by PETER HART
Someone wanted to set off a bomb at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day parade in Spokane, Washington. Luckily the suspicious bag holding the bomb was spotted, which likely saved lives. As the Washington Post reported today:
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Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News wonders why the story hasn’t received more media attention, particularly as a case of what would appear to be domestic terrorism.
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There’s a fairly well-documented history of media playing down domestic terror threats that don’t involve Arab or Muslim conspirators. Those that do are treated differently; there are plenty of cases where law enforcement stepped in long before such plans were operational– and yet much of the media coverage would still refer to them as a form of terrorism. The attempted Times Square bombing might be the closest analogy, and that received widespread media coverage, much of which called it an attempted terrorist attack.
In this case, it doesn’t seem like the media want to call it terrorism– or even news, for that matter. NBC Nightly News did a segment on the bomb plot yesterday, but anchor Brian Williams said this at the end of the report:
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