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by Ken Sanes We now know better. While the media fed us one fake crisis after another in a blatant appeal to our emotions, the real dangers facing the country were being ignored. Nor is this situation new. The national media, especially television, has consistently failed to focus on what is important or to recognize its obligations to the society that enriches it. Instead, all too often, it reacts to events, going with whatever it believes will draw an audience with dramatic images and stories. Then it forgets and goes on to the next story. We are now living with the fatal consequences of that failure. If you think these words are merely recriminations or are overstated, consider this: if the news media had devoted one tenth of the time to the dangers of a terrorist attack that it devoted to Gary Condit, thousands of people would not be dead. The nation today would not be in a state of shock. Of course, one can argue - and some have already said this - that a terrorist attack at this scale could not be foreseen. But the terrible reality, as every one of us knows, is that a catastrophe involving the airlines was entirely foreseeable and has been predicted on numerous occasions. We have known for years, as a result of sporadic investigations by the media, that airline security was lax. The fact that terrorists could simultaneously take over four airplanes and turn three of them into missiles reveals what a monstrous joke our security has turned out to be. We have also known for decades that terrorists have been plotting attacks on the U.S. We even knew the World Trade Center was a prime target because terrorists went after it once before. But, it turns out, they could count on us to forget and lose ourselves in Gary Condit dreams and the increasingly bizarre inventions of reality television. So they simply did it again to the same building complex, massacring what will probably turn out to be thousands of people who believed they were protected. Afterward, it was as if the news media had woken up. Newscasters were sober. They acted as if they had been temporarily brought back to reality. Many undoubtedly had been, and others knew this was the on-air demeanor that was expected of them. But there are already indications that some in the media want to hype the story or turn it into another one of their fictions. The New York Times, for example, bragged on its home page that it had "exclusive video" of the second collision. And CNN Headline News' labeling of this tragedy as "America Under Attack (And "America Under Attack: Day 2"), made what is happening sound like a docudrama. Other networks are using similar labels. The networks' constant replay of the destruction of the towers on all those divided screens is also starting to look less like an effort to show what happened and more like the conversion of tragedy into TV visuals. The question now is whether we are going to learn from these mistakes. Will the media now remember that it is the fourth estate and focus on what is essential, instead of what sells? The essential is first, and foremost, whatever threatens our security, our prosperity and our democracy. The danger of an attack of mass destruction - and we have now experienced the first one - and the danger to America's energy supplies are at the top of that list. Earlier I said that these accusations against the media might just seem like recriminations when they are really more than that. Let me partially take that back. It is time for recriminations. This is an issue not only about evil abroad but about a profound failure at home. Over the next few days or weeks, we will be dealing with the immediate aftermath of this horror and we may be preoccupied with a military response. But if we aren't prepared to see the world as it is and use our democratic rights to change our own institutions, we will almost certainly be a target again. - - - - - - Plotters
Found the Flaw In Nation's Defense Plans
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