Thursday, April 18, 2013

Last Call

If there's any news outlet that deserves to get sued out of business right now in the wake of wild, ridiculous speculation over the identity of the Boston Marathon bombing suspect(s), it's the New York Post, as Deadspin's Barry Petchesky reports.

On Monday, the New York Post doggedly stuck to its claim that 12 were killed in the Boston Marathon bombings. On Tuesday, CNN (among others) reported that a suspect had been arrested, before walking that all the way back. Today, the Post wrests back the "what the fuck are you doing?" crown by putting two "potential suspects" on the cover of the newspaper. They are most assuredly innocent.

The pair show up in multiple photos of the finish line. They carry large bags. They are dark-skinned. This was enough for internet sleuths to peg them as suspicious. (They show up here, in Gawker's rundown of "suspects" identified by crowdsourcing on Reddit and 4chan.) And that was apparently enough for the Post to run with its front-page story today, claiming investigators are circulating photos of the two. (The photo on the paper's cover is a cropped and zoomed-in version of the one taken by Ben Levine, which appeared on Deadspin on Tuesday.)
But maybe there was a reason for them to be at the marathon, wearing track jackets and carrying bags: they're runners.
The kid in the blue jacket is a middle-distance runner at Revere High School.

The kid's name also happens to be Salah Barhoum, which should tell you everything you need to know about why the kid was pegged by the Post (which is now 0-3 in its idiocy and now almost certainly faces a big fat lawsuit.  CNN isn't innocent in this either, it ran with the Saudi suspect story on Monday and Tuesday as well.)  Of course, the FBI got around to releasing the pictures of the actual suspects:  two not-so-dusky looking guys:

And this guy:


Funny how that works, huh.

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