BEg2 ch 30 aftermath paragraph 1

[Michael Bailey]

Six paragraphs start the chapter with some reportage.

Paragraph 1:

“If you read nothing but the Newspaper of Record, you might believe that
New York City, like the nation, united in sorrow and shock, has risen to
the challenge of global jihadism, joining a righteous crusade Bush’s people
are now calling the War on Terror. If you go to other sources—the Internet,
for example—you might get a different picture. Out in the vast undefined
anarchism of cyberspace, among the billions of self-resonant fantasies,
dark possibilities are beginning to emerge.”

          So the first focus is on coverage, reportage if you will…and the
first mention is the “Newspaper of Record” which via some interesting
tradition is the New York Times, although the Wall Street Journal and The
Washington Post also are recognized in the category.

 - librarians began referring to The NY Times as such in the early 1900s, &
the Times held an essay contest for people to buttress that nomenclature

https://www.nytimes.com/1927/01/25/archives/wins-times-essay-prize-california-librarian-first-in-contest-on.html
 - not digitized so only the title is legible -

As a newspaper of record, its editorial policy is firmly Establishment
oriented. So it looks to official spokespersons in many cases. The logic of
government policy informs its choice of coverage and its take - and in same
cases, vice versa, although that’s more in the form of suggestions and
opinions in editorials.

The Internet, still a fairly new thing, has no such orientation. Many
people who have never looked to the Newspaper of Record to shape their
worldview now had a forum. However lacking or flawed The NY Times’s
fact-checking and policies w/r/t choices of stories to run with, at least
they had some.

Absent from this first paragraph is TV and radio. No worries, he gets to
that, but perhaps it’s natural for a writer to first look to verbiage. No
matter how in depth pictures and voices can get, there is for some of us an
impact almost always stronger in reading about things.

The nature of the Establishment narrative seems reasonable enough, invoking
familiar themes such as threat - now more immediate - and pulling together
under existing leadership.

The independent viewpoints may outnumber the adherents of the Viewpoint of
Record, but lack organization and official clout. At this point, “dark
possibilities” is the only description given.