BIG IDEAS

If you haven’t checked out Brian Gilmore’s brilliant piece on Dr. King, Vietnam and the relevance to Iraq, you should.

To make the point even more, listen to the link below of the full version of King’s anti-war speech, which won him more enemies than all of his prior civil rights activity combined.

King On Vietnam

More stupid FBI tricks from the peopel who brought you an attempt to overthrow Castro by putting beard remover in his soup. According to boingboing.net, The FBI, in an apparent attempt to catch terrorists, started tracking falafel sales in San Francisco. The idea being that a rise in falafel sales might signify an increase in sneaky illegals from the Middle East entering the country and buying fast food.

What’s the logic here? I mean, does the increase in taco and Dorito sales at 2 a.m mean there are more people smoking weed, for instance?

Oh, wait a minute…

OK. Never mind.

As they’ve felt compelled to do for the last six years, MSNBC is running their live September 11 coverage from 2001 in real time. This rebroadcast of the Today Show’s 2 hour coverage comes on again tonight at 10pm.As the years pass and we know more (or still very little, however you see it) about the event, looking at NBC’s coverage makes you really wonder about the ramifications of the 24-hour live news dynamic.

That day was stunning, and six years later many of the memories of that moment do come back. That’s especially true if you’re from DC, Pennsylvania or New York near the areas where the planes hit. But even more stunning is re-watching the sausage-making experience of seeing normally professional reporters look for real truth and real news in an atmosphere of rumor and utter chaos. Do we really need to see this?

Reports of non-existent car bombs. Ron Insana from CNBC doing an in-studio interview with dust still on his suit and in his hair when the dressing room is no more than 20 feet away. A breathless and flustered Ashley Banfield holding up a charred piece of paper that came from the fall of 1 World Trade Center. Ten minutes of a bomb outside the State Department that never materialized. Ridiculously bad.

Still it’s Must See TV, if only to view this train wreck of American journalism. In the two full hours of reporting (guessing), only a handful of actual facts come out that can now, six years later, be verified: (1)Two planes hit World Trade (2)it was coordinated (3)they were hijacked (4) the towers were on fire (5) they fell. Everythiing else spoken for that time is hyperbole, speculation and emotion. From now on there needs to be a standard line for these kinds of news events, “We know nothing, but until we do, we’re showing you this live video of [event goes here] until we have the facts.”