http://www.muckrakerreport.com/id422.html
Last Sunday, C-Span 2 aired a session from the 2007 LA Times Festival of Books, called the “Age of Spin Panel,†whose purpose was to explore media deception during the Bush years – a big topic. The panel consisted of Newsweek journalist Michael Isikoff, political consultant Frank Luntz, Salon.com columnist Joe Conason, and Mother Jones magazine reporter David Goodman, all of whom, with the possible exception of Goodman, are well-known figures within the Washington media establishment. A number of topics were discussed – the Iraq war, the outing of Valerie Plame – but I found the panel chiefly interesting for what was said about 9/11.
During the question and answer session, the discussion turned to the attacks, and to what extent the U.S. media failed to do its job in reporting about them. A woman stood up and said that she was from New York, that she had witnessed the collapse of the towers, that what she had seen she felt resembled a controlled demolition, and that she wanted to know what the panel thought about the media’s complicity in establishing an atmosphere of disinformation after the attacks. Instead of responding to her question, however, Mr. Luntz ignored her completely and requested that a man in the back row please lower a sign reading “9/11 Truth Now†so that those who “had traveled a long distance that day†could enjoy the panel. “That,†said Mr. Luntz, “is civility.â€
Naturally somewhat annoyed, the woman then asked Mr. Luntz why he wasn’t answering her question, at which point Mr. Luntz aggressively interrogated her, “who do you think did it, who do you think did it?†which, as the woman then pointed out, was not the question she was asking. What was so odd about all of this was to see how quickly the established parameters of the debate broke down as soon as the 9/11 question was introduced, how these four highly intelligent professional journalists who a moment ago had been calmly and rationally answering the audience’s questions were changed very quickly into four guys who clearly felt like they were being personally attacked by members of the audience, which, as far as I could tell, wasn’t the case at all. In the end, the thing I took away from watching the whole scene was that, for whatever reason, when it comes to dealing with this 9/11 issue – i.e. how much did the administration know beforehand about the attacks, to what extent can our own government be accountable, just what happened inside the buildings that day, why building 7 collapsed when no plane hit it, all perfectly reasonable questions that the 9/11 Commission itself was at a loss to fully explain – public intellectuals and professional journalists like Michael Isikoff, Joe Conason, Frank Luntz, and David Goodman are liable to experience a certain hysterical excitability that causes them to dismiss the issue outright, without taking the time to have a more nuanced understanding of the facts.