[wordup] Our Incompetant Media

[Adam Shand]

From: Jon Callas <jon at callas.org>
To: The Eristocracy <Eristocracy at merrymeet.com>
Subject: Our Incompetant Media

[Editor's note: Of course, for those readers who are not in the US, "our"
doesn't refer to you. I considered changing my headline so as to avoid the
sort of parochialism described here. But it would be meta-parochialism to
assume that only the US media is parochial. -- jdcc]

Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 12:46:28 -0500
From: Earl Wajenberg <earlw at mc.com>
Subject: Anthrax around the world

I heard a news story on the morning commute, saying that American media
were increasingly inward-looking, shorting foreign news. As immediate
confirmation of this, I discovered the following in Alistair Cooke's
"Letter From America," a weekly column he writes for the BBC.  I had no
idea -- from American news sources -- that anthrax letters had been sent
to any but American targets. (Though I do have to admit that Cooke is
referring to a story from the New York Times.)

Earl

From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/letter_from_america/default.stm

The headline read: "From Berlin to Brazil - the anthrax letters" and there
followed only one of 10 separate stories - there are times when it's less
than a pleasure and a pride to reflect that the New York Times has the
largest and most unmatchable team of overseas reporters of any paper on
earth.

This one story summarised the new truth. In, at last count, 16 countries
there had surfaced letters with powder identified as anthrax.

And in hundreds of thousands of offices and public buildings around the
world, no longer only America, the office workers, the staffs, the
parliamentarians, were being evacuated and tested.

And by now, I suppose, millions of harmless surprised civilians are
wearing surgical gloves to handle mail.

Germany's White House was evacuated. Four buildings in Paris. Canterbury
Cathedral.

Alert evacuations, gloves, masks distributed in Mexico City, in Leipzig,
in Ottawa, a computer parts building in Holland.

Powder on a newsstand caused, on Sunday, the shutting of Vienna's
international airport.

Of course some of these, many, must have been hoaxes - what a marvellous
new and simple way open to lunatics who want to terrify a community.