- "If the people knew what we had done, they would
chase us down the street and lynch us." -- George HW
Bush
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- A couple weeks ago, just out of curiosity and in the
interest of fairness, I decide to email a hundred mainstream media news
editors from newspapers large and small. I wanted to get their own remarks
to four very innocuous but pertinent questions regarding THE EVENT that
spawned two foreign wars based on lies, massive government spending, enormous
corruption and cronyism, vote fraud, crimes against the Geneva Convention
and destruction of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights, not to
mention the rather minor (by comparison) Valerie Plame affair.
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- That event, of course, was the 911 attacks that opened
the Pandora's box to ALL the felonies that followed.
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- So I wrote polite emails to nearly one hundred news editors
around America. I opened with the query: "Dear Editors, Do Joseph
Pulitzer's words still apply today?" Then I added Pulitzer's quote
(below), just in case some of the news editors may have forgotten who JP
was and what he tried to do.
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- "Iwill always fight for progress and reform, never
tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties,
never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public
plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to
the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always
be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by
predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty." -- Joseph Pulitzer, April
10, 1907
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- My fourth question to the editors, particularly, may
have struck a raw nerve. "If you personally became suspicious that
911 was possibly an inside job--by a rogue element in the government--would
you suppress the story rather than inform, and thus distress, your readers?"
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- I sent along a few links to well-researched 911 news
stories, topics we on the Internet are familiar with and can openly discuss.
Nothing too shocking or far-fetched, but simply well researched reports
of discrepancies that should awaken the skeptical instincts of any good
editor. Two 911 Planes Were Never Deregistered, for example, and
BYU Discredits Prof Jones For 911 WTC Paper! Like I said, nothing that
we on the Internet can't handle.
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- I received ONE (1) response.
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- Is 911 the story that may NEVER be mentioned in
the polite mainstream media? Rare indeed to read an article in the local
newspaper, airing even one of the many contradictions--and there are hundreds--to
the Greatest Unsolved Crime of The New Century.
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- I wrote to some editors twice, before I concluded, by
their stony silence, that 911 was the one topic that may never be questioned---EVER-in
the US mainstream media. As noted muckraker and tenacious Internet reporter,
Greg Szymanski wrote: "Pulitzer may be turning over in his grave,
wanting to pull his name from the prestigious awards given out yearly,
considering the media's pathetic coverage of 9/11, the PATRIOT Act and
doctoring of WMD intelligence reports to sell the war in Iraq."
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- For example, New York Times "reporter"-and
I use that word loosely--Judith Miller once won a Pulitzer Prize, believe
it or not. One can thus conclude that news awards, as presented by
the self-congratulatory US press, have become almost a fraud perpetrated
by phonies as awards for fakery. Otherwise the US news media would be attacking
rather than ignoring the mountain of discrepancies in the 911 event. The
US media might even conclude that, yes, 911 was indeed an act of terror.
An act of terrorism conceived after weeks of secret planning in some
five-sided fortresses, by a cabal of war criminals, double agents and
nefarious profiteers.
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- The response to my brief questionnaire did not surprise
me. Rather it appeared to coincide with what I have come to expect
from the US media, especially newspapers. That is, little or nothing.
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- Henry David Thoreau observed: "I never read any
memorable news in a newspaper." But I keep reading them hoping to
be surprised one day. I suppose I'm a self-appointed inspector of
newspapers.
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- Like a lot of Internet writers, I used to send some of
my best columns to my local newspaper. To their credit they published two.
They never paid for either but then most newspapers have their own stable
of writers and contributors who live thousands of miles away. Local
writers, especially the majority of hard-working Americans who "hold
these truths to be self-evident," seldom see their opinions in print.
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- One California citizen, a frustrated letters-to-the-editor
writer to his own local newspaper, understood this well. And so he composed
his own, widely read, Freewayblogger Manifesto. "Sure anybody can
write a book, article, or a letter to the editor," he said. "You
might even get it published provided the publisher and/or its parent corporation
agrees with what you have to say."
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- And if they do NOT agree with what you say, you will
be effectively ignored or silenced in that community.
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- I wrote to the news editors and publishers of my local
newspaper, the South Florida Sun Sentinel. I wrote to them twice, asking
about 911. I wrote to editors Earl Maucker and Kingsley Guy and Chauncey
Mabe. I even wrote to the Sun Sentinel publisher, Bob Gremillion. I politely
asked them: "Does the US media purposely avoid reporting news stories
of 911 contradictions that conflict with the official government version
of events?"
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- No response. Twice.
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- I wrote to the editor of the Austin American-Statesman.
The editor, Rich Oppel, had written a recent column I admired. He concluded,
"The business of journalism has changed, not always for the best.
Yet the journalism of journalism had not changed. In those still-fierce
faces and voices of the aging editors, I saw and heard idealism and ideas
at octane levels that made them driven and eternally young."
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- Sounded fine to me, in theory.
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- I wrote to editor Oppel twice. Hoping for that "still-fierce"
idealism. I thought Rich might live up to his words. At least in print,
editor Oppel sounded a lot like that idealistic New York news editor that
actor Michael Keaton portrayed in an entertaining movie,
The Paper (1994).
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- No response. Twice.
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- I wrote to sixty editors from the San Francisco Chronicle,
Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, South Florida Sun Sentinel,
Austin American-Statesman, Los Angeles Times, St. Louis Post Dispatch,
and the recent Pulitzer Prize winning Toledo Blade before I finally gave
up.
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- I even wrote to the trio of Blade reporters who wrote
that Pulitzer Prize-winning piece about the war in Vietnam. (How The Toledo
Blade came to win a Pulitzer for a Story That Was 37 Years Old).
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- I had hoped that those three award-winning reporters,
Joe Mahr, Mike Sallah and Mitch Weiss might email me back. Maybe write
me that 911 was hotter than depleted uranium (another topic off limits
to the MSM media) and admit that they couldn't touch it. I mean, it took
The Toledo Blade 37 years to focus on atrocities in Vietnam, ignored by
the US media. Imagine how many centuries it might take for
the MSM to focus on 911?
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- The one editor gutsy enough to answer my emails? Jim
Wilhelm from The Toledo Blade. Here's his reply, in part.
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- "Without looking at the 'example,' (links) I personally
don't believe the U.S. media would purposely avoid reporting such stories.
There are lots of reasons information that comes to the attention of a
newspaper or other media are not reported, some of them having to
do with whether they can be properly substantiated through sources and
documents that would stand up in a court of law."
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- Okay. Reasonable response, right? But not even
a smidgen of curiosity to examine the well-researched links I sent? Sadly,
Jim Wilhelm, like all the other editors, ignored the information that might
not "stand up in a court of law," even the very same mainstream
media reports that appeared immediately after the attack but never surfaced
again.
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- Unfortunately, 911 researchers have been clamoring for
just such a court of law. Some in the 911 Truth Movement, like Mike Ruppert
and Jimmy Walters, have even challenged people to come forth and either
sue them or prove their shaky contentions, that 911 happened as the mainstream
media reported it. Walters even promised a million dollars to anyone who
could bring a little PROOF to the discouse, simply saying, "Reopen
9/11 - Catch the Real Terrorists"
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- No takers so far.
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- Wilhelm replied to my fourth question--the one that likely
struck a raw nerve with every editor who works in the US media. Recall,
I had asked: "If you personally became suspicious that 911 was
possibly an inside job--by a rogue element in the government--would you
suppress the story rather than inform, and thus distress, your readers?"
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- "The question--- like most of the others above,
is loaded," wrote Wilhelm. "If I had the resources (for example,
reporters in Washington) I would pursue such a story. I
would not willfully suppress such a story if I had substantiated
information."
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- Curiously, guys like Greg Szymanski, way up in Idaho,
without a huge news organization behind them (The Toledo Blade employs
146 newsroom staff), without a newspaper paying a decent weekly salary
or even a reporter's phone bills, can manage to uncover more substantial
bits and pieces to the puzzle of 911 than ALL the editors I queried.
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- They may not "willingly suppress such a story"
but the truth about 911 may not win any Pulitzer Prizes for, oh, 37 years.
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- Amateur historian and novelist, Douglas Herman writes
regularly for the Worldwide Web, the last bastion of truly Free Speech
and of gutsy reporting. He is the author of the controversial thriller,
- The Guns of Dallas
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