MSM Overlooks Discovery Gunman’s Motivation

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A gunman armed with explosives took hostages yesterday at Discovery Channel’s headquarters in suburban Washington. A standoff with police that lasted several hours ended when SWAT personnel shot and killed the intruder. Fortunately, no one else was harmed, although one of the bombs strapped to the man’s body detonated when he was taken down.

The gunman, identified as James J. Lee, was not looking for money. In fact, he had thrown thousands of dollars of his own money into the air outside the Discovery building in 2008, when he staged an earlier protest.

His beef with Discovery Channel and the reason behind yesterday’s hostage taking was the network’s programming. In Lee’s view, the shows on Discovery promote population growth rather than – as he would have preferred – “encouraging human sterilization and infertility.”

In an angry manifesto on his website, Lee offered his assessment of humans as “the most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around,” adding that they “are wrecking what’s left of the planet with their false morals and breeding cultures.” His mission, in short, was to save the planet.

It is worth pausing to note that all of the details provided in the previous paragraphs can be found in any number of elite media outlets, including the Associated Press, ABC News, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. One piece of information, however, that is conspicuously absent from their coverage is the “inspiration” for Lee’s actions, which he ascribed to two sources. One was a novel, Ismael by environmentalist Daniel Quinn. The other was Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

The Post and the Times each devoted some 600 words to the story without once mentioning Gore or his documentary. Ditto for AP and ABC News, whose accounts run 1,000 words and 1,400 words respectively. In all fairness, one mainstream media source – MSNBC – does mention Gore, but the name is buried 600 words deep into the article.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that the fact of Lee’s having perverted a leftwing message into malevolent action is relevant. What I am saying is that if the gunman’s inspiration had been, say, Glenn Beck’s novel or a speech by Sarah Palin, the MSM would have been all over it. That juicy bit of information would have appeared in the lede, if not the headline.

The notion of armed lunatic fits in nicely with the left’s narrative of the right. But when they find themselves looking in a mirror, don’t expect to hear much about it. Talk about your inconvenient truths.

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