My old AJC colleague and friend Saeed Ahmed is a pit bull when it comes to chasing news. So it was no surprise to see him become a rising star at CNN.
He’s fast, fair and furious when chasing a story on deadline and has become a senior assignment editor overseeing national and international coverage. His byline and photo accompanied the main story on CNN’s website concerning the massacre Wednesday in San Bernardino.
His story states, “Law enforcement sources say Farook had been in contact with more than one person who had been the subject of an international terrorism investigation by the FBI,” adding, “For now, here is what we know and don’t know about the attack and its aftermath.”
It was a straightforward news story.
Saeed is a Bangladeshi native who moved to Atlanta to attend Morehouse College, where he became a minority within a minority. He’s a smart, funny guy with a cute family and a wide range of friends. But upon seeing his photo accompanying the mass-shooting story, a reader saw just one thing — a Muslim rat.
“happy now that your sick and twisted ideology has killed another 14 people?” one reader taunted, adding:
“Your sick religion has killed more people than world war II. And here you are smiling in an idiot picture.
“You want Islam? Move back to Iran. Or Mali you sick idiot. You don’t fool anyone you rat.”
Saeed, a professional, and a self-deprecating one at that, responded: “I agree with you, that picture is an ‘idiot picture.’”
That some sick, twisted rat (to use the bigot’s own language) decided to lash out at a perfectly honorable fellow American says much about our times.
The access to torrents of instant information has done the opposite of what we might have once believed. We are not smarter and wiser. We live in the age of rash pre-judgments and toxic pre-conceptions. Why wait for the facts or a reasoned analysis before coming to a conclusion when your opinion, supported by like-minded people on the Internet, will do?
“Discussing” issues online can bring out the vicious inner self: Go with your initial, base inner beliefs and hit “send.”
We have segregated into media camps that are echo-chambers for our own biases. We can burrow into the news we want and the news we believe to be true in all sorts of ratholes on the Internet. The tried-and-true poles of cable-news thought are Fox News and Atlanta’s own CNN, and it was illuminating Wednesday night to flip between the dual versions of horror as the hosts and “experts” dug into the latest massacre before the blood was dry.
The broad strokes gleaned from a few hours watching: CNN was reticent to say the San Bernardino massacre was a case of terrorism. Fox was itching to.
The problem, of course, with such modern calamities is that we cannot wait for answers, especially when they’re not delivered quickly. So media outlets must fill the empty hours with expert speculation.
On CNN, former FBI official Tom Fuentes surmised, “To me, it says it’s an anti-government operation, probably a militia-type group,” as opposed to international terrorism.
Later, CNN analyst Harry Houck ventured, “It could be some right-wing group, for all I know,” adding that he was just speculating.
Conservative websites used those examples to show CNN’s inherent bias. Interestingly, Houck, a real law-and-order guy, was already getting beat up for saying “you people” in a discussion with a black guest a few days earlier. In fact, a group called colorofchange.org wants him kicked off the network, calling the former NYPD detective an apologist for police abusing blacks.
Later on, a CNN criminologist called the killings “intrinsic,” more of a grudge killing. In fact, she suggested, it might be a mix of international terrorism and old-fashioned American workplace violence. In essence, the 2015 edition of “going postal.”
Through the night, CNN was very cautious about naming the killer, even though Farook’s identity had been out there for hours.
Fox had no such compunctions. The name “SYED FAROOK” was emblazoned there at the bottom of the screen as reporters and hosts guessed about what it might be.
Talk show host Sean Hannity pondered about sleeper cells coming to life and worried that the FBI was being too politically correct in not publicly naming the shooter a lot earlier than it did. And then Hannity brought up the need to block Syrian refugees from coming to the U.S., although the 28-year-old Farook was born in Illinois.
There was an energetic sense of “We knew this would happen” in many circles on the right, a feeling that jihad was finally washing up on our shores. That opinion felt similar to theories uttered a week earlier from many on the left who saw Robert Dear, the Colorado Planned Parenthood shooter, as a right-wing Christian terrorist on a personal crusade to stop a woman’s right to choose.
Is Robert Dear a domestic, political terrorist or a mean, deranged nut who beat women and lived in a hut?
Is Syed Farook part of an international sleeper cell or a disgruntled government employee who wanted to make co-workers suffer?
The answers will emerge in the coming days and weeks.
But in the meantime, please leave Saeed Ahmed alone.
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