The missed story in Bostn
: What I really wanted bloggers to do in Boston was find the stories that weren’t being covered. They didn’t, frankly, because there weren’t stories worth covering. That’s why bloggers covered themselves and why the press covered bloggers; it was all that was new. Or so it seemed.
Jay Rosen found the story that was truly missed, a story that is about more than the convention; it’s about America; it’s about the world; it’s about our age and it was right under thousands of noses for news in Boston:
Security. It was all about insecurity, really. It was telling us that we live in a different world than the last time there was a poltiical convention. If there needed to be something “new” to report, it was not, by god, the bloggers. It was this: the reason we needed all this security. It not only spoke of politics, but world politics, and not in an abstact way, but in every way a person can experience life. Hey, what was all this security about? And who authored it? Ultimately, Al Queda did. So things had to stop short of ultimately.
That was a story I think we missed. The unbelievably out-in-force Security–double searches, forced to walk through pens made of wire, and much, much more–was like a stream of data telling us a lot about the state of the nation, the state of the world, and, yes, the seriousness of this election– and of the convention itself, a political event after all….
I think all 30,000 of us missed the story of what the security invasion was telling us about the state of the nation, which is bound up with other nations on the globe we live on, and actors beyond that category, too. But that would lend an out-of-control and unintentional gravity to proceedings that are supposed to be fun and rah-rah….
It wasn’t reported, Jay says, because “it would have required us to admit it: Al Queda also came to the convention.”
And Al Qaeda will be coming to New York next. But then, the reason this is a story is that Al Qaeda lives next to us every day now.
