As glad as I am that the crisis in Boston has been resolved, it could've been worse, thanks to the hair trigger snap judgment of the New York Post.
Never has yellow journalism been so blatantly obvious as it was in the Post earlier this week, when they falsely accused Salah Barhoum, without so much as formally accusing the young man, of being one of the Boston Marathon bombers, just because his attire matched the description of one of the suspects. Editor-In-Chief Col Allan, in Friday's New York Daily News, said his paper was standing by its story. Then again, they also initially stood by ridiculous claims that 12 people, not three, were killed in the explosions, and that a supposed "Saudi national" was in custody, without completely checking the facts. Talk about putting the cart out before the horse!!
Barhoum, though, has some company in a historical sense. 17 years ago, Atlanta security guard Richard Jewell was wrongly accused of being involved in a bombing during the Summer Olympics. If Jewell can recover from this bout of misfortune, so can Barhoum, though I'd not be surprised at all if his family decides to file a slander/defamation suit against the Post and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, for dragging the poor kid through the mud without getting all the facts before them, just in a rush to print a story.
In the end, it falls on Allan for failing to do diligent research to get those facts straight, likely because of the credo that "controversy creates cash". Not in this case, as not everyone bought into the Post's pack of lies. Allan not only gets the Weasel ears, but a Dunce Cap for being so ignorant of protocols in relation to his job and reality in general.
2 comments:
I'd hold off on those weasel ears for Allan.
I've been following various internet media on this and being in the media biz myself, I'm very suspicious of the coverage and the info provided thus far.
First, where is the claiming of responsibility? Actual terrorist bombings are typically followed with a claim by the group that did it. We have no such claims here.
Two - the desire for the bombers to be "white". Weasel ears are deserved for Chris Matthews (MSNBC) and David Sirota (Salon.com) who actively hoped the terrorists were white [Tea Partiers] rather than blacks or Arabs.
Three - how clear and quick the pix came for the suspects, one of whom was dead rather quickly.
Fourth - That Saudi national was deported, meaning he wasn't supposed to be here. He was connected to a powerful Saudi family back in the old country. I find it suspicious blame is suddenly redirected elsewhere. According to my sources, while in the hospital, he was asking "how many did we get?" How do we know he wasn't in cohoots with the Chechen suspects? The Blaze was also reporting that as many as a dozen people had died. Numbers are easy to manipulate. The explosions looked bad and I'm surprised so few are reported as dead.
There is a lot more than the government or the media is letting on.
It took three days after the bombings for clear-cut pics of the suspects to appear, once they got through all the misdirection and confusion.
Since I don't bother with the political channels overmuch, I hand out the ears based on what I see in the papers more often than not.
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