CNN To Produce Hillary Documentary

Cable News Network has announced they will produce a documentary film about presumptive 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to be released in movie theatres before airing on their network in 2014. 

CNN told Politico that documentary filmmaker Charles Fergueson has been tapped for the project. Fergueson is the director and producer of “No End In Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq” and “Inside Job” (a film about the 2008 financial crisis), which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary.

NBC has already announced their intentions to produce a Hillary bio-pic, but Chuck Todd went out of his way to explain that the news division at the peacock network would have nothing to do with the film. 

Just want to get this out of the way now: NBC News has nothing to do w/Clinton mini series on NBC entertainment. So save your complaints

— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) July 27, 2013

This puts CNN in an awkward position, considering they don’t have an “entertainment” division like NBC and they don’t have the luxury of drawing bright, thick lines between a news division’s activities.  CNN is a news network and nothing more. 

As Huffington Post points out, yesterday CNN’s Jake Tapper discussed NBC’s planned film and noted “there are, of course, any number of potential problems in producing a film about a character who in real life could be trying to cast herself as commander in chief.”  Tapper was then forced to acknowledge CNN’s own project.