At an anti-war march in 2003, we chanted a protest song borrowed from an old-time novelty song:

“This is the war that never ends,

It just goes on and on, my friends.

George Bush started fighting it, not knowing what it was.

Now we will keep on fighting it forever just because”

(repeat ad-nauseam)

Unfortunately, it seems that this may be the case.

As we commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the United States is also ending the war in Afghanistan, which began officially in October of 2001, less than a month after the terrorist attacks. I chose to analyze a story about a subject I have dutifully followed throughout the ensuing years, The War on Terror. 

In the New York Times article, published on September 10, 2021,  20 Years On, the War on Terror Grinds Along, With No End in Sight, journalist David Landler brings together the voices of international terror experts, renowned scholars, and former government officials. Together, they look back at America’s protracted conflict and strive to create consensus for why it must inevitably continue. The article’s quantity and quality of sources support a text that reads like a first draft of history.

Mark Landler is a veteran journalist with more than a quarter-century at The New York Times. A thorough reporter and a master of narrative, Landler is also the London Bureau Chief for the New York Times and has covered international economic news for most of his career. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a longstanding nonprofit and nonpartisan think tank. His experience and reputation give Mr. Landler a great deal of credibility on this subject.

The article contains more than a half dozen hyperlinks that expand and support the information being presented, employing the gravitas of the New York Times archives. Additionally, there are two text boxes in the body of the text. One features links to NYT stories about the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. The other contains FAQs about Afghanistan with short answers and embedded links. Throughout the text, Lander fosters a discourse between the sources cited, voices of dissent, and the author’s central claims and evidence. Landler asks the reader to consider the proposition that we are entering the post-post 9/11 period. He concludes that this transitory era requires a certain level of introspection but also a refocusing of our counterterrorism policies to avoid an attack while we are “divided and distracted.”

There were several recent articles on this subject that I could have analyzed, some of which would have aligned seamlessly with my own beliefs. However, breaking out of my bubble has helped me come to terms with my own biases on this complicated subject. Although I still believe that the War on Terror is a misguided policy, I have developed a deeper understanding of why many still envision a war that never ends for the foreseeable future.

The Climate Crisis

News: In the Aftermath of Hurricane Ida, The Guardian published a story whose title borrows a recent quote from President Biden, ‘Climate crisis is here’ says Biden in week of storms, floods and wildfires. This article contained a number of relevant links, including Biden’s White House remarks on the subject, along with other Guardian coverage of the storm’s impact on the Gulf coast and the historic flooding in the Northeast. The text featured several Biden quotes, including his pivot linking Ida’s destructive power and the wildfires out west to create a larger narrative about the need for immediate action. The thrust of the article opens up a wider discourse about the Climate Crisis: how it was talked about in the Trump Era, what steps are being taken now, and importantly, where the stirring rhetoric doesn’t correspond to the administration’s plans to open up vast areas of the Gulf of Mexico to further oil and gas exploration. This is an excellent example of a news story that reports the facts, supports them with in-depth reportage, and furthers the conversation on an important subject.

Opinion: This article published by The Hill, How easily the climate crisis can become global chaos wasn’t readily identifiable as an opinion piece from the link in the Google search results, though it does appear under the Opinion tab on The Hill’s website and carries a small disclaimer beneath the by-line.

Throughout the text, Dr. Jeff Masters makes use of statistics on grain production, a 2015 risk report from the insurance company Lloyds of London on the potential for food shortages and numerous articles from the blog he founded, Weather Underground . He then cites a study that found a correlation between Climate Change and the Arab Spring, a report produced by The Center for American Progress, a liberal leaning research and advocacy organization. Personally, I’d like to see other research that corroborates these findings.

Although I agree with Dr. Master’s methodology and assertions and believe he presents a very compelling argument, it is clear that it is his opinion that “global chaos” is on the immediate horizon and that “humans caused the climate crisis, we can solve it.”

News: In a brief article published by Mother Jones, Basement Apartments Were Already Dangerous. Then Came the Climate Crisis, reporter Nathalie Baptiste looks at Hurricane Ida from the perspective of her “beat”, how marginalized communities are impacted by government policies.

The text makes use of social media accounts including videos and cites a NY Times article on the subject several times. Baptiste also provides rental price data, and reporting from the NY based website, The City to support her article’s claims, that illegal basement dwellings are unsustainable and need to be brought up to code and the urgent need for affordable housing in New York.

The Climate Crisis is a multifaceted “wicked problem” that exposes weaknesses in disaster planning, physical infrastructure, economic allocations, public policies, and the social safety net. So often, those most impacted by disasters are the poor. This article straddles the line between news and opinion. Although it contains little original reporting, I considered it news in the vein of advocacy journalism. The facts, statistics, and reports the author utilizes raise awareness and offer perspective on a well-documented, desperate situation made even worse by the Climate Crisis.

Opinion: This article that appeared recently in the New York Times, To Address the Climate Crisis, Focus on More Than Carbon Dioxide was easily flagged as an opinion piece, since the prescriptive title was a dead giveaway. (It also had the word opinion on the title page) Written by the chair of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, Rep. Kathy Castor (FL14) the text cites data from NASA the EPA and the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. She makes the case that we need to cut not only carbon dioxide emissions, but turn our focus to include methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas, which makes up 85-90% of natural gas and is being released into the environment at every step of its production and use. This opinion piece is meant to inform and motivate Americans to urge their representatives to support upcoming climate legislation as well as increase the public pressure on her Republican colleagues.

8:15 am – Woke Up. This is a much later start than I usually get in the mornings, but my wife let me sleep in. I look at my phone to check the time and my messages. I have 3 notifications. The first, posted just after midnight from CNN announces Kathy Hochul as the new governor of New York. The second, a video from the Weather Channel about a road collapse. I also received a Facebook notification that my friend Gordon had added to his stories. While trying to swipe up to see if there were any more messages, I accidentally clicked on the Facebook alert and I see Gordon and his partner enjoying breakfast on a balcony in Iceland. Normally I would keep scrolling and see what my Facebook friends were up to, but I have to get a move on.

8:30 am – While I am making coffee I open up the notification from the Weather Channel. The road collapse was in China and appeared to be weather-related. I had thought it might have happened in the South, Tennessee or the Carolinas, having driven through the remnants of Tropical Storm Henri last week while visiting my son in Georgia. I don’t get into disaster porn, but I will share extreme weather event stories to highlight the multi-faceted threats posed by climate change. I decided not to share this video since I didn’t have time to research the story or to develop a nuanced take. I check the app for upcoming weather in my area and around the US. There is a tropical wave in Caribbean with a high probability of development. That wave became Hurricane Ida.

8:35 am – I log on to Canvas on my laptop and start organizing my day’s tasks.

9:18 am – That loud sound outside our house is happening again. (No, not the cicadas, the other loud sound.) It’s like a generator with a loose fan belt and it runs day and night for the last two weeks. I google “noise pollution, NJ” to get a phone number and lodge a complaint. I also learn from the search results on nj.com that the Federal Bureau of Statistics finds New Jersey one of the loudest areas on the East Coast.  I call my county office and I’m told that someone will be out to investigate later in the day.

9:30 am – After the phone call, I check my email  – it’s mostly junk mail. I then sit at my desk and open up the book, “Our Iceberg is Melting” by John Kotter, an enchanting fable about taking action when confronted with changing conditions and an assigned reading for my MCO 431-Media Entrepreneurship course.

10:30 am – I put down the book and head into the shower. This is usually the time of day that I catch up with my podcast subscriptions. This particular morning I pulled up a link for an “On the Media” segment titled: The Rise and Fall of Fake News that was mentioned in the article by Claire Waddle, “Fake News, It’s Complicated.” I popped on my waterproof speaker and hopped in the shower.

10:45 am – As both my shower and the NPR segment were ending, an amazing thing happened. The feed switched to a livestream of WNYC where the discussion was the big news in NY – the first day of the new NY Governor, Kathy Hochul. I listened intently as I dried off. I kept the feed going until the top of the hour.

11am-1pm – I read an assigned text from my FMS300 Television Studies class – The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programs by George Lipsitz. It is 35 pages and I take detailed notes.

1pm – I receive news alerts from HuffPost and CNN that Charlie Watts of The Rolling Stones had died. Normally, I would visit those sites for details if the death was unexpected. I knew that he had been ill for quite some time so I simply asked Siri to play some Rolling Stones. (And she did)

1:30 pm – I eat lunch and read through the daily snail mail. I received a violations notice from NY Toll Authorities that my EZ-Pass hadn’t registered when I went through the Lincoln Tunnel. Technology is amazing, when it works. When it doesn’t, it’s a real hassle.

2:00 pm – 4pm – I watched the Module 2 lectures and excerpts of early TV for my FMS300 class. The clips included scenes from The Honeymooners and The Goldbergs.

4 pm – Cooked dinner for the family, and continued listening to The Rolling Stones from my iPhone.

6:00 pm -12:30 am – I go out to drive for Uber. I have SiriusXM radio in car which I leave on a station called Chill, gentle techno beats when I have passengers. When I am alone in the car, I alternate between MSNBC and Netflix is a Joke Radio. I like the fact that MSNBC repeats their evening line up after midnight so I can catch the parts I’ve missed while driving passengers.

1:00 am – I check over my phone before going to sleep. I received a CNN notification that two Congressmen have made an unexpected trip to Afghanistan complicating evacuation logistics. It’s been a long day so I put my phone to charge and turn off the light.

I find that I consume a lot less outside media while I am focusing on my college courses. Somehow the really big stories, like the new NY Governor and the death of Charlie Watts come at me from so many directions, I am compelled to pay attention. In ranking the news media sources I accessed on this day I would rank their credibility on a scale of 1-10 in the following order:

WNYC – 10

The Weather Channel – 9

CNN – 7

MSNBC -7

NJ.Com – 5

HuffPost – 3

I have listened to WNYC and NPR for many years. The Weather Channel is bringing Climate Change information into the mainstream. CNN and MSNBC are reliable, but editorialize too much. NJ.com is very uneven. I used to rely on Huffington Post as a trusted news source, now I simply need to find out how to turn off notifications from them.