The Truth is Out There

Opinionjournal.com's James Taranto attends a panel discussion on the media. Here's his report.

'Truthers' Are Stranger Than Fiction
LOS ANGELES--Saturday afternoon found us at UCLA for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, where we had been summoned from New York to sit on a panel discussing "the future of news" with L.A. Times editor Jim O'Shea and ABC-TV's Mark Halperin. The moderator was the Times's foreign editor, Marjorie Miller. All agreed: The future of news is uncertain, though the Web is likely to be an important factor.

The audience questioners, though, were a hoot. One woman brought up the famliar left-wing trope about the dangers of corporate control of the media. She told Halperin she worried that Disney, which owns ABC, dictated the network's news coverage, especially during the run-up to the war in Iraq. After Halperin assured her that this was not the case, we chimed in: "Why the hell would Disney want to go to war in Iraq? It doesn't make sense." She looked chastened and returned to her seat.

Then there were the "truthers," members of a cult that believes 9/11 was a government conspiracy. They are easy to spot because they all wear black T-shirts with pictures of the twin towers and slogans like INVESTIGATE 9/11. (We encountered some of them near Ground Zero on Sept. 11, 2006.)

Two truthers, a man and a woman, were standing in line to ask questions. The man prefaced his by saying, "I'm not going to ask the 9/11 question again." (We don't remember what he did ask.) When it was the woman's turn, she went into a long disquisition about how FDR had advance warning of Pearl Harbor, and "buildings don't fall at 10 stories a second," and finally she asked, "Where is our Bob Woodward to bring the story out?"

Our answer: "Rosie O'Donnell."

The woman started speechifying again and finally was shouted down by the crowd, which was strongly left-leaning but apparently not insane.

When you think about what the truthers are saying, it makes even less sense than the Disney-invaded-Iraq theory. They want us to believe that the government staged 9/11 and is now using totalitarian means to cover it up. But if the government were really suppressing dissent, these people would be in prison, not walking around in public wearing T-shirts identifying them as dissidents.

Unless. What if the truthers themselves are in on the conspiracy? Maybe they are agents of the government who deliberately act crazy in order to discredit the idea that it is a conspiracy.

As one of our fellow panelists put it, "So far, it's working."