The Media’s Double Standard on Jumping to Conclusions

The Media’s Double Standard on Jumping to Conclusions

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The first response by the media to any act of violence is to blame it on shadowy right wing forces. Despite a complete absence of proof, journalistic wunderkinds like Luke Russert rushed to assert a connection between Tax Day, Patriots Day and the bombing of the Boston Marathon even though the connection was so tenuous it was hardly there.
The evidence that was amassed however pointed the other way. There is a Saudi student in custody and being questioned. There is a search out for another foreign man with dark skin and an accent. 364 Ocean Avenue, the building searched by police, appears to have a sizable number of Muslim tenants.
Those aren’t definitive proofs, but they’re far more definitive than the presence of some Newtown family members at the Boston Marathon. If there was any speculation to be made, it would point in the direction of the familiar threat of Islamic terrorism.
The Boston Marathon attacks had similar characteristics to some Al Qaeda attacks, including multiple timed explosions to inflict as much human damage as possible and it resembled some of the bomb plots that the FBI and law enforcement authorities had broken up over the last few years.
Nevertheless many people on the right chose not to jump the gun and counseled waiting until all the facts are out. Meanwhile the media brought on talking heads spewing the usual hot air about right wing extremism.
This isn’t anything new. Every time an attack happens, the media pushes its right wing conspiracy while pretending that Muslim terrorism doesn’t exist. When the perpetrator is Muslim, then the media reverses course and pretends that Islam is not a factor. Even when all the facts are in, then the media urges us not to jump to any conclusions.
Obama, the master of not jumping to conclusions, declared that a Christian filmmaker was responsible for Benghazi and had him locked up, but avoided calling multiple bombings at a public event an act of terrorism. He refused to give medals to American soldiers murdered at Fort Hood by a Muslim terrorist who had been in contact with Al Qaeda leader Anwar Al-Awlaki because it might influence that terrorist’s case.
There is one kind of conclusion that you can always jump to and one kind that you are never supposed to reach no matter how many facts are in.
The right-wing devil is always on the table. Islamic terrorism never is.