POST 9/11 DETENTIONS SLAMMED
I was flipping around last night and Chris Matthews' show was debate (if you can say those kind of shows ever "debate") whether or not the media is really liberal or conservative. It began with a snip from liberal comedian Al Franken who noted that the news media has many biases. Corporate, sensationalist, ratings, money, get it first not necessarily right, it bleeds it leads, enterainment over information. Of all the biases, liberal/conservative is one of the least important in terms of impact on how the news is presented. This is a sentiment I totally agree with. This liberal/conservative thing may have been important 10-15 years ago, but with increasing emphasis on "info-tainment" and decreasing emphasis on serious reporting, the alleged leanings of individual journalists is less and less relevant. Journalists may report the story, but how it gets edited is not their decision. Which stories they even do is not their decision either. I've always said that the media bias is reflected less on HOW the report particular stories, but on WHAT they choose to report and what they choose not to report. You can say a reported story is biased or not; but when a story is not reported at all, you can't make any such determination.

For example, last night, I heard and read on the BBC a story about civil liberties post-9/11. They discussed a report by the Justice Department's Inspector General criticizing the manner in which thousands of foreigners were detained. It pointed out that many were detained for long periods of time without charge, until the authorities got around to determining they had no connection to terrorists (which was the case for the overwhelming majority). They were guilty until proven innocent. Many were arrested under the guise of violating immigration law, but they were detained far longer than immigration violators should be. Under US law, the government has 90 days to deport or release detainees. Many of these were held far longer, until the authorities got around to determining they were no threat.

Official response was typical: "We make no apologies for finding every legal way possible to protect the American public from further terrorist attacks," Justice spokeswoman Barbara Comstock said, ignoring the findings of the inspector general that certain procedures were not followed legally. It was also typical in that the most blatant abuses were arrogantly shrugged off: in trying to protecting Americans' freedoms, we can do whatever we want, including assaulting those freedoms, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11.

Anyway, back to my point the media, I heard and read the story on the BBC but the website story was a little thin so I looked around the American media sites. What I found was...

CNN: After several searches, I could not find any article. Apparently, they did not report on this.
MSNBC: Not part of the US news section. I had to do a search for it, only because I knew the story existed in the first place.
ABC and CBS: Story appeared in their main US news' sections.
Fox News: Story appeared in their main politics' section.

I thought this was interesting since Fox is a right-wing station and CNN prides itself on being serious and objective. Yet which one saw fit to run a story on this important report (that happened to criticize the right-wing Justice Department)? Perhaps this is the best argument for preserving a diversity of voices in the media, for ensuring competition in the press. Ironic eh...

See: Report criticizes post-9/11 detentions