In the hours immediately after the bombing, suspicions fell broadly if vaguely on Middle East terrorism. Speculation, as I write in 1995, “congealed with rumor into what seemed to be a plausible and urgent narrative” for the news media.

For example, Connie Chung, then in her final weeks as a CBS News anchor, declared in a special report from Oklahoma City hours after the bombing:

“This is the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil ever. A U.S. government source has told CBS News that it has Middle East terrorism written all over it.”

Over on ABC News, the network’s national security correspondent, John McWethy, reported that “if you talk to intelligence sources and to law enforcement officials, they all say . . . that this particular bombing probably has roots in the Middle East.”

And on CNN earlier in the day, news anchor Frank Sesno said: “We have been told that a number of extremist Islamic groups have been traced to the Oklahoma area, and while there is no specific link yet [to the bombing], I’ve been told that they are among those who are being looked at very, very closely.”

The news media rode the angle of suspected Middle Eastern terror very hard — and were very wrong. It was a telling example of how early reports about a disaster or calamity can be in error or exaggerated, and as such deserve skeptical treatment. “It is,” I write in the book, “a vulnerability the news media seldom seem to anticipate, or to learn from.”

As it soon turned out, the attack was the work not of Middle East terrorists but of Timothy McVeigh, a disgruntled veteran of the U.S. Army who thought he would teach a meddlesome U.S. government a severe lesson by bombing the federal building. McVeigh was a white American. So, too, were his accomplices, Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier.

Coverage of the trial was unrelenting, almost inescapable, and at times somewhat madcap — as when Larry King paid a visit to the Simpson courtroom in Los Angeles in January 1995. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that King “bounded into court like an overheated Labrador retriever, drooling over the famous lawyers and waving to the audience as if he were the grand marshal at a parade.”

Howard Rosenberg, a media critic for the Los Angeles Times, wasn’t much exaggerating when he wrote in the trial’s aftermath:

“We in the media have met the circus, and we are it.”

Considerable debate about the coverage of the trial — invariably but probably excessively called the “Trial of Century” — revolved around the wisdom of allowing the proceedings to be televised. Doing so, it was said, encouraged the lawyers and witnesses to grandstand for the camera and had the effect of prolonging the trial.

The debate about cameras in the courtroom was fairly intense in 1995 but has since been settled, more or less, in favor of televising high-profile criminal trials.

Not that that necessarily has made for more sophisticated media coverage.

WJC