Goodbye and good riddance to Chris Matthews

[David Andrews]

4 minutes ago, Anthony Thorne said:

David - regarding Rather’s observations about the buildings and possible bombs on 9/11, remember his office would be targeted with anthrax a few weeks later. Rather avoided the subject after that.

http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/10/22/cbs.rather.anthrax/index.html

I know - but he still said more on 9/11 than Brokaw or anyone else did.  The in-studio coverage of that day is otherwise abysmal.

Edited March 8, 2020 by David Andrews

[Anthony Thorne]

I agree, he did. And I’d probably change the subject too if someone sent me an anthrax letter.

Edited March 8, 2020 by Anthony Thorne

[David Andrews]

The second-best comment in the live 9/11 coverage was black comedy, interjected into the Today show by a Washington correspondent.  So good, I recorded it for posterity:

Announcer: We want to move a couple of miles away [from the Pentagon] to the White House, where Bob Kur is standing by.  Bob, we understand that building has now been evacuated.

Bob Kur: It is utterly surreal.  As soon as word came of the Pentagon incident, we were rather forcefully removed from the White House.  The scene was one of administrators, crooks, whatever, running at fairly high speed out of the building.

+++

EDIT: I had sat through the NBC, CBS, and CNN live 9/11 coverage, and today was compelled to listen to the ABC News coverage.  Absent Dan Rather's commentary on CBS, ABC's coverage was the best, with both Peter Jennings and an on-site correspondent mentioning the resemblance of the WTC collapses to controlled demolition, and Jennings saying when the first tower fell that one had to get to a building's "under-infrastructure" to create a collapse of that type.

Here's an interesting article on how Americans got their news on 9/11/01, compared to today:

https://www.wired.com/story/pagers-pay-phones-and-dialup-how-we-communicated-on-911/

Edited March 9, 2020 by David Andrews

[Anthony Thorne]

I don’t have the name handy while I type into my phone, but at one point I was researching business associates of the neocons and all the closely associated groups. One young lady who was partners with one of them somewhere was new to me. So I Googled her background and worked backwards to see who she was. Turns out on her bio she worked at one of the major TV networks (one of the big three) and was in charge of all the live feeds coming in for broadcast at the network on the morning of 9/11. She was later given an award for all her great work.

Back to JFK, I need to read Mal Hyman’s book. I’ve heard nothing but good things about it.

Dave, could the quote you noted be referring to cooks instead of crooks? Even Pentagon folk need to eat.

 

Edited March 8, 2020 by Anthony Thorne

[David Andrews]

39 minutes ago, Anthony Thorne said:

Dave, could the quote you noted be referring to cooks instead of crooks? Even Pentagon folk need to eat.

 

Well, you tell me - it starts at 1:07:43 in this video.  Thanks for alerting me -- I found out it was Bob Kur reporting, not Bob Kerr.  I have amended my post.  Maybe Bob made a Freudian slip.

There are other slips. At 1:27, Katie Couric: “It looks like a movie, frankly.  Because this is unfolding, and it combines the horror of the TWA 800 bombing and the Murrah Federal Building, because it’s both of these incidents, of course, coming together in the most horrific way.”  Katie seems to think that Flight 800 was a bombing and not a center fuel tank explosion, and she lumps it in with OKC as a terrorist act.  This no matter how hard John O'Neill at FBI worked with CIA to establish that a wiring spark brought the plane down.  So you can be going down like Custer across town, while they tear down your accomplishments at 30 Rock.

Note also that Peter Jennings in the ABC coverage reported a car bomb outside the State Department.  I don't have a time note for that.

 

Edited March 9, 2020 by David Andrews

[W. Niederhut]

3 hours ago, David Andrews said:

I know - but he still said more on 9/11 than Brokaw or anyone else did.  The in-studio coverage of that day is otherwise abysmal.

David,

     I have long believed that Dan Rather well knew, by the evening of 9/11, that WTC7 was destroyed by a pre-planned, controlled demolition.

    You have probably seen this video, and studied the back story about the mainstream media suppression of any coverage of the WTC7 collapse.

    Someone published an astonishing stat a few years ago indicating that only about 5% of U.S. citizens even KNEW that WTC7-- a 47 floor sky scraper that was never hit by an airplane-- had collapsed in a free fall into its own footprint on 9/11!

 

[David Andrews]

I've seen it, thanks.  The version of the live coverage I saw had this moment tacked on the end, after the first two buildings collapsed.

[W. Niederhut]

17 hours ago, David Andrews said:

I've seen it, thanks.  The version of the live coverage I saw had this moment tacked on the end, after the first two buildings collapsed.

   So, in summary, we can reasonably conclude that Dan Rather surmised, early on, that the official M$M narratives about two Crimes of the Century were false.

1)  The Crime of the 20th Century-- JFK's assassination.

2)  The Crime of the 21st Century-- 9/11.

[David Andrews]

3 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

   So, in summary, we can reasonably conclude that Dan Rather surmised, early on, that the official M$M narratives about two Crimes of the Century were false.

1)  The Crime of the 20th Century-- JFK's assassination.

2)  The Crime of the 21st Century-- 9/11.

When Rather gives those video lectures for young journalists, he always stresses how important it is to overcome one's shock and emotional responses and let one's instinct for the story kick in.  When you're Present At The Creation of events, knowing how the butter flew is probably part of all of that.

A young woman from a New York State agency called today about my options as a new senior citizen.  When I pointed out some claims that were in error, she said, "We can only say what they tell us to say."  So, journalism, even in the Kennedy era.  Rather might sniff things out, but was limited in expressive capacity.

Edited March 9, 2020 by David Andrews

[James DiEugenio]

I just read Covering the Body by Barbie Zeilizer.

And it ties in with the whole Chris Matthews act.

One of the major themes of the book is that no other event has the media anniversary syndrome like the JFK case does.

She then added that these anniversaries serve as occasions for the MSM not to explore the event anew, but to reaffirm their own sagacity in covering it and also to reinforce their verdict on it.  They actually use the anniversaries to congratulate themselves on "coming of age" during the JFK assassination, even though they never acknowledged the contradictions in the story as they covered it e.g. the Perry/Clark press conference on Friday afternoon. In other words, they have become rituals of mass denial.

IMO, there were few people more practiced at this than Matthews.

Edited March 9, 2020 by James DiEugenio

[Anthony Thorne]

An earlier version of Zeilizer's manuscript is here in PDF form. The book version obviously looks more readable though.

https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1015&context=dissertations_asc

[W. Niederhut]

3 hours ago, David Andrews said:

When Rather gives those video lectures for young journalists, he always stresses how important it is to overcome one's shock and emotional responses and let one's instinct for the story kick in.  When you're Present At The Creation of events, knowing how the butter flew is probably part of all of that.

A young woman from a New York State agency called today about my options as a new senior citizen.  When I pointed out some claims that were in error, she said, "We can only say what they tell us to say."  So, journalism, even in the Kennedy era.  Rather might sniff things out, but was limited in expressive capacity.

       The way I see it, Dan Rather's disinformation and silence about the JFK assassination and 9/11 is especially inexcusable, because he was in Dallas and Manhattan when both crimes occurred, and HE WITNESSED BOTH SMOKING GUNS-- the Zapruder film, and the video of the WTC7 demolition.

       He, surely, knew that JFK's head was blown back and to the left by the fatal shot from the Grassy Knoll, and he also knew that WTC7 was demolished by expertly placed explosives on 9/11!

      Both smoking guns were largely concealed from the public-- for years.  But Dan Rather saw them from the beginning.

      (And I say this as a guy who always admired Dan Rather-- going back to his famous Watergate era interview of Nixon.)