Al Qaeda Bomb Threat: Follow Up

A look through different media vehicles

Newspaper:

The Wall Street Journal. has efficiently reported on the recent news of a would-be airplane bomber.  Something that is notably different in the newspaper’s reports is that it uses opinions and feelings from airport guests.  It answers questions about how public opinion is affected by bomb threats.  Since the recent news about how the CIA was working with an informant does nothing to ease the worry about future terrorist plots, reports on machines used by airports that are designed to detect sophisticated chemical bombs such as the one that was going to be used are being published every day since the first report this week.    

Television:  

ABC World News with Diane Sawyer released a television broadcast on its evening national news report on Monday, May 7, 2012, concerning the would be bomber on a U.S. bound flight from Yemen.  Yemen has been increasingly a driving force in terrorism towards Americans.  Brian Ross gave the report on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on that Monday morning.  The report since then has been plastered over all news media for the last few days, with developments reported about every day.  The more recent report is that a Yemen informant working closely with the CIA successfully captured a would be bomber with months of preparation and information.   Now that the public has resurfaced fear of terrorist bombers post 9/11, the media has been covering this story closely from many different angles.  One being that reliability on metal detectors for nonmetallic bombs is compromised.  The media continues to investigate on these terroristic stories. 

Blog:

Political Blogger Dylan Byers blogged on Monday, May 7, 2012, at 4:51 p.m. (EDT) on the initial reports done by the Associated Press. Byers relays that the White House and the CIA agreed that AP was not to release the story about intelligence regarding a plot to bomb a U.S. bound airplane before Tuesday, May 08, 2012.  Although AP did not do as it was told, they released the story one day before, instead.  This blog was written only hours from which the AP report was released and before the news story developed further in finding that the bomber was in fact a double agent for the CIA agent.  Dylan Byers has not written any other story regarding further development on his blog on Politico.com. 

Social Media:

Twitter is the best place to receive updates on news reports since many reporters have Twitter accounts that are used to quickly send a message to the masses without superfluous information.  The ongoing investigative report on the foiled CIA double agent Al Qaeda bomber, Twitter had “#underwearbomber” trending when the media released the report.  Many people from all over the world on Twitter were referring to the bomber who was caught with a sophisticated bomb that was integrated into his underwear in 2009, along with the news about bomber on Monday, May 7, 2012, with comments like this one from @realhartford: “‘The agent is now safely outside Yemen and is being debriefed.’ That’s writing gold right there. #underwearbomber.” Since then, the trending feed has been updated about every couple of minutes with some kind of remark on the incident although official reports on Twitter have been released about every hour or so. The developing story continues to trend on Twitter.