Next Time Maybe They’ll Listen

Not exactly true, I thought. Greeley’s gone easy on the biggest culprit of all–the media. My mind was bent by an article I’d read a day or two earlier, Harold Evans’s infuriating piece in the November/December Columbia Journalism Review that began, “We were warned.” Evans’s story–which was headlined “Warning Given…Story Missed: How a Report on Terrorism Flew Under the Radar”–told the dismal fate of a 150-page study three years in the making. The study’s authors could not have been more distinguished nor their assignment more vital, he said, yet the media largely ignored it.

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »

The report, Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change, was made public last January 31 at a press conference in the Senate’s Mansfield Room. To make sure reporters understood what they were getting, the commission also scheduled private briefings. How did the media respond? “Network television news ignored the report,” Evans wrote. “So did the serious evening news on public television. Only CNN did it justice….The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal did not carry a line, either of the report or the press conference.” Evans wrote that the commission’s executive director, a retired four-star air force general and former Vietnam war POW, “watched in disbelief as the Times reporter left before the presentation was over, saying it was not much of a story.”

I went on-line to revisit the self-absorbed era when Road Map for National Security appeared and vanished. It turned out that the Tribune didn’t even run its own story on the study: it lazily picked up the Los Angeles Times’s instead, shortening it by about 25 percent. But then I spotted something else in the Tribune archives, a January 30 mention of the New York trial of “supporters of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden” accused of blowing up the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998–an act one defendant had called a “martyrdom operation.”

Embracing its 25-year time frame, Road Map declined to specify mortal enemies who might be here today and gone tomorrow. Because the whole report can be found on-line (at www.homelandsecurity.org), it’s easy to search, and I searched for al Qaeda, al Qaida, and bin Laden. Nothing. For Islam and Muslim. Nothing. For “passenger jets” and “air safety.” Nothing.

Last September John Cherwa, the Tribune’s assistant managing editor for sports, made an astonishing admission. “I wish that my reporters had the fire in their belly that a lot of the Sun-Times reporters do,” he told Chicago magazine’s Steve Rhodes. “Without them, my reporters, God love them, would be even more lethargic than they are now.”

News Bites