Paranoia is knowing only a little of what's going on...

Watching Newsnight with Aaron Brown on CNN, I saw Mr. Brown interview a woman named Annie Jacobsen. Ms. Jacobsen is a writer for WomensWallStreet.com, a dinky website providing financial content about the stock market to women. You may have heard about her, as she appears to have caused quite a stir with a recent story she wrote for the website. Her article Terror in the Skies, Again is about a recent flight she took from Detroit to Los Angeles that had a large group of Arab men on it. This group left her so shaken she was barely able to write an inflammatory and bigoted story about it.

It would seem that after seeing 14 Arab men board her plane wearing track suits with Arab writing on it and carrying valid passports, also with Arab lettering, Ms. Jacobsen bagan to feel uneasy and suspected the group of being cleverly disguised terrorists. Then their suspicious behavior began. The men began talking to one another, gesturing to each other, and even (GASP!) using the lavatory from time to time!

That's all. Nothing happened. Turns out the group were part of a Syrian musical ensemble hired to play at a hotel. The men talked to one another. They glanced around. They peed. Ms. Jacobsen overreacted to their behavior on the flight, but that's fine. I'm sure we all would have raised some eyebows at the group as tensions on airplanes are justifiablly higher these days. And perhaps she would have taken those jitters away with her and told a few people about the scary boogey men and their musical instruments of evil. The fears were unfounded and no incident occurred, however, and unlike what the average passenger might do after feeling on edge from a flight, Ms. Jacobsen dug around a little to find out if she should have been scared.

She contacted the TSA and the FBI and they assured her they were aware of the flight and they found nothing amiss after they looked into it. The men were indeed musicians and were doing nothing suspicious. But for some reason that I can only attribute to narrow-minded racism, she seems confounded that there were no arrests at LAX the day of her arrival.

I find the whole story a little implausible on face value but I chalk that up to Ms. Jacobsen's parnoid embellishments. For instance, one of the men apparently smiled at her before boarding, but once on board his face was "cold" and "steely." It could be that she was acting rather frightened and strange herself. Or it could be that he did not like her. I cetrainly don't and I haven't met her. But I am less interested in whether the story is true than in what it says about us as a society.

Suddenly, this non-incident is being picked up by the mainstream press and Ms. Jacobsen has been on-hand for a number of different news programs to discuss her racist tripe. Could you imagine NBC News picking up a story in some racist newsletter put out by the KKK and pretending by discussing the article with the author they are remaining fair and balanced? Because that is what this reactionary unintelligent garbage should be likened to.

Now it seems Ms. Jacobsen has written a follow-up to her story lambasting political correctness and how it will lead to more deaths. Excuse me, but nobody died. Nothing happened and no one was ever at risk. But people all across the blogosphere are lining up to pronounce P.C.-ness dead, as if her gross depiction of a women who jumps to conclusions and refuses to come back down is evidence. It's hard to take anything as hard fact when smack dab in the middle of an article an author uses Ann Coulter as a primary source.

Through all this coverage and discussion and facetime for a know-nothing, racist nutcase, not one news outlet has bothered to even try to contact a single member of this Syrian Band. That's the "liberal" media for you.