A Dot Calm book review

FEET TO THE FIRE: The Media After 9/11
by Kristina Borjesson

As reviewed on AlterNet (www.alternet.org/mediaculture/29833/) by Laura Barcella

This book asks America's top journalists for insights on why post-9/11, pre-Iraq War news coverage was so shoddy.

From a telephone interview Barcella conducted with Borjesson, here are some salient quotations:

The bottom line for me is to try to examine the best journalists out there, and see what it is about them and how they go about doing their work. And in the course of it, I just exposed a lot of stuff.

The thing that I found really profound was that there really was no consensus among the nation's top messengers about why we went to war. And I still don't think the American people are clear about it.

The other thing that I found interesting was looking into why their reporting didn't get the kind of traction it should. The reason why their reporting didn't get traction was because their reporting wasn't on television.

The other thing that was very clear in the pre-war phase was that the relationship between the White House (the executive branch) and the public, and the executive branch and the Congress has changed profoundly. Walter Pincus mentioned that.

There were plenty of nonmainstream media outlets reporting the real story. But I was trying to look at the most powerful outlets I could find that were doing a good job. And basically what I'm doing with this book is bringing these people to the public's attention and saying, forget about Chris Matthews on Hardball. Go ahead and watch Hardball if you want, but if you want the real nuts-and-bolts reporting, go to Knight Ridder. Look at what John Walcott, Jonathan Landy, Warren Strobel are doing.

There is so much more to Borjesson's "FEET TO THE FIRE." It was not unpatriotic of her to ask pointed questions. It will not be unpatriotic of us to read the book.