The events in Dallas yesterday are shocking enough without the
national broadsheet attempting to sensationalise them further.
The Australian (the fart of the nation) published initial
reports that pushed the line that a race war was imminent across the Pacific.
It’s too early to predict where the events in this tragedy will
lead, but with this fiction being promoted, anything is possible –
Heavily armed snipers
killed five police and transit officers in downtown Dallas and wounded six
more, in a premeditated and triangulated “ambush-style” assault during a rally
protesting against the killing of black men after two shootings this week.
That was the lead paragraph of the story on the front page
of The Australian this morning.
The problem with this piece of “reporting” is that the
references to “heavily armed snipers” and “triangulated” attacks is pure
fiction.
By mid-morning the story from the same agency (News corp) had
morphed into –
The sniper who killed
five police and transit officers in downtown Dallas during a peaceful protest
yesterday has been named as Micah Johnson, a 25-year-old army veteran.
In the space of a few hours, “heavily armed snipers”
(plural) have become one Afghanistan veteran who was posted as a carpentry and
masonry specialist.
He was sent home from Afghanistan as a consequence of a
sexual harassment complaint from a female soldier.
The notion of an organised group of militia (as initially
posted on the front page of the Australian), is more in keeping with the race
war narrative, but it was simply bunkum.
I don’t believe that this was a deliberate beat-up. Rather,
it was sheer media incompetence, behaviour that Rupert’s broadsheet is becoming
increasingly prone to.
The difference this time is that the perpetrator wasn’t an
Islamic extremist, so Muslims, for a change, aren’t being smeared.
Will African-Americans cop the blow-back? Remains to be seen,
but if the behaviour of News Limited is any indication, the signs aren’t good.
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