Another case of media mistaken identity

By now you’re familiar with the incident at the U. S. Capitol in which some nut pulled a gun on the security police and they shot him. The suspect was identified as Larry Russell Dawson from Antioch, TN. The mainstream media went to Facebook to find him and quickly posted a picture of the suspect. He was a white male who didn’t look to be 66 years old, the age of the suspect. It didn’t matter. He was a Trump guy, a tea party guy. The mainstream media had their story. Trump had driven another crazy person to violence.

The REAL Larry Dawson

The problem was they had the wrong guy.

It took our staff about 60 seconds to figure that out. How? Because the URL address of “the suspect” was Larry F. Dawson, not Larry R. Dawson. Plus, this guy was from Pikeville, TN, not Antioch. So our staff went looking for the real Larry Russell Dawson. They found him. A 66-year-old left-wing black preacher who was known to protest in favor of raising the minimum wage to $15-per-hour.

The mainstream media then realized their error. Instead of correcting the mistake, they just deleted the first picture of the white guy and replaced it with a static shot of the Capitol. No mention of the mistake. No corrected photograph. No back story on who this nutcase really was. All of a sudden it didn’t matter what his politics were, or his race.

How many times have we seen the mainstream media jump to conclusions? Remember the Colorado theater shooter? ABC first reported that he was a conservative tea party type. Again they erroneously picked the wrong profile from Facebook and ran with it. When it turned out the real suspect was a crazy liberal they ignored it. His political views no longer mattered.

I was reading a piece in the New York Times about how there were no clues that would yield information on who would become a terrorist. How about we start with the basics? The common thread of today’s terrorists is they’re Muslims. The Times piece never went there. They simply listed some warning signs to look for like depression and anger.

The 9/11 hijackers weren’t depressed. Nor were the San Bernardino killers or the Boston Marathon bombers. The one thing they all were was Muslim.

Now, this is not to say that all Muslims are terrorists, but to ignore the fact that we’re at war with radical Islam is dangerous.

The thread that ties all this together is the agenda of the mainstream media. They see conservatives as more of a threat than radical Islam. They want so much to tie violence to the tea party or Trump or Cruz and want so desperately to disassociate violence and Islam.

Hillary Clinton even chided Cruz and Trump over their response to the Brussels bombings. She said profiling Muslims in America would only radicalize them. Think about that for a second. She’s saying if you make Muslims mad they’ll kill you. Isn’t that a problem in and of itself? If a group of people is just one unjust traffic stop away from blowing up an airport, don’t we have a problem with that group?

The media are dead set on making conservatives the boogeyman. President Obama speaks far more passionately against conservatives than he does radical Islamic terrorists. In fact, he won’t even use the term, but he’ll constantly refer to conservatives as the enemy.

The real enemy is political correctness. It prevents us from having frank discussions. Frank discussions about real life and death situations.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.