[iwar] [fc:The.media.must.share.some.blame.for.Sept..11]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-25 18:22:14


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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 18:22:14 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:The.media.must.share.some.blame.for.Sept..11]
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                              Cal Thomas
                          October 25, 2001
             The media must share some blame for Sept. 11
[CalThomas.gif]
Why were we caught with our preparedness pants down on Sept. 11?
Some blame the government for ignoring not only the warning signs but
also previous terrorist acts and threats to repeat them. While the
past two administrations can share some blame, a major culprit is the
media. The press fiddled with the likes of Gary Condit and Chandra
Levy; with Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky; with the political games
Republicans and Democrats played over the budget and electoral
politics, while America was being prepared for burning by her enemies.

This isn't the first time the news media has deliberately missed a
story with religious roots. During the 1929 Scopes trial, the media of
that day thought they had buried fundamentalism. In 1979, the
so-called "religious right" re-emerged from seven decades of political
hibernation and the media scratched its head in astonishment. PBS's
Bill Moyers wondered in a 1980 TV special where all of these people
had come from. He and others might have known had they been paying
attention and looked in the right places.
While the media was lying in bed on Sunday morning reading the New
York Times and watching the TV interview programs, much of America was
worshipping a higher authority and their ranks were growing. Because
most in the media elite don't worship anything higher than their
careers, they missed this important and newsworthy movement. They
never fully recovered from that lapse and most still are incapable of
understanding religious doctrines and accurately defining religious
terminology. The desire for better TV ratings lead programmers to
present people from the extremes for high-octane religious debates,
rather than responsible and knowledgeable guests who could enlighten
the public with historical facts and informed perspective.
Now comes another religious movement, with an indictment of secular
culture similar to Christian conservatism, but with a far more radical
and dangerous proposal for altering it. While the "religious right"
sought victory through the ballot box, radical Islam seeks it at the
point of a gun. But the press missed this, too, to our common
detriment.
Some may wish to excuse the media blindness on the grounds that most
journalists do not wish to offend. That is selective absolution. While
they may not wish to offend certain racial and sexual minorities, they
have regularly offended conservative Christians and many Jews by
wrongly attaching labels and motives that insufficiently describe what
these groups believe. The media has been able to get away with this
because they know such people won't send anthrax to them in the mail
or hijack airplanes that crash into their offices.
Few in the media know the basics about Middle Eastern culture,
politics and history, or Islam and its myriad teachings. Newspaper
editors and television executives should require that reporters take a
crash course on these topics, or hire people who already have the
information and can present it fairly and accurately. The
disinformation campaign about our enemies will succeed in proportion
to the ignorance level of our citizens.
A major part of the problem has been journalism's failure in recent
years to cover foreign news. When I worked for NBC News in the 1960s
and early '70s, one of the more useful endeavors was a year-end
national tour by our correspondents, who would come in from Hong Kong,
London and Paris and join a team of domestic reporters for
enlightening "town meeting" sessions attended by the public. Today,
the networks have closed most of their foreign bureaus and rarely
cover news from overseas. Advertisers covet 18- to 49-year-old female
viewers, who buy their products, so foreign news has been dropped in
favor of too many stories apparently chosen for the express purpose of
reaching this demographic.
The TV networks, from which most people get their news, will only make
the commitment and spend the money to cover foreign news again if
there's sufficient demand and if it's profitable. That will depend in
large part on whether viewers want such coverage and support it by
buying the advertised products.
Given the media track record, I wouldn't bet they will make the
commitment now and our ignorance will place us in greater danger.
©2001 Tribune Media Services

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