There was an instablog newslink that loudly announced “Indian American jailed for stealing 9/11 funds” and the link lead to the original news item from thaindian.com which had as its RSS feed for comments as “on Indian American jailed for stealing 9/11 funds’ and its facebook share, bookmarks and del.ici.ous and email post links, all saying “An Indian American ... ”

The news is about a former official (who happens to be a person of Indian origin) jailed for stealing 9/11 funds in connivance with another American. The news item may be accurate, but a lot of Americans of diverse national origins steal money. Every time someone steals or gets jailed, do we see headlines that link the incident to the original nationality of the person committing the crime ?

Why does this headline read as ”An Indian American did something” ?

Do we have headlines that read ” An Italian American did this” or ”An English American did this” or a ”Japanese American did this” or an ”Israeli American did this” ?

Why is it that the Press connect the nationality when it comes to any adverse incident by anyone from India or Pakistan?

For a start, would Instablogs change the headline of the newslink by Dave as “Former American Official jailed for stealing 9/11 funds”? Doesn’t make much of a difference, the headline from thaindian.com has already been broadcast through newslinks, facebook shares, del.ici.ous, RSS feeds, bookmarks, email forwards and probably picked up by various newsmedia and has done some indelible damage. But changing the instablog headline would be a symbolic at least.

Image credits: csmworld