The Downing of TWA Flight 800 by James Sanders

The Downing of TWA Flight 800 by James Sanders

Author:James Sanders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pinnacle Books
Published: 2013-07-18T00:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER ELEVEN

This Is Journalism?

As far back as October 1996, just a couple of months after the crash of Flight 800, the inherent weakness in press investigations had become painfully apparent to me. It wasn’t that the investigations themselves were flawed—nothing’s perfect—but that there had been what looked like a paradigm shift in the way journalist coverage was conducted over the past few years, so that it was tougher to get a story out in the traditional mainstream press than it used to be. There was a climate of fear in the air, fear of government reprisals, fear of lost ratings because the news was unpopular, fear of exposing “hard news” to too many people in TV land, and fear that the truth itself was somehow toxic to the American audience. Newspapers themselves were fighting to stay alive, faced by competition from locals and low-overhead regional’s, the tabloids, and even the national news magazines which presented digests of the news in easily swallowable nuggets. None of this is meant as criticism, only a description of the kind of landscape I believed I had to walk across the more I realized I was on the trail of a story that nobody wanted to break. And over the years, television journalism had become simply an echo chamber that repeated stories its viewing audience wanted to hear because it supported their own belief system.

Without becoming too disingenuous in criticizing it, I think journalism in general has become so fixated upon instant news and the constant new instant lead story, they’ve become reluctant to rely on the building up of a base of facts, continually analyzing and drawing from that base, adding to it when evidence is confirmed, and withdrawing when it is not correct. Accordingly, journalists assume that a fact in July is not a fact in October unless they have continued to receive a stream of information. It’s a poor method for getting at the truth but a great deal for the “unnamed government sources” whose reason for being unnamed sources is to function as a corps of spin doctors misinforming the press whenever necessary so as to create a new set of facts to alter the truth to fit the needs of their own bailiwick within the bureaucracy. Just take a look at how inside leaks today can move the news cycle along in directions that those overseeing the leakers want it to. And that’s what happened fifteen years ago in the wake of the downing of TWA 800.

As investigators grappled with the possibility that the only explosive device aboard the TWA craft was the jet’s own nearly empty center tank, other investigators on the crash of TWA Flight 800 were examining several explosions on the U.S. military planes in which mechanical problems ignited fuel tanks. Whether anyone asked the sources disclosing the story to the press just why they believed the mechanical theory should supersede all other theories and precisely whether the analysis of previous types of mechanical explosions had shed



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