DISCOVERY CHANNEL BUILDING TAKEOVER

I decided to follow a story that has just recently occurred, the Discovery Channel building takeover by James Lee. I followed this story using three different sources. The first is from ABC news on a webpage (http://abcnews.go.com/US/gunman-enters-discovery-channel-headquarters-employees-evacuated/story?id=11535128&page=3) , the second from a MSNBC television broadcast (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38957020/) , and the third from the Washington Post newspaper (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/02/AR2010090202259.html).

All three stories painted virtually the same picture. However, ABC did not label James Lee, the culprit, as deadly gunman like the Washington Post and MSNBC had him labeled in their stories; ABC’s headlines read, “Environmental Militant Killed by Police at Discovery Channel Headquarters”. This title would make one think that the police killed a man whose only crime was loving the environment and trying to protect it. IN the bulk of the story ABC did tell of his gunman status and how he held three male hostages just as the other news sources did. The other two sources however made it seem like James Lee was a dangerous gunman from the start and may have been a way to boost their ratings or sales.

Another thing that I found interesting about the three articles on the same story was that one of the stories describes that when the gunman was shot, one of the explosives that was tied to him, went off one of them did not mention an explosive going off and the last dwelled on a more detailed description of what happened. The Washington Post did not mention an explosion going off when the gunman was shot and MSNBC simply tells us that when the gunman was shot one of the explosives went off. By reading this, I asked myself, “how powerful was the explosive I wonder?”, assuming that it had to be some sort of “boom” that had to occur. However, reading ABC’s story, it simply says that “one of the canisters popped”. This statement falls short of an explosive going off and made me wonder why I had not heard about this before. It seemed like ABC was trying to give an overall detailed description of the situation that was at hand.

All of the stories mentioned that James Lee was an environmental militant and that he was against the Discovery Channel for not trying to save the earth and even pitched them a reality show on saving the environment. Lee had been arrested outside of the Discovery building before and all stories mentioned this fact as well as the game show. The sources also said that Lee said that the earth does not need humans and we need to try and save the animals before we start having more humans.