Boston strangler marathon bombing tea party

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I'll confine my contribution to the story of America's Bombing with a few stray notes about media coverage of it that I haven't seen in writing yet.

First, I'll look for some Beltway celebrity pundit to declare that during the "national tragedy" in Boston, the social media "came of age." Specifically, I expect someone to compare the Reddit crowdsourcing detective forums as well Facebook and Twitter sleuthing to how television news reporting "came of age" on the day JFK was assassinated in Dallas. The contribution of Reddit editors is certainly significant and worth considering, but celebrity commentators are always compelled to turn one thing into another, well known thing that we all can relate to. I'll leave the topic (for the moment) by stating that any such comparison is shrinkwrapped horseshit.

Second, instead of regurgitating all the corporate media reporting failures this past week, not limited to CNN and Murdoch's New York Post, I'll point to a really competent aggregator of confusing and contradictory breaking news reports: Greg Mitchell's Pressing Matters blog. He has been way ahead of other aggregators I follow (such as TPM and Huffington Post), pulling together news from a wide variety of sources and commenting minimally to provide a professional, old-school journalist's interpretation. Most of his remarks are directed at helping the reader to avoid overinterpreting the reporting or to point out examples of bad journalistic practice. I only noticed one or two ham-handed quips in all his liveblogging over the past 2 or 3 days.

Third: Boston was not on "lockdown," as all media were breathlessly reporting this morning. I say this because the use of that term is nonsensical. You can't put a city on "lockdown"! As far as I can tell, no curfew was declared either: the police told people in Boston and environs to stay off the streets and to "shelter in place." Both seem to be sensible recommendations. And I'll add that the phrase shelter in place is a legitimate term of art for terrorism and hostage-type situations. The use of lockdown, though, is an example of what I see as a creeping compulsion by media and their slavish consumers to glamorize every aspect of life as if it were an action movie or made-for-TV drama. The news, you see, becomes much more thrilling to consume if described in terms of entertainment programming. I think of it as a social disease---an infection of real culture with the virus of mass media narrative. In my lifetime I've seen journalism migrate from (1) traditional news reporting, to (2) finding the "story" in the news to "help" the audience understand, to (3) intentionally communicating durable "story lines" to which facts are fit and cherrypicked against. This last stage is The Narrative. Many media and political scholars argue that the narrative long predates my perception of memory of it, and I wouldn't argue against that. But I think my basic point here remains intact.

Last: NPR's so-called counterterrorism correspondent on All Things Considered tonight, "Dina Temple-Raston," behaved like a colossal douchebag by repeatedly telling everyone how taking the suspect alive was a top priority in order to get "intelligence" from him about "the plotters," with thick implications that we already know that the bombing was a coordinated foreign terrorist operation. No verified fact reported so far remotely supports that kind of language; everything that I've read and heard up to this moment indicates that two guys created some crude antipersonnel IEDs out of household materials and may have had their getaway car in queue for work at a body shop as late as Wednesday morning. Some plot! It may actually turn out to be true, but even the liberal NPR should know that it's best to wait for some facts to emerge before extrapolating too far along The Narrative.