At Big Government, John Nolte rounds up, blog-style, the breaking reports from the MSM on the shooting at the DC Navy Yard, which are often contradictory, both as new updates come in, and as the sausage gets made and remade as a result.
CNN’s Carol Costello has an epic facepalm moment:
During CNN’s live coverage of Monday’s shooting at the Washington Navy Yard, anchor Carol Costello asked when the last time was that a gunman wreaked “havoc at a U.S. military facility.” In 2009, a jihadist killed 13 in a mass-shooting at Fort Hood in Texas.
“I used to work in Washington, live in Washington. This seems so unusual to me that a gunman could create this kind of havoc at a U.S. military facility,” Costello stated. “Have you ever heard of it happening before, Brian?”
“As Santayana said,” Allahpundit quips in response, “those who do not learn from history are condemned to broadcast their ignorance about it on national cable news:”
Probably 80 percent of the public, I’d guess, thought of Nidal Hasan when they heard the news this morning. I’m one of them; it occurred to me that maybe this was revenge from a sympathizer for the death sentence he got a few weeks ago.
Ace describes Costello’s classic MSM self-lobotomy as the liberal cocoon in force once again:
People now choose what sorts of media inputs they will permit in their lives… and this applies to the media probably most of all.
One can get by in the media on a steady diet of Rachel Maddow, Huffington Post, Gawker, and Obama Speech iPods. Oh, one will miss the occasional Local Crime Story, but as one’s coworkers are also missing that Local Crime Story, there’s no one around to embarrass you for your ignorance.
Nidal Hassan was an Unhelpful Narrative for the left, and so it’s simply not a Narrative at all. It is instead, deliberately, an incoherent mix of a few scattered facts with no story to unite them into the whole. The media began trying to forget Hassan from moments after his rampage ended — the moment they realized he wasn’t a Tea Partier, and therefore that his mass murder was a Local Crime Story — and they’ve now succeeded in forgetting.
Jesse Walker, call your office: the center of power — the media center of power in this case — has demonstrated how paranoia distorts its reportage yet again.
Oh, and speaking of media paranoia and writing the first draft of history, this didn’t long at all, did it?
Update: NBC is reporting the suspect’s name; a Wired blogger has his alleged mugshot photo from an earlier arrest.
Meanwhile, Jim Treacher asks what must not be asked: “Why is it that mass shootings tend to happen in places with the strictest gun laws? (UPDATE: Liberals respond)”
More: “The FBI is seeking information about the deceased Navy Yard shooter, and has included a pic that will disappoint David Sirota and Brian Ross,” Glenn Reynolds writes. I do hear that many media outlets have been calling him ‘a Texan’ without showing the photo. Narrative, you know.”
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