting them saying things which were never said, and taking actions which were never taken. They should be entitled to libel damages from ABC. Further, the burden should not be on Albright to prove she never said those things, but on ABC to prove she did. Faced with such potential legal liability, producers would either gain prior consent for the depiction of actual people in fictional works, or they would create fictional composite characters to perform the fictional acts.

Will this prevent people from thinking of “Apollo 13” as the definitive history of that space mission? No. But it will encourage a more responsible writing by authors. Writing that will at least make it reasonable for intelligent people to readily distinguish between fact and fiction. Yet there will always be goobers who remember Titanic as a love story instead of a shipwreck. Not to fear though, I’m planning to put a hex on all of them if I ever graduate from Snape’s 3rd-year Potions class.