Jordan Brown's List: Aftermath of Boston Marathon

• For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government’s mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts.

• While the Department of Defense does what it pleases in any case, the ban was diluted somewhat in 1987 to mostly just cover official State Department “public diplomacy.” That restriction is now completely removed with taxpayer funded public diplomacy PR campaigns now coming back at taxpayers. America now has official state media which will make things interesting if it becomes involved in political debates.

   

• A number of fake charity Twitter accounts and Facebook pages have been set up in the wake of the Boston marathon bombings in an attempt to capitalise on the tragedy.

    

  Pictures of 'child runners' who had supposedly died in the blasts were tweeted from a 'Hope for Boston' account begging for retweets to "show respect".

• The Department of Homeland Security has now officially acknowledged the ‘frighteningly similar’ scenarios between an Operation Urban Shield drill they planned for Boston and the actual Marathon bombing event in a Boston Globe article.

• TruthStream Media.com reported back on April 23 about the connection between the drill underway on April 15 at the finish line and the counterterrorism exercises conducted by Boston’s Urban Shield team, which including overlapping layers of Homeland Security, FEMA, statewide and regional emergency responders and the City of Boston, including its Office of Emergency Management.

   

  This includes suggestive photographic evidence that may prove members of these emergency agencies were on scene at the finish line bombing no more than 2-3 minutes after the incident (in addition to the Craft International figures who’ve been much discussed). In other words, they were already at the finish line, in formation, conducting a drill.

• Officials: There will be a controlled explosion opposite the library within one minute as part of bomb squad activities.

• Last week, the New York Post ran a front page photo of two teenage runners under the headline "Bag Men," implying that they had something to do with the Boston Marathon backpack bombs.

  It turns out those kids had nothing to do with the attacks. But they came to the public's attention after their images were scooped up and pored over by hundreds of online amateur sleuths.
• "People at, not just at reddit but at 4chan and other Internet forums, decided that they could help with the investigation by taking all the photos that had come out of the bombing, combing through them and looking for — I'm sort of air-quoting here — suspicious characters. People carrying backpacks, people who might look like a terrorist," Madrigal says.
• "It was actually disrupting the official investigation because they were having to deal with all these sort of false suspects getting floated and people getting accused, and it just turned into a big old mess, which I think was quite predictable," he says.

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• But heavy cellphone use caused frustrating delays and congestion in the system, prompting the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) to tweet: "if you are trying to reach friends or family and can't get through via phone, try texing instead (less bandwidth)." Later, MEMA tweeted the Boston mayor's hotline number for locating individuals.

• The two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing were identified, in part, through a massive dissemination of information and photos to the whole world. Twitter, Facebook and Internet websites all are credited with the effort.

• “Today we are enlisting the public’s help in identifying the two suspects,” said Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] special agent Richard DesLauriers.

   The FBI photos of suspect 1 and suspect 2, as they were known at the time, were instantaneously tweeted and re-tweeted. Facebooked and facebook shared. This is the world we live in now. Immediate access. Active citizen involvement.
• So thousands of marathon spectators flipped through their cell phone photos and videos - to see if they could match the suspects. They re-posted the FBI website address. But the social media aspect had a downside - when the public made a mismatch and targeted an innocent bystander. FBI special agent in charge Richard DesLauriers warned against rash judgments.

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• Barely two days after the horrendous Boston Marathon bombing which has so far claimed three lives and injured over one hundred people, one of the most interesting and telling aspects of this tragedy has been how media coverage helps shape public perceptions over violence and terrorism
• It's easy to see why we have been so struck with grief and anger. It turns your gut sideways seeing this coverage, let alone those who personally experienced it. Americans rightfully want for those responsible to be brought to justice, named, and exposed for all to see.
• Why? Because the terror was real, and the victims had names and faces. The media gave and continues to give intimate information regarding the bombings and those who have been harmed, and Americans understandably feel empathy and vulnerability at such a random, senseless act of mass murder.
• But contrast this with the portrayal of the frequent tragedies, atrocities, and bombings that are committed by the U.S. government, and one can almost excuse the differences in outrage. In the last decade, the U.S. has occupied Afghanistan and Iraq while bombing Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, and Somalia, imposed blockades and sanctions that prevent the poor and elderly in foreign countries from acquiring food and medicine, and yet one can spend a great deal of time searching in vain for any faces, names, or accounts of the victims from the American press. Apparently, when cloaked in the alchemy of government power, these acts aren't terrorism or mass murder, just "foreign policy."

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• It’s easy to criticize users of the influential social-news site Reddit for circulating the photos of random innocent bystanders and fingering them as potential suspects in the Boston bombings. I did it myself just yesterday, deriding Redditors for latching onto marathon spectators like “Blue Robe Guy” on the thinnest of circumstantial evidence. So did several other journalists, some of whom went much further in their denunciations. The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal was particularly outraged by the findbostonbombers subreddit, calling it “plain, old vigilantism with no place in our society.”

     

   

      
• On Reddit, “the media” has become a pejorative term. But let’s face it: Reddit is the media. The main difference between it and, say, a newspaper, is that Reddit’s content is posted and curated by amateurs through upvotes, downvotes, and occasional moderator interventions. Still, the results are similar: a top post on any given subreddit has a chance to reach as many viewers as a popular newspaper story, and in some cases far more. It’s disingenuous for the site’s users and moderators to disclaim responsibility for any harm caused by those posts—especially since they’re more than happy to claim credit when things turn out well.

• Major news outlets scrambled to gather stories in the hours and days following the horrific Boston Marathon bombing in an attempt to keep their viewers interest.  It became increasingly important for these stations to produce the first stories, beating out their rivals for the passing vindication of a few minutes lead on a story. 
• Nearly all of the major stations failed to provide actual news by stating blatantly wrong information and spending more on-air time justifying why they were wrong, and who they got their wrong information from than reporting actual news.  The conflicting information was everywhere; online, in the newspapers, on Twitter.  You couldn’t get away from it.
• It was the AP who first wrongly reported that a law enforcement official declared that a suspect had been identified, only to follow up moments later by stating that the suspect was in custody.  At that time, no suspect had been identified.

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• Alastair Stevenson is a veteran marathon runner who has competed in dozens of marathons around the world, including the London Marathon. He's very familiar with the security typically found at marathons, and he immediately noticed something odd about the Boston marathon security.
• "They kept making announcements on the loud speaker that it was just a drill and there was nothing to worry about. It seemed like there was some sort of threat, but they kept telling us it was just a drill," he was quoted as saying by Local15TV.com.
• At the start at the event, at the Athlete's Village, there were people on the roof looking down onto the Village at the start. There were dogs with their handlers going around sniffing for explosives, and we were told on a loud announcement that we shouldn't be concerned and that it was just a drill. And maybe it was just a drill, but I've never seen anything like that -- not at any marathon that I've ever been to. You know, that just concerned me that that's the only race that I've seen in my life where they had dogs sniffing for explosions, and that's the only place where there had been explosions."

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• A fire, and possible explosion, reported at the John F. Kennedy Library in Dorchester, Mass., is being investigated for a potential connection to the blasts that went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday just before 3 p.m.

    

  A Boston Police spokesperson told Talking Points Memo on Monday that an explosive device had gone off at the library. This information was later clarified on Twitter by BPD Public Information Bureau Chief Cheryl Fiandaca, who described the incident as "fire related."
• According to the JFK Library's official Twitter account, the fire, which appears to have started in the building's mechanical room, was put out by 6:23 p.m. Monday evening. Staff and visitors were safely accounted for, and no injuries were reported.