Pulitzer Prize for 9/11
Let’s begin with a couple of assumptions. First, let’s assume that excellence in journalism is often found in the ranks of Pulitzer Prize winners. Second, let’s assume that the stories that contribute to the winning of that prize are ones documenting significant struggle in the society whether on a local or national scale. Third, let’s assume that any journalist covets a Pulitzer. Fourth, let’s assume that there are demonstrable, provable facts concerning a moment of national crisis about which several books have been published that challenge conventional wisdom concerning that crisis. Why is there no reporting on the subject? Is it because no one sees a Pulitzer in it, because the facts were published in another forum by someone else?
I propose that the most celebrated kind of glory is there for the taking, either in the form of a Pulitzer, because of the national outcry that would result from the writing, or in the form of a best-seller when whatever newspaper it happens to be steps over a journalistic line and requires the act of resignation.
Of course this is all about the horror of 9/11. I suggest that the pounding drumbeat of silence everywhere but where it really doesn’t count may be the platform from which some enterprising, outside-the-box-thinking reporter could reach up and grab from. How many editors would subject themselves to interviews concerning the absence of coverage of the facts of 9/11? How many editors would be able to satisfactorily answer the sandstorm of questions that have arisen ever since the whole matter was supposedly put to rest with the 9/11 Commission Report?
Of course this all assumes that 9/11truth.org and all of the writers and scientists and researchers referred to there have it right. In this instance there is no substitute for study. There is no substitute for knowing that Hani Hanjour had trouble with a Cessna, much less could fly an enormous pig of a plane like a 757 parallel to the ground and just feet above it without touching a single blade of grass. There is no substitute for knowing the relative vacancy of the part of the building hit, or the relative ease with which the likes of Donald Rumsfeld could have been taken out. There is no substitute for doing the reading.
Journalists write; do they read? Have they interest in theoretical answers to the conundrum set out in the last paragraph? Can they tell the world why videotapes of the crash at the Pentagon have disappeared into the custody of the FBI never to be seen again, by us, that is? Can they tell us why the piles of the remains of the World Trade Center Towers include molten steel incapable of being caused by a jet fuel fire? Would they be provoked by such a question? Or would they scurry to that dark place in their mind where uncomfortable notions are put in the middle of an unruly stack of papers, never to be thought of again. Did they get the job because they knew the proper bounds of inquiry and discourse, or did they learn about that along the way? Can they stand comfortably behind the word €œfar-fetched€ and thereby make themselves invulnerable to actual, critical, investigative thought?
Is it a simple lack of courage that is the core of the disability? Is it not axiomatic, that if it is security one seeks from the potential ethical requirement of resignation, one had better find employment elsewhere. Is this not part of journalism school’s core curriculum?.