Police Download ReportDemetrius Crocker prosecution completely underreported
The story of Demetrius Crocker was completely underreported by the media. Only local Memphis papers picked the story up, even after he was convicted of attempting to buy sarin nerve gas to use in a plot to launch a gas attack in Washington D.C. while Congress was in session. The Associated Press published a story on their wire but none of the national media reported it at all until now, as Salon just wrote an article about this.
From The New Standard:
Last month, as we noted earlier this week, a white supremacist named Demitrius Van Crocker was sentenced to 30 years in prison for trying to buy sarin nerve gas from what turned out to be federal agents. He said he wanted to set off a nerve-gas bomb in Washington while Congress was in session, and maybe kill lots of black people in Jackson, Tenn. to boot. The coverage of this was almost non-existent. There were some local stories, and an AP report got picked up a few places. There was virtually no discussion of Crocker’s ideology, even though he apparently ranted extensively about his hatred of seemingly everything. Google News tells the story: just half a dozen hard-news pieces over a course of two days.Today, a Muslim named Derrick “Talib Abu Salam Ibn” Shareef was charged with threatening to set off hand grenades at a shopping mall before Christmas, and already Google News reveals literally hundreds of stories constituting a frenzy of half-coverage, most of it extremely ill-informed, rushed to print or air just to make sure they’re jumping on the Muslim psychopath early.
And today’s article in Salon is excellent:
On Nov. 28 — six days before the Times ran its photos of Padilla — Demetrius “Van” Crocker was sentenced to 30 years in prison. David Kustoff, the United States Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee, where Crocker was prosecuted, tells Salon that “It was one of the preeminent anti-terrorism cases of 2006 nationwide.” Whether or not that is true, few outside of the greater Memphis metropolitan area have ever heard of Crocker. Only one reporter, John Branston of the weekly Memphis Flyer, even covered his entire trial. What is certain is that in every particular his case is a study in contrasts with the prosecution of Jose Padilla.
