There is one foolproof way to avoid discussing whether the Friday beheading in Oklahoma by Alton Nolen was directly related to the assailant’s conversion to Islam: skip reporting the story.
A Nexis search shows NPR never offered a feature on that grisly tale of Colleen Hufford's murder. (Hourly news update transcripts are not included). Meanwhile, Oklahoma was only coming up over the weekend on Saturday’s Weekend Edition, in a story on art forger Mark Landis:
ELIZABETH BLAIR: Let's call Matt Leininger the story's Sherlock Holmes. He was the registrar at the Oklahoma City Museum in 2007, when Landis offered to donate works of art there. Leininger did his due diligence and found out that other museums had some of the same works.
Online, they had a brief report on their “Two-Way” blog, but leaned on MSNBC to say there was no terrorism connection found.
The PBS NewsHour also missed out on that story on Friday night.
