{"id":778,"date":"2004-03-17T18:31:24","date_gmt":"2004-03-17T23:31:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wordpress\/2004\/03\/mount_lebanon_hotel_bombing\/"},"modified":"2004-03-17T18:31:24","modified_gmt":"2004-03-17T23:31:24","slug":"mount_lebanon_hotel_bombing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/2004\/03\/mount_lebanon_hotel_bombing\/","title":{"rendered":"Mount Lebanon Hotel Bombing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier I was watching cable news coverage of the Mount Lebanon Hotel bombing<\/a>. As is typically the case right after a story breaks, there weren’t many details available. I watched for the usual reasons: (1) to survey the scope of the incident, (2) to see if any thing else happens, and (3) to what insightful, strange, or stupid the talking heads say as they kill time. In this case, the scenes of carnage were interrupted by at least two moments of levity.
\nFirst, the anchor was talking by cell phone to a reporter near the scene, who momentarily was exposed to an outburst of chaos. The anchor pulled out the old “don’t put yourself in danger to give us this report” line. It’s really noble for a broadcaster at network headquarters to give the reporter permission to run if hell breaks loose. After all, it would ruin the coverage if the reporter had to move a few blocks to carry on the conversation.
\nThen, for some reason, in the midst of the turmoil the stations flipped over to the vice president so we could listen to him give a speech questioning Senator Kerry’s patriotism. Nothing like the delicious irony of having a split screen with Dick “we will be greeted as liberators<\/a>” Cheney on one side, and the rubble of a bombed out Iraqi hotel on the other. This guy has zero<\/i> credibility when it comes to Iraq. It’s almost laughable that the news channels gave him air time to talk about national security in the midst of yet another Iraqi meltdown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier I was watching cable news coverage of the Mount Lebanon Hotel bombing. As is typically the case right after a story breaks, there weren’t many details available. I watched for the usual reasons: (1) to survey the scope of the incident, (2) to see if any thing else happens, and (3) to what insightful, […]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-778","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"h-entry","8":"hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}