Media hysteria grows over Boston bombing

Barry Grey: On Wednesday, two days after two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding 178, the media coverage of the tragedy reached new heights of sensationalism and outright hysteria. The cable news networks, led by CNN, churned out one rumor after another, most of which quickly proved to be false. They set the tone for the rest of the corporate media, which at one point reported that a suspect had been taken into custody, only to have the report denied by Boston police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Despite repeated media claims that a suspect had been identified in video recordings of the bomb scene and promises of a joint press conference of federal, state and local officials to announce a major breakthrough in the case, the day ended as it began, with no suspects identified, no one having claimed responsibility, and no public information as to who planted the bombs or why. The press conference, which was supposed to include Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and FBI investigators, never materialized.

Norman Solomon: The Orwellian Warfare State of Carnage and Doublethink - After the bombings that killed and maimed so horribly at the Boston Marathon, our country’s politics and mass media are awash in heartfelt compassion — and reflexive "doublethink," which George Orwell described as willingness "to forget any fact that has become inconvenient." In sync with media outlets across the country, the New York Times put a chilling headline on Wednesday’s front page: "Boston Bombs Were Loaded to Maim, Officials Say." The story reported that nails and ball bearings were stuffed into pressure cookers, "rigged to shoot sharp bits of shrapnel into anyone within reach of their blast." Much less crude and weighing in at 1,000 pounds, CBU-87/B warheads were in the category of "combined effects munitions" when put to use 14 years ago by a bomber named Uncle Sam. The U.S. media coverage was brief and fleeting. One Friday, at noontime, U.S.-led NATO forces dropped cluster bombs on the city of Nis, in the vicinity of a vegetable market. "The bombs struck next to the hospital complex and near the market, bringing death and destruction, peppering the streets of Serbia’s third-largest city with shrapnel," a dispatch in the San Francisco Chronicle reported on May 8, 1999.