While unpacking the groceries Thursday evening I listened to “On Point”, the daily talk show produced by Boston NPR affiliate WBUR. The guest was Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi activist, author and intellectual. The broadcast was as sad and depressing as Iraq itself.

Throughout the hour the host harangued Makiya. I have no problem with confronting a public figure with his words from previous interviews – words that have proven tragically wrong in many cases. But the interviewer mostly ignored Makiya’s repeated admissions of regret and error and ignored his attempts to describe what has obviously been a period of wrenching introspection. Makiya still thinks invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam was a fundamentally moral act – he compared it to the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. He appears to be still trying to work through how he so badly misjudged his fellow post-Saddam Iraqi political leaders – some of them men Makiya had known for decades.

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Walking through a hotel lobby over the weekend I paused to watch a few minutes of “Bulls & Bears”. This Saturday morning fixture on Fox News is a business show devoted to helping viewers turn each week’s news headlines into profits on Wall Street. After a few minutes I heaved a sigh and moved on.

The anchor was hyperventilating about terrorist doctors, specifically the ones alleged to have been involved in the recent London and Glasgow bomb plots. My sigh was partly because interest in this issue seemed to begin only when it emerged last week that two of the London Terror Doctors had also applied to work here in the United States. But it was mainly because of the media’s sad, if predictable, mishandling of the whole thing. In fairness to Fox, I should mention that they were far from alone in this regard. The previous evening NPR, too, had run a long segment along the lines of: ‘Oh my God! How can doctors become terrorists???'

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