Terrors to Come – Signals and the Media

FrontPageMagazine.com | October 17, 2001 | Ponte

[LavaDog]

"GRASP THE EYE BY THE MONOCLE," advises a proverb by surrealists Paul Eluard and Benjamin Peret. Activists have long known that our modern monocle, the lens through which we focus on the world, is the mass media.

But until this current plague of terrorists emerged, activists usually cultivated a synergistic, mutually-beneficial relationship with the media. "We’ll provide the entertainment, the dramatic footage to fill your daily news void and boost your ratings and profits," the implicit bargain went. "You in the media in exchange will act as a giant megaphone to amplify our message and celebrity."

Back in those halcyon days, the only white dust found in envelopes on reporters’ desks was Bolivian marching powder. But suddenly the news is that these new terrorists are grasping the cyclopean eye of television not by seduction and synergy but by rape, by launching terrorist attacks on the media itself. This, at least, is a sure way to get media attention.

As discussed here last week, one tabloid editor in Florida is dead from anthrax he likely caught from spores sent in what might be called a biological letter bomb. Half a dozen others at his newspaper have tested positive for exposure to anthrax, and as of Monday a second employee there is ill with the animal disease.

NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw appeared Monday on the "Nightly News," held a bottle of antibiotics up to the camera, and proclaimed "In Cipro we trust." He might have been exposed to anthrax, as reportedly a member of his staff was by at least one of two envelopes with powder inside that arrived in the mail. Neither Brokaw nor his assistant exhibit symptoms of the disease.

"I suspect that many of us have the surreal feeling," said Brokaw, "that we’re watching a movie – and we’re in it." Eluard and Peret would have understood.

As of late Monday, the seven-month-old son of a freelance news producer at ABC who had visited its offices had been diagnosed with cutaneous anthrax.

A letter reportedly carrying benign white powder also turned up at the New York Times desk of reporter Judith Miller, now coincidentally promoting a book she co-authored entitled Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War. And other such envelopes arrived via mail at The Columbus Dispatch newspaper in Ohio, at Fox News, and at the Washington bureau of CBS News.

On CBS’s "60 Minutes" Sunday night, reporter Lesley Stahl appeared in full cry attack mode, hurling one accusatory question after another at a serenely articulate Bush Administration National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

At one point Stahl virtually accused Rice of censoring the media. Rice earlier that week had urged news broadcasters to think carefully before airing footage of Osama bin Laden or his spokesmen making videotaped speeches.

The reason for this request, Rice had warned, was that such videos may carry coded orders from bin Laden to sleeper agents or moles of his al-Qaeda terrorist network inside the United States or overseas. Objective intelligence experts had noticed unusual phrases in bin Laden videos given to his favorite outlet, Qatar’s al-Jazeera, and concluded that these could be signals. British Prime Minister Tony Blair had made a similar request of the BBC, and for it he too was accused of censorship.

Stahl never mentioned this reason given by Rice, however. Instead, she suggested that President George W. Bush simply wanted to silence the other side’s point of view. If Rice corrected this, her words were edited out by CBS. Perhaps Lesley Stahl was secretly sending her own coded message to Osama bin Laden last Sunday night. By reading between the lines, that message almost sounded like: "Do not attack us. We who control the establishment media hate President Bush and America as much as you do. Like you, we are working to bring them down. We share your goals. We, as always, will help you attack them. Do not attack us."

She is, after all, part of "60 Minutes," whose Executive Producer Don Hewitt boasted that he personally elected Bill and Hillary Clinton with his carefully rigged interview of them. The public remains unaware that Hewitt allowed them to do as many "takes" as they wished to each question, and to select which of those "takes" would air. CBS in general, and "60 Minutes" in particular, came to be known as the Clinton BS network for its relentless attacks on Clinton opponents and critics, the chief exception being the Kathleen Willey interview with yet another White House female Bill Clinton tried to use sexually.

But CBS is not alone among the dominant media in what, to use Clinton-speak, could at best be called "Triangulation." When ABC’s Barbara Walters refuses to wear an American flag pin on her lapel because it would "compromise" her objectivity as a reporter, that is putting herself above both "sides," in this case neutral ground between good and evil. The same is true when ABC news anchor Peter Jennings snidely attacks President Bush during the early hours of crisis on September 11. And Reuters news wire proclaimed that it will eschew the judgmental label "terrorist" because one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.

That same looking-down-from-Olympus-on-both-sides superiority echoes in National Public Radio editor Loren Jenkins’ boast that, of course, with your tax dollars he would broadcast details about U.S. troop movements in Afghanistan, even if this led to the deaths of American soldiers. ("I don’t represent the government," sniffed Jenkins; "I represent history, information, what happened.")

And when that consortium of major news organizations declared days ago that they would not report results of their vote recount in Florida – apparently because, despite every doubt being given to Gore, Bush won.

And when MSNBC’s Ashleigh Banfield went far out of her way last Sunday to describe those in Pakistan protesting against America as "the religious right." The media "has not been a particular target of Islamic fundamentalist groups or groups we associate with September 11," said Harvard University’s Kennedy School’s Juliette Kayyem to the New York Times. "It has been a target of right-wing groups in America."

Kayyem’s Harvard colleague Jessica Eve Stern chimed in: "Right-wing extremists are obsessed with biological warfare." And thus are Times readers left to ponder whether Osama bin Laden’s agents are blameless, and to suspect despite a total lack of evidence that the political right in America might somehow be responsible for the current outbreak of envelopes bearing anthrax.

Note that the Leftist establishment media and its academic counterparts are scrupulously determined to give the benefit of every doubt to bin Laden and his Taliban protectors (who torture women, murder gays, and have imposed an insane theocratic dictatorship in Afghanistan). But where President Bush, or National Security Advisor Rice, or the political right in America are concerned, these folks are guilty unless they can prove their innocence.

When word broke over the weekend that an American bomb had fallen a mile off target near Kabul and killed four innocent people, you could see CNN reporters almost gleeful that they could return to their customary "Blame America First" mode of reporting.

For all its pretense of fairness and balance, CNN as it pounded the "America kills civilians" story hour after hour never mentioned counterbalancing facts. Under the incompetent and corrupt Taliban regime, 800 Afghan children a day have been starving to death. Every day that Taliban rule can be shortened could save the lives of 800 children. Apparently CNN was too busy counting the four dead from an American accident (and who chose to stay on this battlefield amid falling bombs) to weigh them against the 800 children who die daily because of the Taliban.

Neither do CNN nor other Leftist media remind us of the 5,800 who died and many thousands more who were injured from terrorist attacks on September 11 – or of untold more men, women, and children who could die or suffer in future terror assaults.

Two new books help restore perspective missing in the establishment news media. The first, coming out this week, is 911 Terror In America (Windsor House). It tells what it was like at Ground Zero on that day of infamy in the actual words of those who were there. We meet a man who looked up from his 91st Floor office to watch an airliner crash into the floor just above him – and learn the details of what it felt like rushing to escape a doomed building as, going past him up the stairs to their deaths, were firemen too young to be shaving yet. We see a fireman clutching all that was left of a comrade, a leg from the knee down to a still-booted foot. We encounter a group of firemen carrying their dead chief’s body and head, decapitated by the razor guillotine of a heavy, silent pane of falling 2"-thick office window glass.

And through the words of rescue workers we learn what distant TV cameras kept secret – that almost nobody was left to rescue. As the World Trade Center towers collapsed, they became giant meat grinders that chopped to pieces virtually everyone inside. If you want to understand what the terrorists really did to thousands of your fellow humans, get this book. It includes 100 pages of unique photos by those inside the police cordon at Ground Zero. Proceeds from the book go to the Emerald Society of Firefighters in New York for the families of firefighters and police lost that day. Heaven now has wonderful Fire and Police Departments.

And to help understand how terrorists have been encouraged, read Barbara Olson’s new book entitled The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House (Regnery). Barbara was among those who died, not as a victim but as a casualty in our war against terrorism, aboard the skyjacked plane that on September 11 was crashed into the Pentagon. Barbara’s previous book, Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Clinton (Regnery), was a national bestseller. Barbara was among the best and brightest of guests on my national radio show, a magnificent person deeply missed by all who knew her.

In this final book Barbara reminds us of one key Clinton act – one more rotten tree easily forgotten amid Bill and Hillary’s forest of depravity.

To help his Senate candidate wife Hillary win Puerto Rican and other Hispanic votes, Bill Clinton in August 1999 pardoned 16 FALN terrorists. Together these 16 evildoers had been convicted of making 130 bomb attacks in New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. Their bombs killed six (including policemen), left hundreds wounded, and created terror in the minds of millions.

But Bill and Hillary were happy to set cop-killers free if unchaining these terrorists meant a few more votes for her.

One subhead in Barbara’s book reads: "Pardons for Terrorists Send a Signal." Notes NewsMax.com’s Carl Limbacher, "Though a lively debate has raged ever since Sept. 11 over whether the ex-president did as much as he could to stop Osama bin Laden, the one-time congressional Clinton investigator [Olson] is the first to raise the FALN pardon question at any length. Perhaps now Sen. Clinton, who has made herself newly available on the TV talk show circuit since the World Trade Center attacks, will be asked whether she agrees with Olson that her husband’s terrorist pardons ‘sent a signal.’"

Only days after Barbara Olson’s death, Hillary Clinton tried to prevent publication of her final book. Terrorists killed Barbara. Hillary tried to kill Barbara’s last words before they could reach you, much as the Taliban in Afghanistan silence any voice that questions them.

Will the establishment media report that Senator Clinton’s attempt to stifle the final investigative report of a critic murdered by terrorists is also an attack against journalism and freedom of the press?

[prognostigaator]

"Executive Producer Don Hewitt boasted that he personally elected Bill and Hillary Clinton with his carefully rigged interview of them.

The public remains unaware that Hewitt allowed them to do as many "takes" as they wished to each question, and to select which of those "takes" would air."

Unaware of this information which did persuade many to vote for Clinton..

And no wonder Hillary granted no such interviews with the media when running for her Senate seat.

[Sooner]

I am speechless. Great article.