The FBI deserves kudos for its capture of six terrorists in New Jersey.

The news media's coverage of the story varies greatly:

MSNBC's lead article on the arrest begins:

"Six foreign-born Muslims were arrested and accused Tuesday of plotting to attack the Army's Fort Dix and massacre scores of U.S. soldiers — a plot the FBI says was foiled when the men took a video of themselves firing assault weapons to a store to have the footage put onto a DVD.
The defendants, all men in their 20s from the former Yugoslavia and the Middle East, include a pizza deliveryman suspected of using his job to scout out the military base."

Newsweek took an entirely different approach to covering the story:
May 8, 2007 - "With the arrest of six men in New Jersey today, the FBI said it had foiled a frightening terror plot intended to inflict mass casualties at a major U.S. Army base. But nobody is breathing easy. The case is just the latest example of how homegrown Islamic militants are indoctrinating themselves in violent jihad theology by watching videos and surfing the Web—without any apparent direction from Al Qaeda or other organized terror groups."

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Which version of the story accurately reflects the "facts" of the situation?

Leslie Stahl interviewed Lou Dobbs this weekend and implied that journalists need to be fair and balanced. She suggested that Dobbs has an obvious bias and therefore he isn't really a journalist in the same sense as for example she is.

Dobbs asserted that it is better for viewers to be aware of the innate bias a person has because they can use an appropriate filter as they digest the information presented.

Stahl fails to acknowledge some very basic truths: Everyone has a bias. When people deny their bias, they are deluding themselves. When members of the media deny their bias they influence the audience's ability to make informed decisions. When a news program chooses to use language like "undocumented worker" they send a different message than if they used the term "illegal alien". When the media discusses the Iraqi war and reports on the death toll of American soldiers but doesn't mention the numbers of terrorists killed, they send a message. When the media refers to people as "insurgents" as opposed to "terrorists" they send a message.

Stahl also seems to believe that facts are neutral. In reality, the facts pick a side. When members of the media don't like the facts they often don't report them. Why don't we see reports on the successes in Iraq- stories about schools being built, the infrastructure becoming more stable, Iraqi civilians risking their lives to join the police force or the military, the children flocking to the soldiers... These facts run counter to the majority of the media's position that everything that is happening in Iraq is bad.

Now we have terrorists captured in America. Are they "home grown terrorists" or "foreign-born Muslims"? The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive but the tone of the articles send very different messages.

I choose to think they are "foreign-born Muslims" who came to America to take advantage of our society while simultaneously hoping to destroy the things that make America the greatest country on the planet. They may have come as children, with parents who perhaps never really embraced the American Dream. They may have come as students, hoping to capitalize on the opportunities an American education will offer.

We may never know exactly how these six men became the terrorists they certainly are, now.

MSNBC encourages the idea that their roots in the Middle East are relevant.

Newsweek wants its readers to think that the American way of life is the root cause of terrorism.

The fact is that terrorists are almost entirely fundamentalist Muslims, whether homegrown or foreign born and raised. The problem is not America. The problem is fundamentalist Islam.