Raise your hand if you smell horseshit

*
NPR, my picture window into the corporate media bordello, has been flogging the marathon bombing story all week despite the fact that one of the suspects is as dead as bacon and the other one is in tighter custody than The Joker (Chechnyan pun intended). You see, it's just desperately important that we find out how Tamerlan was radicalized as long as there's some way we can link it to his overseas travel a few years ago. Because if we find that out, then we have a genuine case of "international terror" by "Muslim radicals." And that would give authorities to deploy killer drones in US skies under a plan that even the libertarian Rand Paul can approve of (see paragraph 5).

Since it's still somewhat early in terms of crafting the official marathon bomber narrative, it's a good time to observe how the process works. News editing decisions help to create a bias toward an official narrative by highlighting certain facts (or rumors or unsourced assertions) that support it while ignoring other facts that don't fit the story line. And so this week the storytellers are busy composing a portrait of vicious, desperate international terrorists who had New York City in its sights next. The trouble with that story line is this and this. Have any of you heard, via mainstream news media, that there are good reasons to ask whether our present-day Saccho and Vanzetti really were planning to take their pressure cookers to Manhattan? I haven't. Yet mitigating facts are right out there in public, non-obscure reporting channels like The Boston Globe and Esquire.

And furthermore, how about this: despite initial media reports depicting a teenage Chechnyan desperado shooting it out with police from his bunker in a Watertown, MA, drydocked cabin cruiser, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was not armed when he was captured. He was halfway shot to pieces, though. My point isn't to second-guess how police do their jobs in a situation like this, but to second-guess the editorial judgments being applied. Those judgments make sense to me only as intentional decisions to shape and burnish a narrative.