Here’s AP reporting a multiple murder in Michigan.
It starts out as straight news (just reporting the facts, ma’am):
A man fatally shot an anti-abortion activist near a Michigan high school Friday, drove to a gravel pit and shot its owner to death and planned to kill a third man, but was arrested before he could act, a prosecutor said.
Harlan James Drake, 33, was charged Friday with first-degree murder in the deaths of James Pouillon, 63, and Mike Fuoss, 61, said Shiawassee County Prosecutor Randy Colbry.
“The defendant had ill will toward these three individuals — not for the same reason necessarily, but had a grudge,” Colbry said.
So the facts are that:
a) Pouillon was an anti-abortion activist,
b) there is no basis for believing that the murder was an anti-anti-abortion statement.
But the AP‘s Tim Martin and Ed White see no reason why a news story should be constrained by the facts. They see no reason why they shouldn’t indulge themselves in a little gratuitous inflammatory speculation:
Although authorities didn’t specifically say that Pouillon was targeted for his anti-abortion views, his death was the latest high-profile shooting of a person involved in the abortion debate. On May 31, abortion provider George Tiller was shot to death in his Kansas church.
Keeping the flag of the AP flying high, I guess.