Some conservatives felt that Soviet brutality was greatly underplayed; conversely, a number of liberals dismissed the entire miniseries as right-wing paranoia. At various points, the program was scrapped, delayed, and rewritten. Prior to the show's airing, several left-wing magazines, including The Nation, The Progressive, Tikkun and Mother Jones carried articles strongly criticizing Amerika. The American Friends Service Committee also protested against Amerika. Journalist Christopher Hitchens, when encouraged by a caller on a February 1987 C-SPAN talk show to view the series, commented "I bet you you don't get through to the end of it. It's a boring idiotic piece of nonsensical propaganda. No one will see it all... ...It's tripe. It will be a terrific anticlimax. People are going to spend a lot of time not watching it and not talking about it.". The automaker Chrysler dropped ads which were scheduled to air during the program. For its part, the Soviet Union threatened to shut down the ABC News Moscow bureau, although this threat was not carried out and indeed seemed to strengthen ABC's resolve regarding the miniseries. "We're going to run that program come rain, blood, or horse manure", said ABC President John B. Sias, after the yet-to-be-aired Amerika had generated more controversy and viewer response than any other ABC program in history, including The Day After. The Discovery Channel countered by running 66 hours of Soviet-produced television, some of it live, including news, music videos, and films. Amerika was preceded by an ABC special addressing the considerable controversy prior to its airing (The Storm Over Amerika), and was followed by an "ABC News Viewpoint" panel discussion moderated by Ted Koppel, with Brandon Stoddard, Donald Wrye, and others addressing the issues along with questions and comments from a live studio audience in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After seeing the first episode and reading the shooting script, Tom Engelhardt stated that Amerika had "a plot line that makes suspension of disbelief into an act of grace." In its summary of the 1986–87 US television season, TV Guide called the miniseries "arguably the most boring miniseries in a decade", adding that "ABC's Amerika tried to hold America hostage for seven tedious nights (and a stupefyingly dull hours) by conjuring up a fuzzy vision of a Communist occupation of the U.S." Social criticism and commentary Although it aired only two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Warsaw