MediaWatch: April 1996
Table of Contents:
The Unabomber's On His Own
After the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing the media hurled charges of complicity at conservatives. Referring to Newt Gingrich's language, Time declared that the "burden of fostering the delusion" that government is the enemy "is borne not just by the nut cases who preach conspiracy but also to some extent by those who erode faith in governance in the pursuit of their own ambitions." Asked Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation: "There's been a lot of anti-government rhetoric, it comes over talk radio...Do you think that that somehow has led these people to commit this act?"
But this April, even after ABC detailed the Unabomber's left-wing ties, the rest of the media failed to pick up the theme.
Two days after suspect Ted Kaczynski's April 3 arrest, Brian Ross reported on World News Tonight that his "name appeared...in connection with an FBI investigation of a radical environmental group called Earth First...Over the years, Earth First has been best known as a violent group spiking trees and blowing up logging equipment, and in many respects its anti-corporate philosophy parallels that of the Unabomber."
Ross noted "that authorities believe Kaczynski was at a meeting attended by top Earth First members." A private investigator, Ross relayed, "says the bomb last year that killed the head of the California Forestry Association clearly can be tracked back to a hit list published in one radical environmental journal." Instead of being consistent, reporters buried the tie. On April 8 the environmental angle made it into the 35th paragraph of a USA Today story as well as the 15th paragraph in The New York Times that day and The Washington Post the next. Insisting "there is no proof," NBC's David Bloom dismissed the link April 10.
The Unabomber manifesto rails against capitalism (it begins "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race"), but the April 15 Time noted no one recalled him having contact at Berkeley "with the leftists he would later excoriate in his manifesto."
Some were sympathetic. USA Today's April 11 front page read: "UNABOMBER: A Hero to Some." Richard Price reported he's "being romanticized for his intellect" as "some people even feel sorry for him, seeing him a brilliant boy gone astray." On C-SPAN's Sunday Journal April 7, Time's Elaine Shannon found parts of the manifesto she agreed with, such as, "industrialization and pollution are all terrible things." She reasoned: "He wasn't a hypocrite, he lived as he wrote." Kaczynski "carried it to an extreme, and obviously murder is something that is far beyond any political philosophy, but he had a bike, he didn't have any plumbing."
