The Conspiracy Channel?

By John Cloud

Which would you rather watch: a responsible and balanced ABC News report about the tragic but accidental crash of TWA Flight 800--or a stylish, X-Files-like show exposing the bastards who blew her out of the sky, narrated by conspiracy auteur Oliver Stone?

Me too, and we may be in luck. ABC plans to air a Stone "special" that will probe, among other topics, spooky theories about the 1996 crash (network honchos won't call the project a documentary, since documentaries employ what fuddy-duddies like to call "facts"). Under the working title Oliver Stone's Declassified, the show is tentatively scheduled to air in February and may become a regular series.

Of course, the FBI has ruled out the possibility that someone shot a missile at Flight 800. But remember, this is the same FBI that (at least in History According to Oliver Stone) helped cover up Tommy Lee Jones' dastardly role in J.F.K.'s assassination.

ABC News folks got in a snit when they heard about the Stone show--their aviation-industry sources were getting calls from Stone's people--and news chief David Westin expressed concern to colleagues in ABC's entertainment division. Last week East Coast newsies said Westin assured them that the Flight 800 portion of Declassified has been axed. But trust no one: Stone says 800 will be part of his show. The public ABC line is that the program will air with warnings that the news division didn't produce it (a disclaimer that could boost ratings dramatically).

Instead, Declassified will be the product not only of Stone's aptly named Illusion Entertainment Group but also of Michael Davies, who became an entertainment executive at ABC in January. A native Brit, Davies loves the Fox network's hit reality specials, such as When Animals Attack and World's Scariest Police Chases. He came to ABC to mimic and improve on them. "If Fox did When Animals Attack," he told Electronic Media magazine earlier this year, "I want to do Why Animals Attack."

Oookay. But should the people who jazz up the evening news with sappy music and breathless JonBenet updates moan that Stone is crashing their party? After years of pelting the wall between news and entertainment, they shouldn't be so shocked that Stone, one of America's best entertainers, would help push the wall over.

And it's possible that one so weary of being tagged a nut case will produce a journalistically sound program. "It's unbelievable how frightened some journalists are of anybody outside their profession digging around," Stone says. "Critics will say we're the conspiracy cranks, but on the contrary--if there's no conspiracy, fine." Stone understands, moreover, that the average viewer of network news is a candidate for Geritol: "We want to do the same thing as 60 Minutes but in a new kind of way that makes it hip." In other words, his show could delight us with dark possibilities and then bore us with the truth. If so, it would be indistinguishable from, say, 20/20.

--By John Cloud. With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles and William Tynan/New York

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles and William Tynan/New York