The following is the beginning of a story from The New Republic. I don't believe the whole story is on-line, unless you have access to a magazine database through your public library, such as The Gale Group's InfoTrac (where I copied this snip from):
The New Republic, Jan 17, 2000 p12
Why the press didn't understand Y2K. System Failure. (Brief Article) David Kestenbaum.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2000 The New Republic, Inc.
David Kestenbaum is a science reporter at National Public Radio.
I watched the millennium dawn from the ugly, windowless perch of the government's y2k information center in Washington, D.C. Camped on the tenth floor, surrounded by mountains of food wrappers, more than 100 reporters listened for the whimpers of dying computers. When they never came, the members of the press turned, predictably, on their hosts. The New York Times asked on page one ("Vast Effort to Fix Computers Defended") whether the billions spent by corporations and the government had really been necessary or whether everyone had been duped by profit-hungry y2k consultants.
But, in all the finger-pointing, the media overlooked one obvious villain: the media. That's right, we (and by we I mean, of course, they) share much of the blame. Just about every outlet covered y2k wall-to-wall all year. The number and prominence of these reports, alarmist or not, left the impression that technological apocalypse was possible. In fact, the evidence to justify the hype was never there. Y2k mostly threatened accounting and billing systems, which have to endlessly calculate cash flows by subtracting the current date from one in the future. Unchecked, the bug could have damaged Medicare and Social Security, but not electric power, telephone lines, airplanes, or sewage systems. Sewage systems don't care what year it is. |
