The media’s constant emphasis on “live,” “breaking news” and “now” has come at the expense of “then,” — the history and context of events — a veteran broadcast journalist told a campus audience.
And just as it did for the World Trade Center stories of Sept. 11, 2001, today’s television news eradicates lessons learned from previous events that could provide context for viewers, said David Marash, who delivered the 2008 Josh Rosenthal Education Fund Lecture in Weill Hall on Sept. 10.
The annual lecture — coordinated by the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy —commemorates the life and work of Rosenthal, a 1979 U-M graduate who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Marash, whose talk was titled “The Medium is not the Message,” said political and economic considerations are limiting the breadth and depth of news content available to the public, including putting 9/11 into context.
Eight years earlier in 1993, a group of fundamentalist Islamist terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, he said. Their efforts did not create the same devastation as that caused by members of the same group in 2001, but the media generally avoided the connection between those incidents in reporting of 9/11, he said.
Marash said other terrorist plots against the United Nations and New York City bridges, tunnels and subway system — in the name of radical Islam — have been thwarted between 1993 and 2001.
“The news media’s scant backward glances at these pre-cursor events (before 9/11) robbed Americans of the knowledge about an enemy they needed to know,” he said.
Marash, who has nearly 50 years of broadcast journalism experience, said journalists failed to investigate terrorist conspiracies and the perpetrators, and the investigators and prosecutors who defeated them.
“The breakdown had nothing to do with the clarity or fuzziness of the pictures,” he said. “The fault was in the content of the reporting.”
