Everyone has a part to play, including you, informed citizens!

Movies routinely take us to other worlds apart from our own, and when willing suspension of disbelief is in place, offer great enjoyment. We can travel the galaxy, witness ax murders, and share beds with beautiful people. That ability, to fantasize, ought to be in place as we read and watch news.

Here are two snippets, the first a summary from Boston news media that I noticed at Huffington Post after the Boston Bombing Hoax:

It’s a list of casualty reports from Boston area hospitals after the supposed bombing. I look at things like this and only wonder how they pull it off. There were no real victims other than the Tsarnaev brothers, and now Ibragim Todashev, all of whom represented a real and present danger, but not to us.

Here’s another snippet:

It’s a page from a Homeland Security manual on running mass casualty drills, one of which was in operation in Boston that day. I snipped it from Memory Hole Blog. In such a drill, everything is to be treated as real, including the actors imitating casualties and the responders who deliver them to hospitals and clinics. The Boston area hospitals indeed reported casualties, and the news agencies picked them up as real. Everyone is merely doing their part. Most workers at Reuters or ABC News did not know the event was fake. But a few did, the ones we call “moles,” or government agents posing as news personnel. They exist in every large news organization, perhaps even small ones at this late date. Their placement is critical.

Consider, for example, the innocuous and inoffensive, housebroken and clueless Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. I would not regard any of her writing to be a threat to national security, but Times reporter Mark Mazetti did. He got hold of and forwarded an advance copy of one of her columns to the CIA for review. Here’s Times managing editor Dean Baquet:

“I know the circumstances, and if you knew everything that’s going on, you’d know it’s much ado about nothing. I can’t go into in detail. But I’m confident after talking to Mark that it’s much ado about nothing. The optics aren’t what they look like.”

I take him at his word. He can’t go into detail. I believe him in this regard even as I regard his journalism creds as bogus.

Memory Hole Blog is run by James Tracy, who is, to the best of my knowledge, effectively banished from the mainstream as a conspiracy theorist, and who is not in any American sense a “journalist.”* I’m just warning you, so that when you visit his blog you will know to suspend disbelief, if only for an instant, before resuming your roles as informed citizens. And don’t worry – he’ll soon lose his job. Our society does not long tolerate honest inquiry. He’s part of a fringe.
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*I find it interesting that plain old “reporters” are now “journalists,” as if the professional embellishment were a cover for absence of combativeness and an inquiring nature. When did that change happen?