The network news divisions still leap to cover grisly crimes in the heartland. But some crimes are much more interesting than others. Take, for example, the beheading of a woman at a Vaughan Foods factory in Moore, Oklahoma on September 26. All three networks reported the story on Friday night, but surprisingly, they quickly lost interest within 24 hours. (NBC stood out for skipping the killer's conversion to Islam.) They barely noticed Saturday morning.
Newspapers were one-and-done. Saturday’s New York Times printed one story on page A-12, although it included the beheader’s Facebook rants. “The page is filled with criticism of American culture, and dire warnings for those who do not follow that religion.” His most recent post, three days before the murder said “This is the last days.'' In July he wrote (capitals his) ''AMERICA AND ISRAEL ARE WICKED. WAKE UP MUSLIMS!!!''
Saturday’s Washington Post printed one story on page A-7, and like the Times, developed no followup in the paper edition. They have blogged it online, including a Monday story on the horror expressed by Nolen’s mother and sister about the beheading in a video statement on Facebook. That is an obvious TV news hook that’s being skipped.
Now here’s where it gets interesting. On April 30, 2014, there was another Oklahoma story much more horrifying to the Left. At the state penitentiary in McAlester, murderer Clayton Lockett’s lethal injection was botched. He writhed on the gurney for 43 minutes before dying. This was a compelling story for liberal death penalty opponents. Lost in the haze was Lockett’s victim, Stephanie Neiman, who graduated from high school two weeks before her murder in 1999.
ABC, CBS, and NBC all reported the story once. But others who skipped the beheading story showed a dramatic double standard in spreading Oklahoma news.
USA Today has no weekend editions, and while its website had a beheading story, it published nothing in print on Monday or Tuesday. But it published seven news stories and an editorial on Lockett’s death.
As reported earlier, a search of the Nexis database found no feature on the beheading on National Public Radio, and no report on the PBS NewsHour.
But PBS aired an interview segment on Lockett. NPR was the most egregious, broadcasting nine stories or interview segments on its morning and evening news programs over nine days, adding up top 6,766 words of transcripts. (One was titled “The Grim History of the Modern Death Penalty.”) That’s not counting three interview segments on the NPR talk shows “Here and Now” and “Tell Me More.”
It's impossible to ignore that NPR and USA Today have more compassion for a convicted murderer than they do for an innocent woman beheaded by a Muslim. Their political/religious correctness knows no bounds.
