While many media outlets were faulted for playing down antiwar protests after the attacks, "Democracy Now!" covered such events extensively.
An employee who became a loyal friend and confidante of Mrs. Reagan, Mrs. Sawyer complained that the news media were quick to find fault with the first lady.
She believes the media is at fault, too.
This type of venue has no place in the political arena, and both the candidates and the media are at fault for allowing themselves to be manipulated into giving legitimacy to, in essence, a religious event disguised as political discourse.
In which case, just as the media is at fault when it provides terrorists with precisely the publicity they crave for their acts of violence-as-PR, the media must accept some responsibility for the way in which a fun, weird story about clowns tipped over in some cases into actual violent assaults.
The tendency among the many PR operatives who work for the likes of Comcast and AT&T (and who have been especially active this month denouncing Crawford's book on Amazon and in other media) is to fault excessive regulations: If only we unchained the invisible hand of the marketplace, they argue, then the American Internet would be numero uno.
Because it's so much easier to place blame, I believe that the media are partly at fault for creating this perceptual gap.
State-run media are reporting that a "fault in optical fibre cables" disconnected the beleaguered Middle-Eastern nation from the rest of the digital world.
That a bogus story spreads on social media isn't mainstream media's fault; social media is practically designed to spread bogus stories.
But Christie has to be watching what's going on and thinking that he's going to get attacked, and if he's not absolutely perfect in defending his positions, the media is going to magnify whatever faults are exposed.
