“You know things really are getting back to normal when cable news networks break into Osama bin Laden coverage to bring viewers a good old-fashioned car chase,” wrote Lisa de Moraes in The Washington Post of November 8. Actually, it was a truck chase—or the chasing of a truck by police cars in Dallas-Fort Worth: a stolen tractor-trailer with a load of lumber that had caught fire. The local Fox News affiliate sent its helicopter up to film it in spite of the FAA’s ban on news helicopters within a twenty-two-mile radius of major metropolitan airports. In any case, the helicopter in Dallas wouldn’t have been much use for reporting on Mr. bin Laden, who has been remarkably stingy with the sort of visuals that most viewers in the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area are at all likely to want to see.
Not to disagree with Miss de Moraes, but on another page of the same day’s paper, I thought I saw an even better sign of the return to normal: a headline reading “Television’s Talking Heads Lack Female Voices.” Like Fox News, The Washington Post was back to the really important things in its life. Paul Farhi’s story complained that the on-air “experts” consulted by the network news teams about the war in Afghanistan included few women, so that unsophisticated viewers might suppose that “Almost all of the people who seem to know anything are men.”
Of the 98 weekend “public affairs” programs whose guest lists were
