IN WHICH I DEFEND THE NEW YORK TIMES AND OTHER MEDIA: Quite a few commentators (e.g., Michelle Malkin and Mark Steyn) are criticizing the New York Times and other media outlets for playing down the Islamic angle to the U.N.C. terrorist attack of Mohammed Taheri-azar.

There’s no question that this angle is being downplayed. But it’s arguable that the papers are doing this to reduce the likelihood of copycats. This doesn’t appear to have been any sort of organized attack, just a lone-wolf effort by a guy who’s not too sharp. It’s still terrorism, of course, of a sort — after all, Eric Rudolph was a lone-wolf guy who wasn’t too sharp, though he seems to have been considerably sharper than Taheri-azar — but in some ways it’s more like the school shootings of the 1990s than real Al Qaeda type terrorism. Hyping those shootings led to copycats, and made the killers look like martyrs to disturbed potential imitators. There’s a pretty good argument that the same applies here, and that it’s more responsible to address this in fairly muted tones.