Barack Obama Assassination Scare in Denver - Media Coverage

Media Coverage

An op-ed in the self-described "alternative media website" The Centre for Research on Globalisation said the alleged assassination plot received "oddly ... little coverage" in the American mainstream media and said foreign news agencies in Russia, Lebanon and Israel provided more detailed coverage. The Centre suggested a media blackout had been initiated against the story, although it did not specify whether the alleged blackout was implemented by the government or willingly by the press. Robert Arend, a writer with liberal/progressive OpEdNews, said within two months of the alleged plot, media coverage of the trio had decreased so much, "those three creeps dropped into the bottomless pit of media obscurity".

The story was featured on page A18 of The New York Times and page A23 in The Washington Post on August 27, 2008. The alleged assassination plot was originally listed as the 15th story on the CNN website and was not posted on the MSNBC site at all. The story was also unreported by ABC World News, NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News and PBS NewsHour. Brad Friedman, a fellow at the progressive Commonweal Institute, pointed out that U.S. Attorney Troy Eid put far greater focus, "on this relatively little amount of meth and their use of it than on the other apparent highly incriminating pieces of evidence obtained". Friedman criticized the media for not questioning Eid more sharply about the trio's large arsenal of weapons. Friedman also further criticized Eid as a "typical George W. Bush appointee — somewhat unprofessional, seemingly incompetent, stonewalling, less than brilliant."

Eid said the story was blown out of proportion by the blogosphere, and that legitimate newspapers reported on rumors and allegations in response to the blogs. Eid said he was "hounded" by countless bloggers about the story and accused of "racism and worse" for not charging the trio with threatening a presidential candidate. He said the situation was characteristic of the way the mainstream media was changing in response to the Information Age: "Blog-driven 'news' is tragically becoming the rule, not the exception. Much of it is misinformation, where some person or interest group "spins" some angle for an unknown purpose. You can tell this when calls and e-mails start flooding the office, reading from the identical script, accusing you of the moral equivalent of crimes against humanity."