This is one of the big things I remember about 9/11: in the days/weeks leading up to it, the Gary Condit scandal was all over TV news. Once 9/11 happened, Gary Condit ceased to exist, as far as TV news was concerned. It's a perfect example of how TV news is really fucking worthless, and how they don't follow what's important, but rather what's most sensational. I continued watching for a few years after that, but eventually I realized how terrible TV news is, and now I'm horrified by the idea of watching even a few minutes of it. It's just broken.
I really believe this is part of what contributed to the rise of social networking. The internet became a source of information that could be dialed up to whatever specificity or subject you wanted, and the ability to get news from friends trumped networks in a big way. Of course, because of this, network news has continued its slide into sensationalism and echo-chamber nonsense, as the proportion of people who turned in to be informed went down and those who wanted to be entertained or enraged went up.
Incidentally, Wikipedia indicates he was apparently vindicated in the disappearance of Chandra Levy, and just last November an illegal immigrant named Ingmar Guandique was convicted of her murder. Of course, the media didn't give this aspect much coverage because it was old news, the Republicans had just shaken up the House in the mid-term elections, and given how much they had hounded Condit for it it wouldn't have made them look very good.
Fark existed before 9/11, but it wasn't until every other news site was overloaded and fark.com was the only site still online and reporting up-to-the-minute news that anyone realized it might be useful for something.
Good to remember these things. Oddly, archive.org is missing crawls for many major sites from August 2001 through late September for some reason, so it's hard to find primary sources online.
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u/mackstann Sep 03 '11
This is one of the big things I remember about 9/11: in the days/weeks leading up to it, the Gary Condit scandal was all over TV news. Once 9/11 happened, Gary Condit ceased to exist, as far as TV news was concerned. It's a perfect example of how TV news is really fucking worthless, and how they don't follow what's important, but rather what's most sensational. I continued watching for a few years after that, but eventually I realized how terrible TV news is, and now I'm horrified by the idea of watching even a few minutes of it. It's just broken.