For its October 16 issue, the New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann has penned what I would call a soft-hit-piece on 9/11 Truth, entitled: “Paranoid Style---How conspiracy theories become news.” The article does a kind of meta-handwaving-dismissal, not by poo-pooing the Truth Movement directly, but instead by pish-poshing the coverage (in the news and documentary film) of Truth research. The implication here is that the coverage is just an inevitable by-product to some doubly inconsequential fringe cult, so never you mind anything else you may see in print or on screen.
The method is duly served by the New Yorker’s characterization of Richard Hofstadter, the ideological father behind conspiracy-theory-derision, as having been “one of the country’s leading intellectuals,” and then going on to treat his superficial, supercilious bull-shill as exhaustive explanation for the unfortunate “phenomenon” of conspiracy theoretics. Case in point? What else? Loose Change. About that, the writer, with the smug distraction characteristic of all the New Yorker’s most deliciously insubstantial pontifications, opines: “To engage in huffy denunciation of the journalistic shortcomings of ‘Loose Change’ would probably not change the minds of many of its fans.” Of course we know it’s not worth your time kind sir, but you favor us with examples yet! “Commercial flights did not hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon…United Flight 93 was diverted to Cleveland and its passengers taken to an empty NASA research facility…two AA flights that crashed that morning had not been scheduled to fly…” etc. [Editor’s note: LC guys, what was that part about the NASA warehouse all about, anyway?]
No mention of David Ray Griffin. Zip on Michael Ruppert. Ditto Steven Jones.
What WTC 7?
But of course, because those conspiracy theorists don’t even have hip-hop videos for sale! They’re just boring old misguided men who, cue the immortal and unassailable logic of Dr. Hofstadter, “mistakenly empower[] particular, and evil, forces with the ability to determine the course of events, [thereby] miss[ing] the messiness and contingency with which life actually unfolds.” And there you have the sole tenet of what passes for liberalism in American journalism: shit happens, no one’s at fault, get a life, fiddle-dee-dee. Not even worth sending a letter to the editor about, if you ask me. (But a blog posting, well!...)