9/11 honour and dishonour roll, v. 2.0

Originally published at http://backofthebook.ca/2010/11/22/our-911-honour-and-dishonour-roll-v-2-0/4233/

By Frank Moher

Time to update our 9/11 Honour and Dishonour Roll. Some fine qualifees have presented themselves in recent months.

The original idea of the list was to record for posterity those news organizations that have or haven't done their job in covering 9/11. You'll find that roster here. For this iteration, I'm expanding it to include individual media types -- columnists, hosts -- as they've been the busiest truthers or obscurantists of late.

As noted before, entrants may appear on both lists. And, as always, suggestions for additions are invited.

The 9/11 Media Honour Roll

Geraldo Rivera (Fox News). After walking in lockstep with his fellow Fox News hosts for years (see Dishonour Roll below), Geraldo recently allowed as how "the most obnoxious protestors in recent years may be right." Welcome to the right side of history, buddy. Hope you stick around.

Eric Margolis. In an entry on his website, the former Sun Newspapers columnist calmly laid out some facts and asked some questions about 9/11, for which he received a sweaty attack from the National Post's Jonathan Kay (see Dishonour Roll below). Perhaps notably, Margolis did not speak out about 9/11 until after he was fired by the Sun chain, but better late than etc., etc.

The 9/11 Media Dishonour Roll

Geraldo Rivera (Fox News). Having given Rivera his props, we may as well show you his "Oh get a life" moment with those "obnoxious" protestors back in 2007.

Jonathan Kay (The National Post): Kay puts on a good show of objectively contemplating the 9/11 Truth movement for purposes of a forthcoming book, but Margolis's column (see above) caused him to drop the pretense. Kay has also averred that he "just can't get [his] head around the possibility of any kind of 9/11 truth conspiracy being true," which is about as pathetic a starting point for a journalist as can be imagined.

Evan Solomon (CBC): Back when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the UN a simple truth -- that there are numerous theories out there about what happened on 9/11 -- Solomon followed-up by asking a guest on his "Power & Politics" chatfest whether there was any point in trying to reason with a guy like that. (I paraphrase from memory; sorry, the podcast is long gone.) Apparently, Evan is still stuck back in Geraldo-pre-2010 mode: don't bother with facts; just go straight for the conventional wisdom.

We liked him better doing arts news.