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It’s a question that the kids putting together any middle school newspaper would be able to answer: In the wake of an attempted terrorist attack on a synagogue — with more than 100 children, as well as staff and other adults inside — whom should you interview about the experience? Hint: The answer is inside the question.
And yet. Over at the disaster that NPR (my old stomping grounds) has become, that didn’t happen. Their public editor Kelly McBride, who virtually always defends NPR’s fiascoes, admitted this in a buried section of a long post:
“NPR ran multiple stories on the attack. In all of that coverage, voices from Temple Israel are absent. I couldn't find any stories that quote rabbis, congregation members or the families of the children who had to flee the building.”
It gets worse. NPR dispatched a “journalist” in Lebanon to do a sympathy piece about the terrorist. McBride called it “humanizing” the family. Yet it didn’t occur to NPR to humanize the intended victims. Instead, it erased them.
I dig into all this, and explain what it says about today’s media, in the latest episode.
This isn’t the only NPR failure I highlight in this episode. I also point out the network’s straight-up hypocrisy on Iran, X, and Elon Musk.
CBS obtained this photo of the Michigan terrorist, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali. Apparently, his excuse was that he had relatives in Lebanon killed in Israeli airstrikes — as though that makes any sense as a motivation. And, by the way, those relatives were Hezbollah terrorists. The FBI is treating the case as Hezbollah-inspired terrorism.
Note that, despite widespread slaughter by Islamist terrorists around the world, there is no similar phenomenon of widespread attacks on Muslim people in democratic nations. That’s a very good thing. The media should be making that clear.
The Michigan attack was so extensive that more than 50 law enforcement officers sought medical treatment for smoke inhalation injuries.
Learn more here.
NPR did not interview a single person from the Michigan synagogue terror attack — but did run a sympathy piece on the terrorist.
Unlike NPR, some local news stations did the actual job.
ICYMI: My Temple Israel was attacked, too.
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JL