"Do we as a society and in the media have a working definition of terrorism that makes sense?"
That's the key question that MSNBC host Joy Reid posed as she closed her January 8 program with a commentary that explored the question of whether the news media have consistent, objective criteria for labeling violent and destructive acts as terrorism. Reid's commentary was pegged to the difference in news coverage between the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris and a botched bombing of an NAACP chapter office in Colorado.
The former was immediately labeled a terrorist attack by many in the media, Reid noted, while the same media are much more cautious about the botched NAACP bombing and the motivations of the white, middle-aged suspect, who is still on the loose and as-yet unidentified.
Reid then noted through two deadly instances where supposedly right-leaning shooters, who happened to be white, were not tagged as terrorists: the Gabby Giffords shooting and Las Vegas police shootings at the hands of white supremacists who had protested the federal government at the Cliven Bundy ranch.
While she failed to explicitly make this argument, the implication was clear: the media are much more likely to use the "T" word when the suspect is a non-white Muslim as opposed to a white non-Muslim.
Reid is entitled to that opinion, of course, but perhaps someone should remind her of the deadly 2009 Fort Hood shooting, which the Obama Pentagon is still classifying as a mere "workplace violence" episode rather than a terrorist attack which would make wounded military personnel eligible for Purple Heart citations and additional medical benefits from the U.S. government.
In the Fort Hood shooting, Maj. Nidal Hasan made perfectly clear his Islamist motives, and yet the Obama administration has strenuously avoided tagging the incident as terrorism. Heck, even Hasan's defense attorney dismisses the "workplace violence" categorization.
Even so, it seems only Fox News and conservative outlets on the Internet seem to care about this controversy, with MSNBC and others in the liberal media studiously avoiding it.
