Steve Beck: By not calling attack ‘terror,’ Sun-Star was guilty of creating fake news
Re “UC Merced, other attacks far from ‘underreported’” (Page 3A, Feb. 9): Regarding Jeff Jardine's column about under reported terrorist attacks. I live 1 mile from the UC Merced campus and read the newspaper every day. I remember very clearly the knife attack from 2015. I remember wondering why the media was so reluctant to state the obvious: that this was a radical Islamic terrorist attack.
The Sun-Star and Bee reported the incident, but they were very late in calling it a terrorist attack. That is the complaint of those critical of the liberally slanted media. Yes, these things are reported, but they are not accurately described with the details crucial to understanding the motive. Sometimes they are forced to report the motive later because other not-so-liberal news outlets have reported it, but by then it is off the front page and most people never see it, so it adds up to fake news because the main point of the whole story, namely the motive, is conveniently left out of the story when it is on the front page. Very clever, but people have caught on, which is why your circulation is going down.
Steve Beck, Merced
Editor’s note: Despite substantial coverage of the crime (47 stories in the Sun-Star alone), the Sun-Star and Modesto Bee did not speculate about the nature of the attack because little was known of the motives until investigating authorities released their information. To have stated uninformed speculation as fact would have been irresponsible. The attack occured in November when most media outlets covered it; the FBI announced the findings of its investigation in March, followed by nationwide media reports on those findings.
This story was originally published February 13, 2017 at 5:46 PM with the headline "Steve Beck: By not calling attack ‘terror,’ Sun-Star was guilty of creating fake news."