On October 11, New Hampshire Public Radio said it “erred” in sponsoring an anarchist book fair in Hanover whose promotion backed the Prairieland defendants. On October 14, a Fox News headline tied the fair to attackers. Most of the sentence is not in dispute. NHPR did apologize. The fair called itself anarchist. The weight sits on two words, “linked to”, a hint that carries a charge no one has to prove: it can mean an organizer, a guest or a shared line on a flyer. Fox’s own story answers which. Its fifth body paragraph names the promotional slogan, “Solidarity with the Prairieland Defendants.” It reports no defendant who organized, attended or sponsored the fair. The Prairieland record is hard. The Justice Department says all nine people indicted were convicted at trial, seven more pleaded guilty to material support for terrorists, and Benjamin Song got 100 years for the attempted murder of an Alvarado police officer. The Globe adds that some of those convictions rested partly on handing out leftist zines, and the fair’s own slogan said zines are not a crime. The flyer said defendants; the headline’s “attackers” folds every one of them into the attack. The tell to carry into the next headline: when “linked to” stands where a name should be, the link is usually a word, not a person. The line rides a habit of the mind: it hands readers who already think public radio leans left the proof they were looking for. The apology itself mentions no ICE and no defendants. A plain report would have had to say a station sponsored a table at a fair whose flyer backed people convicted over an attack.
