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Are We Really Going There?
Just because the Paper of Record says so….again?
On the first day of the Introduction to Journalism course I took during my blink-and-miss-it three semesters at Case Western Reserve University, Professor Ted Gup made the impassioned case for journalism as a noble “calling”. Mr. Gup is a respected investigative journalist whose work has been published in The Guardian, The Washington Post, National Geographic, Smithsonian, The New York Times, and The Nation.
(Sidebar: My signed copy of his “The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA” was lent to my buddy, Pete, and never returned…not that I’m holding a resentment against a dead guy or anything.)
To my point: I wonder what Professor Gup would have to say about the state of mainstream journalism post-9/11? I was working on Montague Street in downtown Brooklyn on that stunningly beautiful Tuesday morning. After walking along the Promenade late that afternoon and seeing the massive plume of sick brown smoke rising from the pit in lower Manhattan I had the sickening realization that this horrific act would be used to justify further horrors.
What I didn’t expect was that The New York Times would be one of the loudest cheerleaders for the illegal invasion of Iraq that “naturally” followed the attacks on September 11, 2001.
