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Thursday, September 12, 2019
OPINION
New York Times remembers 9/11 as the day airplanes became sentient and killed 2,000
by Becket Adams
| September 11, 2019 10:51 AM
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It is not even noon yet on the East Coast, and the New York Times has taken first place already for the worst take on the 18th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks:
EELiMdDXYAYap_q.jpeg
(Screenshot via Twitter)
I count at least two problems in this since-deleted tweet. First, there is no mention of who carried out the 9/11 attacks or what motivated them. That is like writing a headline memorializing the Aug. 3 El Paso, Texas, mass shooting and not once mentioning that there was a white nationalist gunman involved.
Second, and I hate to be the one to say this, airplanes lack agency. They did not take aim or crash themselves. The terrorists flying them did.
In case you think the Times’ bizarre choice of words Wednesday morning is due to the limitations of Twitter, I am here to disabuse you of that notion. The report that this tweet linked to, titled "Remembering Those Lost 18 Years Ago on 9/11,” had all the same issues.
The article's second paragraph read originally, “Eighteen years have passed since airplanes took aim at the World Trade Center and brought them down.” There were also no mentions of the words “terror,” “terrorist,” or “terrorists" anywhere in the body of the story as it appeared originally on the Times’ website. The closest the report came to mentioning the ill intent behind Sept. 11 was when it said Mayor Rudy Giuliani “was heralded for his leadership as mayor of New York when it was attacked.” So at least there is an admission that it was an attack, although there is no explicit admission that it was an attack by people. It might as well have been an earthquake. In its original publishing, the report's sole mention of "terror" appeared in its subhead but nowhere in the story itself.
I am not alone in thinking this is all rather absurd. The Times editors appear to agree, at least once scolded. The article now includes at least two references to terrorism. The report's second paragraph now reads, “Eighteen years have passed since terrorists commandeered airplanes to take aim at the World Trade Center and bring them down.”
Considering the role that terrorism played in the attacks, and the way in which terror shaped U.S. foreign and domestic policy for the next 18 years, it must have taken the writers more effort not to mention terrorism in an article detailing Sept. 11 memorial events than to mention it. And the readers, unwilling to spend so much energy blinding themselves about the story, had to point out the problems.
You just have to wonder to yourself: What is the motive behind all that effort?
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