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On the morning of January 7, news junkies like myself woke up to a plethora of shocking and tragic stories, be it the bombing of a NAACP office in Colorado or the massive terrorist attack which claimed 12 lives at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
The last of those understandably received the most coverage. The attack, likely carried out by Muslim fundamentalists angry at the newspaper for depictions of Muhammad, comes just a few weeks after an Iranian cleric held a Sydney cafe hostage amidst a storm of threats and calls to action from ISIS. That said, one cannot imagine that an attempted bombing at an NAACP office did not even deserve a mention from most mainstream media outlets, cable news in particular.
Employees of the advocacy group heard a loud explosion Tuesday morning, walking outside of their office to find an ignited IED and a large canister of gas which, had it successfully exploded, could’ve made the attack far worse. While the FBI has not ruled whether the attempted bombing is a hate crime, they’ve gathered from eyewitness reports that their lead suspect is a middle-aged, heavy-set white male.
While the body count and international implications of the Paris attack are far larger—making the incident inherently more newsworthy—than the Colorado Springs bombing (which took no lives and inflicted minimal property damage), one of the many benefits of a 24 hours news cycle is all major stories can get their due. Of course, it’s a benefit few cable networks choose to take advantage of. MSNBC—supposedly the most progressive of the three major cable networks—spent the entirety of its morning coverage in Paris, not mentioning the Colorado Springs bombing once.
