BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Last year CBS killed a script it had commissioned on the early life of Adolf Hitler amid charges that it would humanize history's most notorious mass murderer. Now the network is being slammed again for another Hitler mini-series -- this one ostensibly equating the Third Reich with the Bush Administration. It's not at all clear whether either of those claims were or are true. What is clear is that Ed Gernon, executive producer of Hitler: The Rise of Evil, was fired by the Canadian production company Alliance Atlantis three days after the New York Post picked up on remarks he made to TV Guide. Gernon is quoted as saying of the mini-series, which follows Hitler's rise to power that quote "It basically boils down to an entire nation gripped by fear who ultimately choose to give up their civil rights and plunge the whole world into war." And he added, "I can't think of a better time to examine this history than now." Ron Rosenbaum recently wrote about the controversy in his column in the New York Observer. Ron, welcome back to the show.

RON ROSENBAUM: Thanks a lot, Brooke.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now John Podhoretz of the New York Post calls the mini-series -- and I don't know if he's seen it or not -- an act of slander against the president of the United States and by extension toward the United States itself. You've seen the series. Is it an act of slander?

RON ROSENBAUM:I don't know if slander is the word I'd use, but I think that there is a very crucial moment in the mini-series in which an episode in the rise of Hitler is altered, fiddled with, however you want to call it, in order to create what I believe is a false analogy with the Bush administration -- specifically at the Reichstag fire, the famous episode of the burning of the German legislative chamber. In the history that the mini-series was initially based on, Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler, the standard version of what Hitler says is that this is an attack by Communists and we must respond -- essentially, I'm boiling it down.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Right.

RON ROSENBAUM:In the mini-series, they change it to: this is an attack by terrorists; there are several subsequent instances in which Hitler uses terrorism, in which Hitler says constitutional rights must be suspended for the administration -- in other words it's a tendentious translation of what Hitler would have said to make the analogy between the rise of Hitler and the Age of Bush.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Okay, not to get too much into minutia here, though, it, it's fair to say that those were Communist terrorists who were burning the Reichstag, and in the case of 9/11 those were Islamic fundamentalist terrorists -- they were still terrorists since they were striking a civilian site.

RON ROSENBAUM:Why the change? Why alter history? And the reason it seems to me is to make what I regard as an analogy which is staggeringly inappropriate.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And do you think that Gernon then is appropriately fired for having drawn that parallel or spoken about it?

RON ROSENBAUM:Absolutely not! I mean I feel this is a scandal! Because this Canadian company makes a mini-series in which they accuse Americans of being so fearful they're afraid to speak up, and then one of their own guys -- Ed Gernon -- speaks up and says you know, something unpopular, and the Canadian company fires him! To me it's incredibly hypocritical!

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Do you think there's something a little disingenuous in CBS being allowed to distance themself from this guy while-- leaving is views pretty much intact in the mini-series?

RON ROSENBAUM:It's puzzling to me and contradictory for CBS to claim that none of the tone or content of the mini-series reflects Ed Gernon's views when in fact it fairly clearly at a crucial moment changes history in order to reflect Edgar Gernon's views! So-- either they're deceiving themselves or they fell asleep and missed that part-- [LAUGHTER] I don't know how to explain it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what you're basically saying is you may not support what Gernon says but you defend his right to say it.

RON ROSENBAUM: I don't think he should have been fired for telling the truth about his own political views.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How closely do you think a mini-series has to track with real history?

RON ROSENBAUM:You know that's a really difficult problem that I think I and a number of people feel real conflict about. My problem in this mini-series is just putting words into Hitler's mouth-- the many scenes in which -- well several scenes anyway, in which Hitler is smooching up a storm -- it's the soap-opera-ification of the Hitler story, and they're so sensitive to criticism they, they need to include a scene in which Hitler beats his dog, I guess to signal to us that Hitler is a really bad guy. But I don't think this is going to come as news to a lot of people at this point, so one has to wonder, you know, what this adds to our understanding of Hitler, and I'm not sure it does, except for the tendentious allegory that they altered history to hammer home.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Ron, thank you very much!

RON ROSENBAUM: Thank you, Brooke.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Ron Rosenbaum writes a column for the New York Observer. He's also the author of Explaining Hitler: A Search for the Origins of His Evil.