Perhaps proving that many media outlets rush to publish everything these days - with little editing - a television station in Idaho published the "rambling" words of a would-be assassin, and the Washington Post ran two stories directly linking to it. Former Marine Kyle Odom, who allegedly attempted to to kill Idaho pastor Tim Remington on Sunday, was arrested after he “threw unknown material over the south fence line at the White House Complex,” according to a Secret Service statement.
The manifesto that Idaho television station KHQ published online redacted the names of two graduate students - who attended a Texas college with Odom - twice, but appears to have accidentally missed their first names in another sentence, in the same paragraph. Since their first names aren't particularly common, it probably won't take long for journalists and other students to figure out who the shooting suspect, that Coeur d’Alene, Idaho police said Monday has a history of mental illness, accuses of not being human, which led to the attempted assassination.
It's bad enough that The Washington Post chose to link to what they called a "rambling" manifesto, that really doesn't offer any news value, but its poorly edited headline for one article - "Idaho pastor shooting suspect arrested outside White House, wrote warning about ‘Martians’ in Congress," - also suggests the alleged would-be assassin served in Congress. That story was published at 3:25 AM.
Years ago, former Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz reported, "After weighing the question for nearly three months, The Washington Post and New York Times have agreed to publish in today's Post a 35,000-word manuscript submitted by the Unabomber, the serial mail bomber who has promised to halt his deadly attacks if either newspaper ran his lengthy critique of industrial society."
"Donald E. Graham, The Post's publisher, and Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, said they jointly decided to publish the document 'for public safety reasons' after meeting last Wednesday with Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis J. Freeh," Kurtz wrote on September 19, 1995. "The papers are splitting the cost of an eight-page insert, which will appear only in The Post because it has the mechanical ability to distribute such a section in all copies of its daily paper."
Former Washington Post publisher Graham told Kurtz that both papers were "printing it for public safety reasons, not journalistic reasons," and that it "will not necessarily set a precedent."
"Media analysts have been divided on whether the newspapers should print the Unabomber's treatise," Kurtz noted. "Some have said that publishing 35,000 words is a small price to pay for the possibility that the killer would halt his attacks. Others have warned that the newspapers have no way of knowing whether the terrorist will keep his word, and that accepting his terms could encourage violent groups to make similar demands."
One of the bylined Washington Post journalists, Carole D. Leonnig won the Pulitzer Prize nearly a year ago for here work on stories about lapses by Secret Service agents, and was honored with a White House Correspondents' Association award which "include[d] a private reception with the president beforehand."
A second article published by the Washington Post - which at press time was the most widely read article of the day - written by the other bylined journalist, Michael E. Miller, also links to the manifesto and observes that it "outlined [the suspect's] path to Sunday’s shooting in clear but increasingly paranoid prose." The only explanation for writing an extremely long story called "Idaho shooting suspect’s ‘hypersexual’ Martian manifesto is a window into an unraveling mind" is because it "suggests...the act of an unraveling mind."
"Remington, who survived the point-blank shooting in what one church member called a “miracle,” had appeared a day earlier with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) at an event put on by Cruz’s presidential campaign," Miller wrote. "That led to speculation the shooting was politically motivated."
Since Miller includes long quotes from the manifesto, the journalist must have read all of it, but makes no mention of the students, so he apparently didn't notice or care that their first names weren't redacted.
The suspect wrote that early in 2014, two graduate students at the Baylor College of Medicine "began reaching out to him", even though he "barely knew them", and "both kept pointing their finger at [him] saying 'pew pew' like they were shooting gun, and that he was later "told that _ and _ were 'not human.'" He added that they were "tasked" into turning him into the "the next school shooter."
In the manifesto, the suspect also suggests President Obama should take a lie detector test to prove he knows about Martians that "take control of 'wild' human beings and use them as sex slaves", but its highly doubtful that any federal law agencies will act upon that tip.
On Tuesday, Christian Datoc reported for The Daily Caller, "In a recent span of 16 hours, The Washington Post managed to publish 16 anti-Bernie stories, a fact that wasn’t lost on Reddi."
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