The world has had a week to chew the sound bites from two days of 9-11 commission public testimony. Media masticators and political grinds have concentrated on “gotcha” allegations, personalities and finger-pointing aimed at the November presidential elections.
Mincing sound bites, however, misses the large, determinative and most fundamental questions, like the one that should be the center of any pre-9/11 counter-terror policy critique: How much “political will” — and we can parse that as both individual presidential will to act and “public” or national will to act — does an American president require in order to take action to defeat a threat to the United States?
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, here’s an unsympathetic assessment of media coverage of Fallujah, from military blog The Mudville Gazette. Best catch is this bit from news media discussion of their own coverage:
“War is a horrible thing. It is about killing,” ABC News “Nightline” Executive Producer Leroy Sievers said in an unusual message to the program’s e-mail subscribers discussing the issues posed by Wednesday’s killings. “If we try to avoid showing pictures of bodies, if we make it too clean, then maybe we make it too easy to go to war again.”
So shaping the war debate, and hampering future military efforts, is the central focus of decisions about news coverage. Nice to see them admit it. Read the whole thing — which is full of damning stuff like this — and follow the links to see what other Milbloggers think.
UPDATE: Ken weeks emails: “The angry Sunnis in that mob were playing to the camera. Showing their actions on TV encourages their behavior. This guy’s zeal for showing us the ‘true horror’ of war is causing more of the same.”
Yes, terrorism is, in a very real sense, a creature of the mass media. But what strikes me is that after 9/11 they didn’t want to show graphic images of dead Americans for fear that it would make Americans want to go to war. Now they are proud of showing graphic images of dead Americans in the hopes that it will discourage Americans from going to war.
Now that they’ve admitted that they’re not neutral on this stuff, you have to wonder what side they’re on.
MORE: Ed Driscoll has more thoughts (and quotes) on the double standard here.