Perspective

Charley Reese on Lew Rockwell.com brings us the isolationist perspective. He has some good points. I too wonder why the media and their readers do not get upset over 90,000 traffic deaths and 12,000 murders that occured during the same year as 9-11. It's all about perspective.

Perspective, as any artist can tell you, is depicting objects in their proper relationship to one another. Thus, objects that are closer to our eye appear to be larger than objects that are at a greater distance. While artists mastered perspective centuries ago, modern news media still have great difficulty reporting events in perspective.

I enraged one of the Fox News chatterers while a guest on his show by accusing him of being a fearmonger on the subject of terrorism. I pointed out that the same year terrorists killed 3,000 Americans, ordinary criminals murdered 12,000, and the usual 90,000 or so died in accidents. For some reason, he thought that was an outrageous statement.

Actually, it's just putting matters in perspective. We are all in far greater danger statistically when we drive than we are from any terrorist act.

If the American news media reacted in the same way to the deaths of more than 100,000 people wiped out by tsunamis in Asia as they did to the attack on the World Trade Center, then they would all be talking about how the earthquake had "changed the world forever." They won't, of course, because the tragedy occurred far away from them and involves primarily Asians and European tourists. We in the news business are xenophobic to the extreme. It wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to imagine a headline that said, "Seven Americans, 100,000 Others Killed by Tsunamis."