Have you ever watched a news segment and felt your jaw actually drop?
I had one of those moments this week. A major cable news anchor – someone who’s been on television longer than some of my readers have been alive – looked straight into the camera and described the man just charged with planting pipe bombs outside the RNC and DNC headquarters on January 5, 2021 as “a 30-year-old white man from the D.C. suburbs.”
Except he isn’t white. Not even close.
The suspect’s own arrest photos, family statements, even the neighborhood he grew up in tell a completely different story. Yet there it was, broadcast to millions, fitting perfectly into a narrative that’s been pushed for nearly five years.
When the Script Writes Itself
Let’s be honest – most of us have grown cynical about media mistakes. We’ve seen too many “mostly peaceful” fires and too many “fiery but peaceful” protests to be shocked anymore.
But this one felt different. This wasn’t a typo in a chyron or an honest mix-up between two similar-looking people. This was a flagship anchor on a flagship network describing a suspect’s race in a way that was demonstrably, visibly false – and doing it with the calm confidence of someone reading from a script that was written long pre-written in his head.
You could almost hear the internal monologue: January 6 adjacent crime + bombs = must be some angry white guy from the suburbs. The mental shortcut was so automatic that basic reality didn’t even slow it down.
The Moment the Mask Slipped
Within minutes of the segment airing, social media lit up. People posted the suspect’s booking photo next to screen grabs of the broadcast. The contrast was almost comical if it wasn’t so depressing.
“Just so instinctually programmed to lie. Literally an NPC. Programmed to lie.”
– Popular X account with over 2 million followers
Harsh words, sure. But when someone stands in front of a teleprompter and confidently declares something the entire country can see isn’t true, what else are people supposed to think?
It wasn’t just random Twitter accounts either. Journalists from across the spectrum – even some who normally defend legacy media – raised eyebrows. When you’ve lost the “but maybe they just made an honest mistake” crowd, you know the damage is real.
A Pattern Older Than January 6
Here’s the thing that keeps me up at night: this isn’t new.
Remember the Covington Catholic kids? The media saw a MAGA hat and instantly built an entire villain arc around a teenager standing still while an activist banged a drum in his face. Facts be damned.
Or the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida that literally never contained those words?
Time after time, when reality threatens the preferred narrative, reality gets edited in real time. And the higher the emotional stakes, the faster the editing happens.
January 6 has been the mother of all sacred narratives. It’s not just an event anymore – it’s practically scripture for one half of the country. So when someone planting viable pipe bombs the night before? That person has to fit the story. The script literally doesn’t have room for complexity.
What the Actual Evidence Shows
The suspect, Brian Cole Jr., lives in Woodbridge, Virginia with his mother. Public records and family photos make his background pretty clear. His father, according to reports, previously hired one of America’s best-known civil rights attorneys – the same lawyer who’s represented families in some of the country’s highest-profile racial justice cases.
None of this was hidden. None of it required deep investigative work. A simple Google Image search or a look at the arrest affidavit photos would have been enough.
But that would have required pausing the narrative conveyor belt for five seconds. And in modern cable news, five seconds is an eternity.
- Works at a bail bondsman office in northern Virginia
- Lives in a suburban single-family home
- Connected to multiple bail-bond companies through public records
- Family background publicly documented for years
Pretty normal stuff. Nothing that screams “obvious domestic terrorist” or “obvious anything,” really. Just a guy. But guys don’t fit narratives – caricatures do.
The Trust Death Spiral
Here’s what worries me more than any single incident: we’re watching institutional trust die in real time.
Every time something like this happens – every rushed narrative, every retracted story, every “white man” who turns out to be something else entirely – another few hundred thousand people decide they’ll never believe these outlets again.
And it’s not just the right. I’ve talked to liberals who used to watch these networks religiously and now roll their eyes at the obvious spin. When you lose both sides, you don’t have an audience problem. You have a credibility problem.
The numbers don’t lie. Trust in mass media is hovering around record lows – lower than Congress, lower than used car salesmen in some polls. That’s not healthy for democracy, whatever your politics.
Why This Particular Lie Matters
Some people will say, “It’s just one mistake, why make a big deal?”
But it’s never just one mistake. It’s the accumulation. It’s the pattern. And in this specific case, it’s about something deeper: the automatic assumption that certain crimes can only be committed by certain kinds of people.
That’s actually racist – the real kind, not the buzzword kind. It’s saying that evil has a skin color, that political violence has a predetermined face. And when reality doesn’t cooperate, well… we’ll just adjust reality until it does.
I’ve covered enough stories over the years to know that bad people come in every shade, every background, every political persuasion. The moment you start assuming otherwise, you stop being a journalist and start being a propagandist.
The Bigger Question Nobody Wants to Ask
Here’s what keeps me awake: if they got something this obvious this wrong, what else have they gotten wrong?
We still don’t know who planted those pipe bombs. We still don’t have satisfactory answers about a lot of things from that chaotic week in January 2021. And every time the media rushes to fill the vacuum with their preferred story – only to be proven wrong later – it makes it harder to have serious conversations about what actually happened.
Real journalism requires humility. It requires saying “we don’t know yet” sometimes. It requires the willingness to be surprised by reality.
When you lose that, you don’t just lose credibility. You lose the ability to tell the country the truth when it really matters.
And that’s the scariest part of all.
The pipe bombs were real. The threat was real. The suspect now in custody – whoever he turns out to be, whatever his background – deserves due process.
But the rush to make him fit a pre-existing villain template? That was fake. And millions of Americans saw it happen in real time.
In the end, maybe that’s the real story here: not that a news anchor made a mistake, but that so many people instantly recognized it as the latest chapter in a very long book they’ve already stopped reading.
When trust is this broken, it doesn’t come back easily. And incidents like this? They’re not healing anything.
They’re just turning another page.
