Aggressive coyote at Nehalem Bay State Park. Photo has many attributions — It’s probably from the Oregon Parks & Recreation Department, via a visitor who snapped a photo of what is believed to be the relevant coyote.
On June 21, 2012, a 20-pound female coyote attacked a five-year-old girl in Nehalem Bay State Park in Oregon. The girl is fine. The coyote is not, but you wouldn’t know it from this National News article, which reports, both in its headline and in the text of the article, that the offending coyote was “removed” from the park. That sounds like it was live-trapped and relocated, doesn’t it? Only at the end of the fourth paragraph do we see what really became of the coyote — apparently it was “safely taken from the park by lethal means“.
“Safely taken”…by “lethal means”? Not safely for the coyote, surely.
For contrast, here’s an alternative article, about the same event, whose angle implies the coyote was “tracked down and killed”.
Here’s an article that says the girl was “nipped” by the coyote; here’s one that says she was “bitten”; here’s one that says she was “attacked”. Here’s an article calling the event an “encounter”, using a headline which carefully implies the coyote was not necessarily at fault (“Coyote killed after encounter left 5-year-old girl injured“), and specifically not using the word “bitten”, yet still using the word “attacked” later in the article. And here’s one that deliberately emphasizes that the attack was made upon a “little girl”. What do you suppose actually happened?
And, as a bonus, here’s the first article published verbatim by a different news agency without the original byline. Notice that they changed the headline to include the word “attack”, even though the word “attack” appears nowhere in the article?
This is why I never trust information from just one source. Journalists are supposed to be unbiased, but it doesn’t often happen that way.
Animalfeasance 