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I woke up this Saturday morning listening to NPR "correspondents" stitch together a narrative of Boston Marathon international intrigue with Scotch tape and John McCain's used dental floss. As far as I can tell, an NPR "correspondent" does no actual reporting, but spends his or her workdays gleaning bon mots from think-tank experts, corporate spokesmen, and politicians speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The two suspects immigrated to this country from Chechnya (when the youngest was 8 or 9), you see, so therefore they must have been Muslim sleeper agents. It doesn't matter to the liberal NPR that no verified fact in the public domain indicates any foreign connection other than the suspects' country of origin and one trip to Russia by the older brother to renew his passport. Or that no third-party financing or logistical sophistication is evident in the known facts. Or that evidence known to date link only the older suspect to radical Islamic thought (via YouTube content)... and only within the past 5 years or so.
Meanwhile, NPR dutifully informs us that even though Boston police say the public threat has ended, Federal officials are likely to use a "public safety" exception to the surviving suspect's Miranda rights in order to grill him for "intelligence" (not "evidence") without a lawyer present. Then, implicitly accepting that possible approach to American law enforcement as legitimate on its face, they inform us that Senators McCain and Lindsey Graham are demanding that the surviving suspect be tried as an "enemy combatant."
Watch how this unfolds. I think it is an excellent opportunity to observe how corporate media assemble a narrative for the public. It is a feat of rhetoric, not news reporting. Techniques for producing a mass-media news narrative include the unwarranted emphasis of some facts over others; the omission of certain facts that don't fit the emerging narrative; unsupportable extrapolation from known facts to serve as a sort of roadmap for fleshing out the consensus narrative; injection of purported facts from anonymous sources; and so on. Watch how the coverage plays out and pretend you're the front-page editor for the Fifty50 Daily Pap-Smear---ask yourself where each presented fact came from, whether there are conflicting facts on the record, whether the item presented is a sourced fact, an opinion, or a speculation.
Also, ask yourself why officials and corporate media were reluctant to call the Boston Marathon bombing an act of terrorism until the suspects could be publicly branded as foreigners.
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Well, the immigrant haters are going to have a hard time pegging these guys as anything other than "Caucasians". And another bit I've not heard yet-- what guns did these guys have and where did they get them?
ReplyDeleteWe'll have our congressional hate-mongers spouting off about immigrants and immigration reforms (even though these were long-term, legal, white immigrants from Europe, just as Donald Trump prefers). Yet the same hate-mongers aren't going to "reconsider" their actions to kill any regulation of guns or gun ownership over this story. We are ruled by fucking imbeciles.
Let's throw a couple other things on as well: based on what is actually, factually known at this point, as you point out, these guys seem more akin to junior high kids who light cherry bombs in toilets on a trip to the state capitol than terrorist masterminds (yeah, I know, their bombs were a lot bigger and they knew they were going to hurt people). But pointless mayhem-- that's a very stupid story, so yeah, let's patch together a more meaty, interesting, product-selling version.
Also-- this morning in a NYT editorial, the first (I've seen) discussion of how the stupid, obnoxious anti-govt obsession in a place like Texas accounts for so much of the damage done in that fertilizer explosion. I'm still looking for the story pointing out how the hated, incompetent govt. procedures and personnel led to the quick, effective response to the original bombing on Monday and the subsequent efforts to find and apprehend these guys. That was tax money in action, assholes. Not acts of charity from local churches or gifts from big-hearted, "efficient" corporations. The corporate contributions to all this? Pretty much the media crap your posts have lit into.
Kinda wondering why you even still waste time on NPR. They've killed it
No, sorry: no one including me thinks of blowing up an IED as the same thing as a juvenile prank with a loud firecracker. I didn't imply that at all. My reaction was more along the line of Charlie Pierce's, which was that this even seemed to resemble Columbine more than an international "terror plot." The older brother obviously had his share of problems with personal alienation and violence. Many possible alternate motivations on the older brother's part suggest themselves.
DeleteSo an unthinking, immature "prank" gone wrong? Imitate (so called) the real thing and scare people? Very hard to believe, for one given the apparent running battle later with guns and bombs. Even in Young Male Stupid Land the devices described sound like they could be lethal. At least so far haven't herad of video games but would at least include on the alternate make-pseudo-narrative-sense list. Without pushback just watch: category creep will encompass all acts of violence. Knives and guns brandished to solicit wallets and purses, or Sat night bar fights (watch the quiet one, not Mr. Motor Mouth) will increasingly become conspiricies with attached terrorist meaning. Miranda will grow a long beard, and the stubble is already showing.
ReplyDeletePaul Drake
"Category creep" is a useful term. But it's still pretty striking to see that the term "terrorism" is pretty much never applied to caucasoid American gentlemen such as the shooters at Columbine, Tucson, Aurora, and Sandy Hook. I wonder why.
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