I would not call this "well-read". I would call anyone who gets news from these sources alone "brainwashed tools of the Left". (But no one ever accused me of being careful about what I say.) And no, it would not help to add the Seattle Times. : )
I would tell the friend who accused you of being a racist that if he is comfortable overriding common sense at a time like this, he is perfectly welcome to do that - but expecting someone else to check their brain at the door when it could be a matter of life and death is completely unreasonable. He is, of course, welcome at any time to demonstrate his warm feelings of inclusiveness for thirty-something Muslim men who are not citizens of this country by say, putting his wife and kids on an airplane where men fitting that profile are aboard and staying home himself.
You might remind your friends that racial profiling, while uncomfortable and unfortunate for innocent people who are inconvenienced and/or embarrassed by such things, is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. Something worse is losing three of the best and brightest black Washington D.C. school children, who believed they were going on a field trip to California but were instead flown against their will into a corner of the Pentagon.
We're all experiencing discomfort right now. The discomfort we feel losing our feeling of security regarding air travel is, I dare say, just as bad as having someone ask you questions at the airport. Knowing when you or your wife or your child boards a plane that it could be used by terrorists to kill you and people on the ground, or shot down by fighter jets - gee, I don't know - I think it ranks right up there with being asked to find another means of transportation besides air travel on the discomfort scale.
I would not call this "well-read". I would call anyone who gets news from these sources alone "brainwashed tools of the Left".
In fact, commercially profitable "News" is a form of nonfiction entertainment and as such in and of itself is inherently superficial and negative.
Superficial, because written to a deadline rather than to the satisfaction of the writer. The best-written journalism is inevitably superficial compared to the most hastily written book. If "there's nothing more worthless than yesterday's newspaper," then how much can today's newspaper really be worth?
And we are or ought to be so alert to the negativity of journalism as to see through the joke. The whole point of it is to scare you into not ignoring the paper.
The combination of superficiality and negativity is anticonservative, inherently. Tending, in fact, strongly toward cynicism. Journalists protest their independence of liberal politics, but what if the liberal politicians simply parrot the journalistic line? If so, journalists would have to work to seperate themselves from the liberal politicians. And journalists are far too lazy and cowardly for that. If a group of blind men find an elephant, one is supposed to touch the trunk and find it resembles a snake, others to touch legs and find resemblance to trees, and so on. But in fact if the first blind man declares "snake", the others will trim their report to avoid contradicting the first report--especially since "snake!" is an alarming report that gets everyone's attention. So the liberal politicians propose snake control programs into perpetuity because journalists run in packs.