The media's obfuscation of reality continues

Another recent example of the media's subprime attention bubble

Media branding a terrorist as an “activist” is about as Orwellian as you can imagine, and our media does things like this constantly

Just the other weekend, two ISIS-inspired terrorists came within a hair’s breadth of mass casualties near Gracie Mansion. They packed their devices with bolts and screws and tried to hurl them into a crowd of protesters. One suspect told police he wanted it to be “bigger than Boston,” a reference to the 2013 attack that killed three and injured hundreds. The bombs, mercifully, failed to detonate. Both men were apprehended on the spot and spoke freely to police, proudly claiming ISIS as their inspiration. Only their own incompetence prevented Saturday from being one of the darkest days in recent New York history.

Here is how CNN initially framed it:

Read that again. Slowly.

They deleted it after the internet did its job. But CNN was hardly alone. The New York Times described the incident as “Smoking Jars of Metal and Fuses Thrown at Protest Near Mayor’s House.” NBC called the devices “suspicious.” The Daily News foregrounded the pig roast. Even New York City’s own Deputy Mayor Brad Lander, tweeting after the suspects’ names and ISIS affiliation were already public, managed to condemn “Islamophobia” without initially acknowledging that the people who threw bombs that day were Islamic terrorists. Mayor Mamdani himself opened his statement denouncing the rally’s bigotry, then vaguely condemned “what followed” as “even more disturbing,” at the time omitting any specifics about who, exactly, had done what.

National Review’s editorial board put it plainly: the media were “employing all of their creative writing skills to craft craven, obfuscatory headlines that aim to deceive by omission and suggestion.”

This is a textbook specimen of what I’ve been calling the subprime attention bubble, and its most corrosive variant. Not only do they publish clickbait, but what we have here is institutional framing-as-product, where legacy outlets with genuine reputational capital to protect spend it in service of ideological narrative management. The facts were not hidden, they were available to anyone who read past the headline. But many people consume news in headline form, not article form. The framing is the product. And the product here was deliberate misdirection.

The subprime mortgage crisis happened because people confused packaging for value: the logos, the ratings, the prestige all intact while the underlying asset quietly rotted. The same dynamic is playing out in media. The mastheads are still there, the checkmarks are still there, the inheritance of decades of institutional credibility is still being spent. But many people haven’t marked it to market yet.

They will. They always do. The only question is what you’re holding when the correction comes.