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Reading Between The Lines Explosives at UCLA and Georgia Tech The blogosphere is abuzz with news that bombs were found on, or near, two college campuses yesterday - at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and near UCLA in Los Angeles. The Georgia Tech story is interesting in that like the Oklahoma bombing 10-days ago, these bombs were found just across the street from Grant Field, the Georgia Tech football stadium - Michelle Malkin has the link to a campus map. The news reports make it sound as though these incidents may be something beyond a college prank, but reading between the lines, we really don't have enough information to know. For instance, the UCLA bomb story includes the following: Shortly after 1 p.m., the bomb squad remotely detonated the device. A low boom was audible for about a one-block radius, and several people who live across the street said they felt their apartments shake. As a reporter who has covered bomb stories, I know something that rarely seems to make it into news stories. When the police find a suspicious device, they blow it up by wrapping it in their own explosives, then detonating their own explosives. The TV news people get to have a nice explosion to show on TV - the newspaper reporters get to go around and find nice "fire in the hole" type quotes to print. But try asking the police, as I have done, whether the found device blew up because it was itself an actual explosive device - or whether the entire explosion was the result of the police explosives. You'll get dodging and ducking that rivals a Supreme Court nominee avoiding a Roe vs. Wade question. In other words, the police won't tell you if the thing they found was actually explosive or not. And, since uncertainty is not a good news story, and since most reporters don't have sense enough to ask the right questions, you certainly won't find the truth in the news story. The Atlanta police called the Georgia Tech incident a terrorist act. But the story goes on to say: One of the devices exploded, injuring the custodian who found them inside a plastic bag. Two others were detonated by a bomb squad. The Atlanta police say the device that exploded consisted of chemicals inside a "plastic-type garbage bag." An explosive device housed inside a plastic garbage bag that causes only ear ringing as an injury doesn't sound like much of an explosive to me. And again, the news report only says the other two were detonated by a bomb squad - once again, were the devices actually explosive, or was the explosion the result of the bomb squad's explosives? We simply don't know. Nice job news media. |
