I find it more interesting that the media coverage has been, predictably, completely one sided and sensationalistic going so far as to strongly imply 'suspects.' It's a great reminder of how, in the past, we slipped into 2 red scares and it seems we just barely dodged a third in the present.
Perhaps ironically we can attribute this to the internet. It is a great device for misinformation and FUD, but at the same time it also allows people to openly point out poor logic, unsupported conclusions, or even false facts. This diversity of view probably helps any singular view from taking as hold as strongly as it has in times past -- for better (red scare) and for worse (climate change).
It's not "interesting" because the media industries have been doing this everyday for at least 2 centuries. Maybe more interesting is how people keep getting amnesiac about this.
We can attribute any of it to "the Internet" or "Facebook" or "Twitter"... or to any other communication platform that lets people reach a wide audience.
One of the big reasons I find it interesting is because I expect there's probably more news outlets now than ever before, yet we see such a peculiar level of homogeneity in the views they espouse - perhaps even more so than in times past. The New York Times has an awesome archive going all the way back to the 1850s. In fact there's a lot of really great free newspaper archive resources [1]. And in perusing these archives something that I think has really changed is that in the past there was a far greater diversity of published views. By contrast today views tend to be quite uniform except in archetypical difference, such as partisanship.
In a way I would not be surprised if behind the scenes people were collaborating with one another, feeling that expressing different views would undermine the credibility of what's said as different organizations contradict each other. But ironically I think this sort of homogeneity is playing a large role in peoples' diminishing trust in media. It makes the news seem very artificial and orchestrated. And the homogeneity means that when they get things wrong - as seems to be the case here, it makes the entire industry look just awful. Being wrong is one thing, being so collectively ill informed as to not have even meaningfully considered the possibility of a binary truth (it is a weapon, or it's not a weapon)? That's something far worse.
Perhaps ironically we can attribute this to the internet. It is a great device for misinformation and FUD, but at the same time it also allows people to openly point out poor logic, unsupported conclusions, or even false facts. This diversity of view probably helps any singular view from taking as hold as strongly as it has in times past -- for better (red scare) and for worse (climate change).