Silence

My last post concerned the strange tale of the BBC announcing that the WTC7 building had collapsed 23 minutes before it actually did. This news brought forth a 'non mea culpa' from the BBC that also let out the fact that somehow the tapes from that day had gone missing.

Naturally, this proves nothing, accidents happen, even unlikely combinations of accidents happen and the world goes on spinning with its usual aplomb.

But the episode has shown some curious facts about our world, and how it works. The first point is that the story is completely absent from the news media. Both the broadcast and the loss of the tapes are evidently so unremarkable that it can't shake one story out of the MSM. The second point is the silence of the 'big-time' blogs. The powerful Atrios, faced with the mention of it in a comment thread went so far as to start a new thread with the comment:

Because of the goddamn 9/11 conspiracy noise in the last thread. Bleah.

Certainly, 9/11 discussions usually degenerate almost as quickly as Israel/Palestine discussions and if Atrios doesn't want them on his blog that is his right. But the facts in the episode are not in dispute, and there's no need to believe or disbelieve in any theory to wonder what happened.

There are only two bloggers that I have bookmarked (and I have a lot bookmarked) that have
discussed this. One, Postman Patel, who is British, wrote several posts on it in his own inimitable style (here's one), and he has also written about other strange disappearing tapes such as the CATV tapes of 7/7. The other is Wonkette, who has a typically snarky post that still reports accurately what happened and what it's about.

No one else has even mentioned it in passing as far as I can tell , at least up to now. What can we attribute that to?

• Lack of interest
• Fear of being labeled a conspiracy theorist
• Knee jerk belief that there can be no truth to the matter
• Automatic deference to the silence of the MSM

Probably all have some influence, but I think the last one is the biggest factor. Silence is the overriding control exercised by the media. As O. Spengler said about press freedom:

And the other side of this belated freedom- it is permitted to everyone to say what he pleases, but the Press is free to take notice of what he says or not. It can condemn any "truth" to death simply by not undertaking its communication to the world- a terrible censorship of silence, which is all the more potent in that the masses of newspaper readers are absolutely unaware that it exists.

Update: Not one of the diaries at dKos mention this, if the search engine works. There must be thousands of diaries, are these people that well trained, or does the evil and omnipotent Kos prevent them?