South Bend Tribune editorial

Last week, on September 11th, there was an editorial in the SBT by a columnist named Jack Colwell. In the editorial, Mr. Colwell kept saying that Bin Laden must be laughing at us for what he did to our country four years earlier. Apparently, Mr. Colwell has bought right into the official 9/11 story: Osama Bin Laden, the hijackers, they hate our freedoms, and so on.

After everything I've researched about 9/11, I couldn't just sit back and let this guy get away with such a blatantly ignorant, irresponsible article. So I wrote to Mr. Colwell and told him about the 9/11 truth movement. I asked him to look at www.911truth.org and to read The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 by David Ray Griffin. I have yet to hear back from him. I have a feeling I'll be waiting quite a while for any kind of response.

Now, there's an important thing to realize about someone like Mr. Colwell. This man is called a "columnist" by the Tribune. That is very different from a real journalist. A journalist, as I understand the term, is a person who reports the news and is supposed to be informed about the issues he or she is reporting on. A columnist (sometimes called an "opinion journalist") is a person who provides mostly opinion pieces. It's no surprise that these days there seem to be far more columnists writing opinion pieces than journalists doing real investigative news reporting.

I can't help but think about something the author David Brock said in Outfoxed, the recent documentary about Fox News - he said that Fox News and other right-wing outlets like talk radio, for example, have been trying to turn all journalism into a matter of opinion, because opinion can't be proven false. This is a very scary development.

Picture the average person reading Mr. Colwell's opinion piece. The average person knows nothing about 9/11 truth. He reads the opinion piece, which does nothing to further his knowledge about 9/11. It simply reinforces the official story, and it raises his indignation level with repeated quotes like, "How Osama must be laughing at us..." What's the result for this average guy? What's going on is his mind? Here's what's going on: a perpetual closed loop of non-information and a mindless desire for revenge, violence, and war. And that's exactly what's intended.

This is not good. Here's Colwell's opinion piece:

http://www.southbendtribune.com/stories/2005/09/11/opinion.20050911-sbt-MICH-B10-Who_gets_last_laugh_.sto