It didn't take long for the kooks to come to the defense of the pirates who kidnapped Captain Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama. The sea brigands were Third Worlders, after all, and their prey was an American. Susie Madrak writes at Crooks Kooks and Liars, "I wonder which principled member of our corporate media will point out that, in the big picture, the Somali pirates are acting in self-defense?" A commenter on MYDD adds of the gun-toting kidnappers, "I am tired of seeing of Africans die for no reason." Me too, but this pirate trio clearly died for a reason--something to do with sticking another human being with an AK-47 and threatening to pull the trigger.

Self defense?!! What planet is that fool from?

The way the Boston Globe sees it - headline:

Navy kills 3 pirates
to save US captain

I don't get what's wrong with the headline.

I don't know, I guess I've been reading comments today by people condemning our handling of this affair as the imperialist westerners again taking advantage of those poor third world Africans and that headline, to me, smacked of that sentiment.

Like, instead of “U.S. captain saved, three pirates killed”, it read like the U.S. Navy had to murder three pirates from a poor African country to save an Amercian. I have little doubt that that’s the way the Globe meant it.

Which is true. The U.S. Navy DID have to murder three pirates from a poor African country to save an Amercian. And that's ok with most people who I know. But maybe not the Globe and many of it's readers.

That headline jumped out at me too. It's not inaccurate. It's just that it seems ideologically loaded, in that the Globe seems to be pointing the reader's attention to the costs of this operation rather than the success.

Agreed. That's how I took it.

I liked also how they put into quotations ["imminent danger"] when describing how close the captain was to death. Like he wasn’t?

The headline reads like a neutral equation 3 Somalis are less than 1 American.

It should convey that 3 Somalis, who threatened to kill an innocent, were shot and killed before they could carry out that threat. There we have the equation and its justice.

Ya'll are reading into the headline way too much. It's kind of a stretch to call this headline biased. There are plenty of examples of ideological bias in the media. This, however, is not one.

The only question on my mind is: when is Obama expected to apologize to the world over this.

The headline is definitely an interesting turn of phrase, that I think is evidence of some bias of cost over success as Dan points out. It's similar to the headlines during the school shootings at Northern Illinois and Virginia Tech. Many of the headlines referred to the murder as a shooter, which I think is evidence of an anti-gun bias of the media. Sure the murderers used guns to kill innocents, but they were way more than shooters, they were MURDERERS. Then again I'm sure "murder" is a legal definition. If murder is the wrong term, they were definitely killers over shooters.