Right-winged hawks at the edge of seventeen

Surveying the online chatter in the wake of the arrests of 17 fellas on terrorism charges, after buying three tonnes of what they presumed to be ammonium nitrate, provides a reminder of how the warblogging genre got credibility in the first place in the weeks following 9/11. Who’s going to disagree with even the most hysterical assertion that big city buildings shouldn’t be blown up by deranged teenagers? And those leaping to question the sanity of those bloviations can be refuted with link after link after link. But, as major news organizations end up publishing contradictory stories, while quoting one another in the effort to make police statements sound more scintillating, the line between fact and opinion blurs in lieu of actual information – except the people bashing away at their keyboards all weekend must have been able to generate some sort of collective truth, right? Well, in the case of right-wing amateur pundit network Pajamas Media, any partisan panic helps in the effort to convince marketers of luxury goods to steer ad dollars away from the New York Times. BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis was among those unimpressed by the NYT initially skirting detail of who the arrested actually were: “In the fifth paragraph, the suspects were merely ‘mainly of South Asian descent.’“, he observed. “India? Burma? Thailand? Indian? Southeast? Southwest? French-speaking terrorists from Vietnam coming to join their Quebecois confrères, perhaps? Who’s to know?” Subsequently, an NYT brief heaped praise upon the Toronto Star for breaking the story, while the national papers lost their grip due to their lack of Sunday editions, and the Sun was stuck with torquing seemingly clairvoyant tales of impending TTC terror. Meanwhile, the spotlighted comments from lefty readers at The Huffington Post acclaim Canada for being able to conduct raids without bugging all the citizens, and conclude Stephen Harper must be a swell guy because he wasn’t preoccupied with reading My Pet Goat. Well, at least the arrests and subsequent smashing of mosque windows creates a municipal election subplot more menacing than gun crime, as Angry in the Great White North blogger Steve Janke managed to get in the very first dig: “I wonder if Mayor David Miller will blame the lack of basketball courts and community centres to give potential terrorists a more constructive outlet for their energy.”