Blame the media. Very interesting online article in The New Republic. It wonders why, if we're going to blame administrations for, in hindsight, giving too little attention to warning signals, we don't extend the blame to media. The media shapes out what issues matter to the people. And, like the administrations, media companies are avalanched with too many issues to cover--thus, they choose. That choice has consequences. Here are the first two and the last graphs:

On June 25, 2001, one of those infamous warnings rattled down the wire. Aides to Osama bin Laden were promising attacks against United States interests "in the coming weeks." Officials handled the threat in a way that now sounds familiar: They ignored it. But unlike other similarly discarded warnings, this one isn't currently under investigation by the 9/11 Commission. That's because it didn't appear in a CIA memo or a Presidents' Daily Brief. It was a story on the Associated Press wire, datelined Kabul and attributed to a Dubai-based cable channel. And the officials who didn't pay attention weren't spooks; they were foreign editors, who must have seen the story as thinly sourced and terribly obscure. The three big, agenda-setting national papers--The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times--all passed on the story.

The 9/11 Commission's work has forced Americans to think about their government's decisions in the months and years leading up to 9/11. But if it is legitimate to scrutinize the work of politicians and policymakers in hindsight, then it is also legitimate to ask similar questions of America's biggest, smartest intelligence agency: the media itself. It was the press, after all, that--unlike the CIA--managed to get its employees into Afghanistan before 9/11. These were not-so-secret agents like ABC's John Miller, who caught wind of bin Laden's designs in 1998, simply by asking the terrorist leader what he was planning. "If the present injustice continues with the wave of national consciousness," bin Laden replied, "it will inevitably move the battle to American soil. ... This is my message to the American people."
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Yes, government officials had access to information journalists didn't have. And yes, their jobs are to protect U.S. citizens. But journalists, too, know what's going on in the world; sometimes they know what's going on in the world better than government officials. No one, of course, would argue that journalists could have single-handedly stopped the attacks--only that a determined campaign to keep Al Qaeda on Page 1 of The New York Times or The Washington Post might have pushed policymakers to take the threat more seriously. The worst that would have happened? Well, it couldn't have seemed nuttier than the Times's drumbeat of Augusta National Golf Club stories. So blame Bush and Clinton and Rice and Freeh and Ashcroft. But if you do, blame us too.