What if There Was a Coordinated Group Terror and Murder Campaign Against Gays Living In America, and The Media Didn't Report It?

It's not a hypothetical.

Noah C. Rothman provides the facts of the case, in which a group of men, led by a Ali Mohammad Brown, used the hook-up phone app "Grindr" to arrange liaisons with gay men, before Brown murdered them. (I do not know the extent of the accomplices' involvement.)

Ali Mohammad Brown is a "strict Muslim," according to one press account, and according to prosecutors, was murdering people for terroristic motives, as part of a "bloody crusade" against the US government as vengeance against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Apparently he chose gay men as among the most unrighteous of all possible terror-murder victims.

Did you know any of this?

I didn't.

This is a story tailor-made for the national press but, rather than highlighting it, the opposite has occurred. It seems that the press has sanitized the actions and motives of Brown and his two accomplices. He was not simply a murderer and a criminal, though he was most certainly both of those things. Brown was also a terrorist who targeted a specific group of victims based on their sexual identity. It is quite uncharacteristic of the press to understate those two facts.

Brown's killing spree seems like it should be considered hate crimes at the very least, if not overt acts of terrorism. Why, then, has it not been presented in that fashion in the press?

Some press accounts do paint a full picture of these crimes, but others, Rothman says, sanitize the story for reasons which I assume are all too obvious.

But this is not a national story, definitely! Certainly there is no great chatter about it, no ancillary reportage (as when the press spins off coverage to discuss related issues; witness them just reporting on how journalists do their jobs of journalism in relation to Ferguson), no blistering editorials, no Town Halls hosted by Anderson Cooper about bullying, no Concern from MSNBC.

Today the Washington Post Editorial Board announces it will no longer use the term "Redskins" in any of the zero times it has cause to editorialize about a football team.

Apparently that is a more important story than this one, with more Lessons to Teach Us.

The Matthew Sheppard killing had something to teach us. There were many, many reports about that. It was the most infamous single American murder of that decade.

In this case, three gay men were murdered. Three.

Not even a blip on the national news radar screens.

But they'll tell you, with a straight face, they just report the news as they see it.

posted by Ace at 06:00 PM

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