It wasn't censorship.

It was cowardice.

CBS has turned yellow-fraidy- chicken and booted its two-part television docudrama The Reagans to the cable network Showtime. A lot fewer people will see it there. That's what the sweaty execs at CBS want.

They dumped The Reagans because advertisers had run screaming from the show. Why did they bail? Pressure from conservative groups. Rightward apologists say it was a "grassroots outcry" from The People.

That's a laugh riot. It was power politics all the way, an organized whine-fest capped when Ed Gillespie, the Republican National Committee chairman, called on CBS President Leslie Moonves to have historians review the movie for factuality. Bad publicity scares ads away, which scares execs silly. And so CBS caved.

Which was cowardice.

Not censorship.

When government forbids or prevents the use of free speech, that's censorship. When special-interest groups lean on free-market businesses to change what they're doing, that's the American way. Like it or not, everything here was free-market legal.

But what's legal can still be regrettable. The best remedy for free speech to which you object is not squelching that speech, but countering it with speech that upholds your point of view. The Reagans' defenders could have issued a rebuttal to errors they spied in the miniseries - and aired their rejoinder during the broadcast.

But the real culprit is not conservatives for howling. It's CBS for running scared. The logical conclusion from CBS' action is that all any group - left, right or middle - needs to do to deep-six a show is generate a flood of angry e-mail. That way lies pabulum.

Some object that The Reagans is not factual. Well, that's like objecting that ballerinas wear see-through tights. The programbelongs to an addled genre known as "docudrama": a fiction based on somebody's already selective first draft of history. You take a half-understood story, trample the facts with total abandon, and produce something that looks like a documentary but is really a drama.

Want to see docudrama in action? Watch television at 9 p.m. tonight. Two docudramas will go empty head to empty head, Saving Jessica Lynch on NBC and The Elizabeth Smart Story on, whaddayaknow, CBS.

Neither show has much to do with a factual recounting. NBC couldn't get Lynch to authorize this production. So it's based on a book by Iraqi lawyer Mohammed al-Rehaief, a one-man self-hyping machine who claims he made her war rescue possible. Plenty of people think his story has more holes than a Baghdad museum.

The Elizabeth Smart Story evidently manages to tell about a Mormon teenager's abduction by a Mormon extremist without mentioning Mormonism much. Oops.

The Reagans also substitutes sentimentality and dramatic convenience for fact. But that's not un-American. It's all too American.

Copyright 1996-2003 Knight Ridder.

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