What will most of the media glean from the 9/11 Report ?

[kentuck]

My hunch is that most of them will be in their "groupthink" mode and will talk about the need for a new head of intelligence. They will minimize all the other important points to focus on who should be in charge of intelligence. No questions about responsibility or what to do to prevent it from happening again...Only, who should be in charge of intelligence and is that too much of a job for one person?

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

1. "CLINTON DID IT!"

That's what the media will glean.

[UTUSN]

2. "Shrub is not responsible"! n/t

[MaineDem]

13. That's basically what MSNBC just insinuated

They said "for the first time" we learn that a Prez Daily Briefing in '98 said Bin Laden may attack the US; he may use planes; his people may have received highjacking training. It's all Clinton's fault.

[readmylips]

3. Clinton's Fault....

the old dance...

[jimshoes]

4. Chimpy is irresponible... er ... uh....

not resopnsible, er... has no responsibility, uh Clinton did it.

[ObaMania]

5. Sandy Berger tried to steal...

... incriminating evidence of the Clinton administration's mishandling of foiled Millenium terror attempts.

[molly]

6. Some idiot called into C-Span this morning saying

that the commission report could not be complete because Sandy Berger stole secret documents to protect Clinton. :shrug:

:grr:

[KansDem]

14. I thought the same thing about the report being incomplete...

But my feeling is that any "investigation" in which the persons being "questioned" are not put under oath can only lead to, at best, an incomplete report. The fact that GW Bush did not take an oath to answer questions truthfully and had to have someone else there with him to help him "answer" questions only leads to the conclusion that this "report" is bogus and a fraud.

[mhollis]

7. Media? Did someone say media?

Allow me to introduce myself. I work for a very large corporation that owns a major television outlet and half of another. My trade? Editing for the major outlet.

We'll roll like crazy with the recently-released footage of National Airport "security" and let you watch as the suicide hijackers are let in to the gate where they will hijack their plane to crash into the Pentagon. Why? Because we have video. There will be a listing of lots of the points of the 9/11 Commission report's points but we won't linger on that because there is no video.

With respect to the "new head of intelligence" issue, we will follow that story because everyone, no matter whether or not they favor this recommendation, will have an opinion on it. We'll hit both sides of the aisle in Congress because they'll trot out pontificators and give us video.

Do we see a pattern here?

If the presence or absence of video makes us susceptible to what you call "groupthink" then we're guilty as charged.

How do we prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future?

Let's go back to the video of those hijackers, shall we?

I edited, prior to September 11, 2001, no less than nine pieces about how lax security was at airports. We had interns (who we paid) and production assistants carry lipstick cameras of themselves passing through security, getting jobs with airport security without background checks, going into prohibited areas and so on. Each time we did this, we'd get someone from Congress on a Transportation Committee to wring his or her hands about how horrible it was. We'd get someone from the FAA to do the same. We even got people from the airlines doing it.

They did nothing.

The reason why security was lax is because a job at an airport doing security was not a professional job that lead to anything other than being a "rent-a-cop" uniformed security drone at a college campus or some warehouse somewhere. It paid minimum wage plus a dollar and you got no benefits, no pension, no paid vacation. My conclusion? If you are not paid to care, you won't. The airlines were the culprits, as they wanted to pay as little as possible for access to airports so that you could fly cheaper and they could compete for your business.

Today, the TSA is a "government job" and it is paid for by a special tax on tickets. Perhaps that is the way it should have always been.

In that particular case, we were doing the right thing. We were being responsible members of the "fourth estate" and trying to hold those responsible accountable for our security. We don't always do the right thing but, in this case, we did.

Do we need someone to take all of the various intelligence reports and consolidate them into a whole picture? Yes. And we supposedly always have had that person. That person is the President of the United States. Calling for some kind of "intelligence czar" is either admitting that the President cannot handle all of those duties (which is highly likely in the case of Bush) or a means by which niether Bush nor Clinton may be blamed for failing to heed the intelligence reports.

Supposedly the President gets a daily briefing. What he makes of those briefings is at issue here. Richard Clarke wrote that Clinton seemed to see more of the larger picture and Bush pretty much ignored the briefings in favor of his need to be on vacation most of the time. The idea behind creating a Cabinet-level position is to try to force any President to take these briefings more seriously than did Bush. One doesn't need a Cabinet-level position to take the briefings seriously unless one is the type of President who has no curiosity and no willingness to learn what these briefings are telling him.

My contacts who follow Bush closely all tell me that he is very intelligent, just not curious. In my opinion that is why he pretty much ignored his briefings.

[kentuck]

8. Thanks for your insight, mhollis !

And welcome to DU!

[louis c]

10. Very Good insight............

as a Union Officer, I agree with your statement "...if you're not paid to care, you won't...."

Welcome to DU.

[mhollis]

15. So, how did we do?

I put graphics on the air that reviewed a few of the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission. I also did some "interstitial" graphics for the interview our anchorperson had with Governor Keane and Illinois Congressman Lee Hamilton. The issue here is that we did have video.

I also noted that the Congressional reaction was to adjourn today, which is a pretty good indication that Congress cannot get anything done. They can't pass their tax cut extension because Bush (in an apparent flip-flop) is against it (perhaps it can now be said that he chose to raise taxes, too). They can't pass a budget because too much is riding on emergency spending authorizations for the military and the fiscal conservatives get lightheaded at the talk of spending further billions down the "black hole" that is Iraq (But at least Stephen Hawking now believes that information about what has been drawn in will be preserved.

But what will the continuing story be? I would not be surprised if I found out some 20 years hence that Republican "plumbers" had planted the suspicious white powder in the Kerry campaign office to deflect attention from the release of the report.

I can say this: We were warned today by the FBI that there was an al-Qaida threat against the news trucks at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. I note that whenever the news is bad for Bush-Cheny, they try to make everyone afraid. I kind of doubt the liklihood of any real threat.

What remains to be seen is the reaction and response to the report by the victims of the terror attacks. I'd particularly enjoy hearing from the Jersey Girls, a group of widows who lost their husbands from New Jersey who have held the Commission to a very exacting standard.

[newyawker99]

12. Hi mhollis!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[TankLV]

9. CLENIS did it!

Everyone knows Clinton was president at the time, right?

[Catfight]

11. I agree, Clinton's fault, Bush side steps responsibilty. Bush Good

anyone but Bush BAD. REpeat until brainwashed.