The Combating Terrorism Library at West Point on May 3, 2012 published 17 correspondences that were discovered at Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound during the deadly raid a year earlier—and the terrorist leader’s news preferences start to come out. For the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks, bin Laden considered sending a tape to one of the American news channels, and suggested that “we should look for an American channel that can be close to being unbiased, such as CBS, or other channel that has political motives that make it more interested in broadcasting the point of view of al Mujahadin.” Bin Laden asked Adam Gadahn, the American who became an al Qaeda spokesman to do some research into what channel they should use. Gadahn’s answer? They’re all the same, except for Fox News, which he wrote “falls into the abyss, and you know, lacks neutrality too.” He doesn’t share bin Laden’s love of CBS, writing “I see it like the other channels, but it has a famous program (60 Minutes) that has some popularity and a good reputation.” Gadahn’s choice? MSNBC, pre-Keith Olbermann’s firing, that is. “I used to think MSNBC channel may be good and neutral a bit, but it has lately fired its most famous journalists—Keith Olbermann and Octavia Nasser the Lebanese—because they released some statements that were open to argument.”
