Media Backs off After 9/11

I know we were supposed to focus our response on a news story from right now but I believe that sometimes you need to look back in order to go forward. So keeping with that sentiment, while I was doing my research for this project I found some stories from 2001 that were ignored so I chose to focus on one of them.

Immediately after September 11th the United States media went into lapdog mode. An instant consensus emerged among the nation's editors: now is not the time to ask tough questions. Wrapping themselves in the flag, hordes of journalists shelved their critical-thinking skills, essentially recasting themselves as spokespeople for the U.S. government. Some media outlets were more blatant than others. Reuters reported that bosses at cable leviathan CNN sent a memo to correspondents covering the war in Afghanistan saying, "We must remain careful not to focus excessively on the casualties and hardships that will inevitably be a part of this war, or to forget that it is the Taliban leadership that is responsible for the situation Afghanistan is now in."

No ominous-looking