One tweet from Russia Today, another from a friend of Tripathi, a few local TV channels, and I was led to believe that a missing Brown University student was the suspect in the Boston marathon bombing. The entire media establishment should be apologizing to the Tripathi family, but he was just one of many named by the media. Indeed, not too long ago, one of Abreu report's readers asked me to write about her experience with the US legal and media system.
She was accused of domestic violence by a vengeful lover and the next morning her mug shot was splashed across the newspaper. The emotional pain and difficulty that it brought for her almost ruined her life. She was eventually acquitted, but there was no front-page article on the local newspaper with her picture and the word "innocent" splashed on top. The damage, as they say, was already done, and she had to deal with the difficulty of people fearing her on a daily basis.
The NY Post was first criticized by posting a picture of a teenager with the words "bag men" on top. Abreu Report is a small, independent news site, so we don't have the resources of the NY Post to investigate leads. However, the teenager in this photo was never fingered by anyone beyond 4chan and r/Conspiracy. Also, the use of "bag men" is a lawyer term, making it difficult for anyone to say that the NY Post directly accused anyone of being a suspect simply to gain a few thousand page views.
However, don't think for a minute that the mainstream media simply decided to finger everyone with a bag. The fingering has been very selective, and one could almost argue that the outrage was meant to make it difficult for anyone to finger other persons of interest at the Boston crime scene. Particularly interesting are these two individuals:
We still don't know exactly who they are, and what they were doing at the Boston marathon. But of course, the public doesn't need to know who these two guys are because they are not suspects and we wouldn't want to bother innocent people. The mainstream media bothers innocent people all the time, but not these two. At the very least, the public deserves to know whether these guys were private military contractors. And if so, what were they doing at the Boston Marathon?
Some news outlets are reporting that they are members of the Craft, a Blackwater-like group, and that they were carrying radiation detectors. So, if they were the good guys, it should be fairly straightforward for them to come forward and give their side of the story in the same way that the NY Post made that 17-year-old kid come out and give his side of the story.