The terrorist bombings on the Moscow subway that killed 39 people and injured dozens more were an indisputable tragedy, but the comparatively dispassionate and nuanced coverage of the events in the mainstream news media reveals marked cultural and political biases in the way we conceive of and report on terrorism.

Although the terrorists who carried out the Moscow attacks were Muslim extremists from the Caucasus region of Russia, MSM coverage has largely avoided the "radical Islamist" narrative, which usually attributes the extremism and violence of Muslim terrorists to the radicalizing influence of Islam.

The Russian incident, however, has been framed in nationalist terms--a brutal aspect of the ongoing struggle between separatists from the Caucasus region around Chechnya and the Russian government. While the Chechens' Muslim identity is presented as a significant cultural difference between the separatists and those they oppose, their religion has not been singled out as the reason for their radicalization, as it frequently is in coverage of Muslim terrorists who threaten U.S. interests in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and especially the United States.

Even as the news of the Moscow attacks was breaking, and before the identity of the suicide bombers was known, the press was already defining them within the terms of the regional conflict, as in the lead of this early breaking story in the Washington Post: "… two female suicide bombers shattered Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's claim to have contained a separatist insurgency in Russia's southwest …"

The standard terms used to describe and thereby define the terrorists behind the Moscow bombings also speak to this context of national struggle. The New York Times headlined, "Chechen Rebel Says He Planned Attacks," to describe Doku Umarov, an avowed proponent of global Islamist jihad with ties to Al-Qaeda.

CNN even prepared a time-line detailing the two-decade history of violence in Chechnya.

Conservative pundit Michelle Malkin decried what she considered the "whitewashing" of jihad in the coverage of the Moscow bombings in her blog, but even Fox News seemed to take a break from their Islamist jihad alarmism to talk about the events in the context of separatist war with Russia. In fact, Fox ran a story on the possible motivations of the "Black Widows," terrorist Chechen women who lost family to Russian violence.

This deeper exploration of the historical and national context of the Moscow attacks and especially the reporting on the personal histories of the "Black Widows" who carried them out provides a specificity of motive not usually found in American news media coverage of Muslim terrorists.

By contrast, how quickly the MSM pointed to Islam as the explanation for the actions of Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day bomber, disregarding their individual stories in favor of the standard narrative about the threat of Islam.

The Palestinian group Hamas is similarly framed, as in this AP article about "Islamic Hamas … which does not recognize Israel's right to exist." Rather than describing Hamas as a popular movement of violent struggle against occupation, much like the Chechen "rebels" and "separatists" who are also Muslim, the MSM tend to cast the militant Palestinians in "clash of civilizations" terms

The lesson of news media coverage of the Moscow bombings is that deeper contextualization of terrorist acts is not the same thing as justifying them. On the contrary, it is the job of journalists to explore the complex motivations and conditions that lead to such attacks, not to demonize an entire religion.

Meghan McCarty is an M.A. candidate in journalism at USC Annenberg and a Graduate Associate at Annenberg TV News.