CNN’s “Yellow Journalism” Hits New Low

CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper 

It looked just like an infomercial, but with a lot more frowning.

In an example of Orwellian newspeak, the CNN show The Lead with Jake Tapper took on Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth over its decision to distribute information pamphlets outside the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at Ground Zero in New York City. The pamphlets mimic the design of the “official” ones, but instead of the official story, they contain key scientific forensic evidence indicating that the three World Trade Center towers were brought down with explosives and incendiaries. Unlike the official version, the photo on the cover of the AE pamphlet shows the Twin Towers and Building 7.

The Tapper report is a hysterical compendium of all the empty slogans and anti-conspiracy-theory talking points that make up the mainstream media’s continuing attack on the 9/11 Truth Movement. It didn’t take more than a couple of seconds into the report to see how Tapper was going to play the story.

He tells us that “the conspiracy group” AE911Truth plans to stand outside the museum and hand out fake museum pamphlets that look exactly like the real ones. The volunteers handing them out are described as “so-called truthers,” and the whole exercise is labeled an “affront to the victims’ families.”

“Can’t these people give it a rest for one day out of respect for the families?” an exasperated Tapper queries, adding that the 9/11 memorial is “sacred.” Indeed, since 9/11 itself, the grounds have been transformed from a place of truth-seeking to a pathologically sacred shrine to “not asking questions about 9/11.”

Tapper contends that truthers are using the opening of the museum as an opportunity to spread their lies about the attacks. He reads from the AE pamphlet: “Welcome to the other 9/11 story,” but then adds, “the false one.”

Of AE, he says: “Of course they don’t prove anything except for man’s capacity to believe crazy things and man’s insensitivity to, for instance, the families of the approximately 3,000 people killed at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in a field in Pennsylvania by Islamic terrorists with al-Qaeda, as every credible investigation has actually proven.”

I’m not sure if he’s talking about the 9/11 Commission Report, which even commission members have called a “cover-up,” or the NIST report, which the 2,100 technical and building professionals with Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth have shown to be rooted in fantasy, not science.

Tapper had on the air as his guest Emily Bazelon, a senior editor of Slate magazine, whose job it was to help Tapper figure out just what is psychologically motivating all these “truthers.”

She says, “Usually, with a conspiracy theory, you imagine that people are trying to make sense of the senseless. But with 9/11, we have a real conspiracy called al-Qaeda. And so, one has to imagine that the anti-government motivation of the 9/11 truthers is really what’s driving this. Because if you could imagine the government made up 9/11 as a hoax, then the government is completely monstrous, and there’s no reason to believe anything any federal official says, and certainly no reason to pay your taxes.”

Wow. This “journalist” does a lot of imagining.

First, she admits that her pet theory about making sense of the senseless (which we hear regularly from the official story apologists) doesn’t fit the situation. But that doesn’t deter her, as her remarks then take a turn toward the surreal. In her world, if you don’t unquestioningly swallow whole the story of Islamic terrorists with box cutters, then you must think every government official is in on it, and therefore you don’t have to continue funding that government.

Perhaps Ms. Bazelon, who seems to pluck her theories out of thin air with absolutely no basis in fact or evidence, could provide us with even one example of a 9/11 truther whose views have their genesis in an anti-government sentiment or in a desire to avoid paying taxes. I wonder if either Bazelon or Tapper could come up with anything at all to back up anything they say in this report.

Still frowning, Tapper asks, “What happens when this nonsense hits the echo chamber of the Internet?” This prompts more incoherence from Bazelon:

“You see these dark corners of the Internet where people pile on, and there’s this minute parsing of the technicalities of the supposed evidence, and more and more detail gets added and accumulated, and it kind of feeds on itself,” she responds.

Huh? Is that sort of like saying that people on the Internet examine all the evidence and accumulate and discuss their findings? Perhaps if the mainstream media did some examining of evidence, then the truth about 9/11 might be clearer to everyone by now, including their viewers. But that doesn’t appear to be their role in this scenario.

Not to be outdone, Tapper risks straining himself with some political analysis.

“Historically, we see that these conspiracies come after very upsetting events like the Kennedy assassination, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. – is there a pattern there?”

Could it be that people get upset by conspiracies to kill public figures for political reasons, and they get just as upset when the government and media collaborate in covering them up? And could it be that one of the reasons these events are so upsetting is that the conventional explanations for them are so transparently fraudulent?

Furthermore, these explanations are always wrapped in phony emotion so that the rational doesn’t have to be addressed. Do we all see that pattern? Our “journalist” friends would have us believe that the only appropriate way that we can and should react to an event like 9/11 is emotionally. The museum itself focuses on the heroism and the emotion of the day – whatever it takes to stay away from the facts, which overwhelmingly contradict the paper-thin official story.

Tapper attempts to clarify just what truthers are actually saying:

“And the idea here is not just that the three buildings were destroyed by explosives, but that it’s all part of this grand conspiracy where the U.S. government – and let me state, if I haven’t made it clear enough, none of this is true, this is all just crazy talk – that the U.S. government faked it, killed all these people intentionally, and it was just to start a war in Iraq and another one in Afghanistan. Is that the idea they’re going for here?”

Here’s where even Bazelon has to admit there were some problems with how the Iraq war started.

“That’s the idea, and just to state it is to show how horrifying it is. I suppose that given that the American government did put forward some false ideas to motivate going into Iraq – in particular the whole idea that there were weapons of mass destruction there – that’s the tiny, tiny kernel of truth that is in some way related to this completely crazy theory.”

“Some false ideas.” Bazelon can’t even bring herself to state that the government lied to the American people to go to war. She minimizes the importance of these “false ideas,” which have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and she makes sure to get the word “crazy” in there to counter her subtle admission that the war was started under false pretenses.

Up to this point in the report, the really big gun hasn’t been brought out, but Tapper takes care of that with his predictable accusation that truthers are motivated by anti-Semitism.

“There’s also a lot of scapegoating with the 9/11 truther stuff,” he says. “There’s anti-Semitism, anti-Israel, anti-corporations.”

Anti-corporations? Is that exclusive to 9/11 truthers? Are we to understand that being critical of corporations now pegs one as a conspiracy theorist as well? From her place in the official story echo chamber, Bazelon responds:

“Exactly. And I think you see these virulent strains that are related to each other from familiar right-wing talk, and they all get weirdly braided together in this particular theory.”

The anti-Semitism charge is a common one, and it seems to be thrown at truthers more and more often as time goes on (the theme of “contagion” with the term “virulent strains” is also a part of this). The physics of 9/11 are not anti-Semitic; neither is anything else on the popular 9/11 Truth Movement website, AE911Truth.org.

During his recent Canadian tour, AE911Truth founder Richard Gage, AIA, was interviewed by Sun News journalist Michael Coren, who accused truthers in general and Gage in particular of believing that all the Jews were told to stay away from the World Trade Center on 9/11. Coren even used the word “virulent.” Of course, Gage has never made such a comment (I covered this in two recent articles on my blog, Truth and Shadows, here and here). All the same talking points that we see in the CNN piece were there in Coren’s report.

This propaganda masquerading as news is actually a carefully crafted attack on anyone who questions what the media tell us and on anyone who is not satisfied with the official cover-up of 9/11, and it is far from the only recent example. Newsweek, for example, has just produced a cover story ominously entitled, “The plots to destroy America.” In this attack on “conspiracy theorists,” we are told that it goes beyond craziness and insensitivity – that public health and public policy are threatened by those who question the official line.

It seems that those of us who question 9/11 must be making progress if the mainstream media have to pull out this kind of propaganda against the Movement. It also seems that the purveyors of the 9/11 official story may have assumed enormous risk in deciding to enshrine their story in a museum of glass, steel, and concrete, because now they have given the Truth Movement a focal point on which to direct their efforts to expose the fraudulent events and criminal perpetrators of 9/11.

Craig McKee is a journalist and the creator of the blog Truth and Shadows