Patterns of failure in responses to the Boston bombing

[tangaroa]

The New York Post blamed the wrong two people on its front cover. They also got a wrong death count on an earlier cover.

Many news organizations issued false reports on the Internet in the race to be first with the story. The new information cycle is aptly described as "Worse information, faster."

Several news organizations ignored, downplayed, or denied the bombers' religious motivation. These included PBS, The Los Angeles Times, Politico, and the Associated Press, and MSNBC. One common form of such dissembling was to invent justifications to blame the United States for the bombing. In one schizophrenic instance, ProPublica correctly reported that the bomber is an Islamic extremist and then deleted comments that agreed with the article (notice all of the people replying to "Gea"), so what's left of the comment section is full of people blaming the bombing on the United States. Many people in high places have denied the obvious religious motive after it became known.

Several news organizations blamed conservative Americans for the bombing.

The Reddit community's attempt to identify the bombers completely failed and they accused the wrong people.

A bunch of people rushed to judge the Saudi they first arrested guilty before any information came out, but these were mostly blogs and not major media, and mostly the same blogs that would generally rush to judgment on this sort of issue.

There are already troofers claiming that the attack was faked. Among the worst:

• There is a grassroots populist movement to release the surviving bomber.
• Mike Adams at Natural News claimed the bombing may have been staged by the government because the bomb squad detonated suspicious packages after the bombing.
• Paul Joseph Watson at Infowars accuses the FBI of a cover-up for having cleared the private security guards at the marathon.

Every major news outlet that gave the Boston bombing round-the-clock coverage while not reporting on the twenty car bombings in Iraq that same day failed journalism.

Edit May 8: Certainly worth a mention is the push to refuse to Mirandize the surviving bomber, which included included a Yoo-like legal opinion from the FBI claiming that the "public safety exception" -- allowing the police to question a person when there is an immediate pressing need and no time to provide a lawyer -- could be extended for two days or more, while the prisoner was under control and a lawyer could have been provided at any time. Many Republican bloggers latched on to this one, along with the supposed conspiracy of the judge Mirandizing the prisoner as federal court procedures required.

Jester has noted that some of the troofers are friends of the bombers.