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'Terror Returns'–but When Did It Go Away?
Boston and the Right-Wing Media's Collapse

'Terror Returns'–but When Did It Go Away?

By Jim Naureckas
April 16, 2013 

"TERROR RETURNS" ran across USA Today's front page (4/16/13) in inch-high letters. Below, the story it referred to had a smaller headline: "That Post-9/11 Quiet? It's Over."
Rick Hampson and Chuck Raasch's story began:

The blasts on Boylston Street were felt across the nation, shaking and sometimes shattering a fragile hope–formed slowly in the years since 2001–that maybe it won’t happen here.
Not again.
Then it did.

But what happened in Boston that hasn't happened since September 11? All we really can say with confidence so far is that somebody tried to kill a large group of people; as USA Today (12/19/12) itself has reported, such mass slayings are alarmingly common in the United States, with 774 people killed in 156  incidents between 2006 and 2010. "Mass Killings Occur in USA Once Every Two Weeks," the headline pointed out.

If one makes the assumption that the slaughter in Boston was politically motivated, and therefore meets the definition of terrorism, it's still far from unique in post-September 11 America.  The Southern Poverty Law Center has a lengthy list of right-wing terrorism incidents since the Oklahoma City bombing, more than half of which occurred since September 2001; Wikipedia has a list that's less extensive but more ideologically diverse. Among the incidents that you would hope that reporters covering a possible terrorism incident ought to recall:

• The anthrax letters that killed five people in late 2001.
• The two people shot at the El Al ticket counter at the Los Angeles Airport in July 2002.
• The Beltway sniper attacks that killed 10 people in the D.C. area in October 2002.
• The shootings at the Knoxville Unitarian Universalist Church that left two dead (killed by a gunman who  explained that he "wanted to kill…every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book [100 People Who Are Screwing Up America]"–FAIR Blog, 3/11/10).
• The assassination of George Tiller in May 2009.
• The crashing of a plane into the IRS office in Austin, Texas, in February 2010, killing two (including the pilot).
• The Times Square bombing in May 2010.
• The attempted bombing of the Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane, Washington, in 2011.
• The Sikh temple massacre in Wisconsin, which killed six in August 2012.

This is just a small sampling of the violent political incidents since September 11. It's hard to see how you could have a hope, however fragile, that terrorism "won't happen here"–unless you weren't paying attention.

Scott Shane in the New York Times (4/16/13), meanwhile, didn't seem to be paying attention to what he was writing in the same story when he wrote:

The bombing of the Boston Marathon on Monday was the end of more than a decade in which the United States was strikingly free of terrorist attacks, in part because of far more aggressive law enforcement tactics in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Both this lead and the headline, "Bombings End Decade Without Terror in U.S.," were contradicted by the body of the piece, which quotes a terrorism expert as saying that "the post-9/11 decade saw about 40 percent fewer attacks in the United States than the decade before the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington." Sixty percent as much terrorism does not make for a "decade without terror," obviously, nor does it make the United States "strikingly free of terrorist attacks."

The headline and story were later re-edited to make them less inaccurate; now its "Bombings End Decade of Strikingly Few Successful Terrorism Attacks in U.S." and "the end of more than a decade in which the United States experienced strikingly few terrorist attacks." But it's still not clear what Boston would be the "end" of; if terrorist "success" is measured in body counts, the anthrax letters, the beltway snipers and the Sikh temple massacre were all more "successful."

The fact that journalists assigned to cover this story could fail to remember that political violence has been part of the United States landscape for the past decade and more is testament to a narrow definition that dismisses right-wing domestic violence as not really terrorism–and to a will to believe, for partisan or psychological reasons, that George W. Bush "kept us safe" after 9/11. The reality is not so comforting.

Boston and the Right-Wing Media's Collapse

By Eric Boehlert
April 19, 2013

Prefacing his comments by insisting he knows "how foreign affairs work," Glenn Beck on April 18 announced that his website, The Blaze, was breaking news about the Boston Marathon bombing: A Saudi national student on a student visa and was "absolutely involved" in the Patriot's Day blast was being deported by the U.S. government for security reasons.

Beck went further, claiming the student, or "dirt bag," as the host described him, was "possibly the ringleader" in the bombing that killed three people and injured more than one hundred, and the government was deliberately covering it up.

Beck urged listeners to spread the breaking news via Twitter and Facebook because, he warned, the mainstream media would ignore the revelation. But the right-wing media would pick up the slack. Fox News' Sean Hannity helped launch the story on April 17 and continued to fan it yesterday, claiming the student had previously "been involved with a terrorist or terror activity," while a swarm of right-wing sites pushed the paranoid tale. 

By making his wild allegations, Beck was asking listeners to ignore the fact that law enforcement officials had previously, and repeatedly, denied earlier right-wing media claims that the Saudi student had been taken into "custody," or was in any way responsible for the blast. 

Indeed, officials at Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security both soundly denied the story, explaining that there were two different Saudi nationals: one recovering in a Boston hospital who had witnessed and been injured in the explosions but was not a suspect, and another in ICE custody who was unrelated to the bombing investigation. Beck responded by calling for President Obama to be impeached for what he considered the sprawling government cover-up that now surrounded the student, Saudi Arabia and Al Qaeda.

So yeah, it was that kind of week for the right-wing media. It was a debacle.

In the same week that Pulitzer prizes were announced honoring the finest in American journalism, many in the far-right media worked to set news standards in mindless, awful behavior in the wake of the Boston attack.

Faced with covering the most important American terror news story in a decade, too many players opted to just make stuff up. Prompting witch hunts, they cast innocents as would-be killers and then couldn't be bothered with apologies.

It was a memorable week in which the conservative media's highest profile newspaper, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, seemed committed to getting as many stories wrong about the Boston attack as possible.

The hapless Post somehow managed to completely botch the simplest Journalism 101 fact of how many people were killed in the Patriot's Day attack. But hey, according to beleaguered Post editor Col Allan the Post tried its best and that's all that really matters. (It would've taken a "crystal ball" to get the story right, Allan now complains.) So no, there doesn't appear to be much introspection unfolding inside Murdoch's daily; a big-city tabloid that managed to get wrong, for days, a breaking crime story.

Yes, CNN this week was forced to concede mistakes when it  reported sources had informed the news channel that arrests had been made in the case. But CNN quickly, and publicly, corrected the errors. Those unfortunate miscues happen when reporters let a be-first mindset trump the more important be-right standard. What we saw from portions of the far-right press this week however, was completely different; they almost couldn't have gotten more stories if they had tried.

Of course Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham used the terror attacks to push her partisan agenda about immigration reform. (This, before she knew anything about the suspects.) Of course chronic Obama critics like Fox News host Oliver North attacked the president for traveling to Boston to attend a prayer service for the terror victims; to try to help comfort the rattled city. And of course Fox News couldn't wait more than five minutes after that prayer service concluded before inviting Stephen Hayes on to criticize Obama for how he'd handled the issue of gun legislation.

That's what anti-Obama programming looks like and Fox News saw little reason to alter that chronically caustic approach this week.

What was truly stunning though, as highlighted by irresponsible rants about the Saudi student, was the aggressive push by key conservative media players to simply concoct stories about the breaking news event.

Back to Beck:

I believe this is possibly the ringleader, this guy is absolutely involved, and we are flying this dirt bag out of the country because he has connections and we are covering up.

Keep in mind, this was after unethical right-wing bloggers had already harassed the Saudi bombing victim online, publishing his name, home address, and what they claimed were Facebook pictures of the 20-year-old Saudi national student. The same student police had cleared of any implication in the blast. (His only crime this week appeared to be his Saudi origin.)

And who led the early crusade against the bomb victim? Murdoch's New York Post, which erroneously reported he was a "suspect" who had been taken "into custody."

The same Post, of course, which then made headlines by irresponsibly splashing on its front page a photo of two local men at the marathon finish line, one a high school runner, and putting them under the headline "Bag Men," strongly suggesting they were involved with the terror attack. They were not. But that didn't stop ethically-challenged blogger Jim Hoft from referring to them six times in one report as "suspects" in the deadly blast.

"Grossly irresponsible" and "egregious" were some of the descriptions media pro's used to explain the Post's shocking performance this week. As one journalism professor told Media Matters, "It does appear that the Post, there is something crazy going on there."

Trust me, it's not just the Post.