Sony Pictures Entertainment Hack: Who's To Blame?

People have got plenty to say about Sony Entertainment Pictures’ decision to pull “The Interview” from movie theaters. Whether it’s Oscar-winning actor George Clooney or U.S. President Barack Obama, the choice after North Korea’s violent threats have prompted many to point the finger.

The film had been scheduled to open Christmas Day. Obama said Friday he did not agree with Sony’s decision to pull the film, which is about the fictional assassination of Kim Jong Un, but the president does not consider the country’s hack an “act of war.” Instead, he sees it as an opportunity for America to strengthen cybersecurity.

“We’re going to be in an environment in this new world where so much is digitalized that both state and non-state actors are going to have the capacity to disrupt our lives in all sorts of ways,” Obama said in an interview with CNN. “We have to do a much better job of guarding against that. We have to treat it like we would treat, you know, the incidence of crime, you know, in our countries.”

Not everyone believes Obama handled the cyberattack on Sony correctly, especially since the president left for Hawaii after he made his remarks Friday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., lamented. “That press conference should have been here are the actions,” Rogers said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“Saying ‘aloha’ and getting on the plane to Hawaii is not the answer,” he said about the president’s annual trip to his home state. “This was a nation-state attack on the United States.”

As far as the blame game is concerned, “Gravity” star George Clooney accused the media. “A good portion of the press abdicated its real duty. They played the fiddle while Rome burned. There was a real story going on,” he told Deadline. “With just a little bit of work, you could have found out that it wasn’t just probably North Korea; it was North Korea.”

“Sony didn’t pull the movie because they were scared; they pulled the movie because all the theaters said they were not going to run it,” the star said. “And they said they were not going to run it because they talked to their lawyers and those lawyers said if somebody dies in one of these, then you’re going to be responsible.”

Even though people will not be able to see the controversial satire Christmas Day, Sony is looking for a way to distribute it, an attorney told NBC’s “Meet the Press" Sunday. “Under those circumstances, whether it’s legal liability or not, you just have to be very careful about people’s lives,” Sony Pictures attorney David Boies said. He said it’s a matter of national security.

“What Sony’s been trying to do is get this picture out,” Boies said. “You can’t release a movie unless you have a distribution channel.”

Follow me on Twitter @mariamzzarella