The search for a dark-skinned bomber


Before law enforcement officials released photographs of the two suspects in the Boston bombing, some media outlets went overboard in their attempt to finger ‘dark-skinned’ people as culprits for the Boston bombing.

Amy Davidson of the New Yorker writes about the young man from Saudi Arabia who was injured in the blast. But unlike all the other victims who were also in area hospitals, in a massive show of force police searched his apartment and took away boxes of his stuff while his roommate was questioned for five hours. Media outlets like the New York Post and Fox News trumpeted the capture of the alleged Saudi assassin.

And Alexis Madrigal describes how for a short while Indian student Sunil Tripathi and another person with the name of Mike Mulugeta became the suspects, though neither was anywhere near the site of the bombing. Tripathi has been missing for some time beginning prior to the bombing and it is not clear if Mulugeta even exists.

Actually identifying people in such a highly charged atmosphere is extremely dangerous as those people and their families immediately become the targets of hostility and even violence by people who are not content to let law enforcement and the legal system do their jobs.

Chris Hayes took CNN deservedly to task for its confident statement that a ‘dark skinned’ person had been taken into custody when nothing of the sort had happened, as did The Daily Show.

(These clips were aired on April 17, 2013. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)

Comments

  1. mobius says

    Thanx for the link to Chris Hayes program. As usual, I think he did an excellent job or reporting.

  2. ChasCPeterson says

    Amy Davidson of the New Yorker writes about the young man from Saudi Arabia who was injured in the blast. But unlike all the other victims who were also in area hospitals, in a massive show of force police searched his apartment and took away boxes of his stuff while his roommate was questioned for five hours. Media outlets like the New York Post and Fox News trumpeted the capture of the alleged Saudi assassin.

    I was following that story as it developed in real time, and that’s a wildly misleading account of what actually happened.

  3. Matt G says

    What someone sees on television “in real time” is often wildly inaccurate. What is your version of events? Please provide references.

  4. invivoMark says

    How so? I haven’t heard anything, so I don’t know what I should or shouldn’t believe about that account.

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