Do you get so excited when someone says, 'My house was robbed"? Houses, of course, can’t be robbed. They can be burgled; only people can be robbed. Legally. Colloquially, we all know what they’re talking about.

Maybe “The Technician” does, but insisting that people be very carefully precise with language outside of the specific technical domain is a form of sealioning.

They’re happy to call it an intentional act of violence, so they’ve ruled out a lot of the explanations for an exploding car. The bar for “terrorism” is pretty low - they charged an Atlanta student with is for tossing bottles of water and dry ice out his window.

Regardless, it’s definitely a journalistic choice whether to quote the police lieutenant’s very careful, and possibly technical statement, or to quote the business owner (Musk) or US President speculating. And maybe it just turns out that it’s carefully ethical journalists reporting on potential right-wing violence, and usually unethical hacks reporting on possible attacks on the corporatocracy, but it sure does feel like a pattern.

It’s the Black Friday price gouging model. Remember when gas prices went from $2 to $5 in…2008? Everyone was so excited when they came back down to $3 that no one noticed we had a permanent 50% price hike.