Reporting on Terror Training

I heard a story on Fox News today and thought a radical Muslim camp in New Mexico was a training ground for children who were being taught to use military style weapons to shoot up schools. 

If you read the same story in the Washington Post you would not know the operators of the site were Muslim, radical or not.  The only part of the story that was the same is the operators were training children to shoot guns.  We used to do that at Boy Scout training.

CNN does mention that the trainers were related to the "controversial" Imam in New York, and quotes him as saying he didn't know anything about this camp.  If you read that story alone, you would be shocked by the Fox story when you saw it later. 

Let's try to look at this as a factual news story.  Is it relevant that the people at this camp were Muslims training children to shoot up schools?  I think it was.  Unlike the Obama White House, we should be calling this kind of activity what it is, radical Muslim extremism.  It is the kind of thing that needs to be reported as it is, not edit out those parts that are not to the liking of any part of the political spectrum.  That is self censorship, which benefits few who may want to know what the people in New Mexico are really up to. 

There will be a few people who will bemoan the unfairness of claiming someone is doing something bad until they have not been convicted in court, but newspapers do not carry that qualifier that all the Justice Department press releases carry:  Being arrested does not imply guilt of the suspect.  News outlets never bother with that.    But they are willing to self-censor the idea that radical Muslims might gather a bunch of children together and teach them to kill other children in schools.  That is politics over their own professional standards.