After spending weeks depicting ISIS as an unprecedented threat — too radical even for Al Qaeda! — administration officials suddenly began spoon-feeding their favorite media organizations and national security journalists tales of a secret group that was even scarier and more threatening than ISIS, one that posed a direct and immediate threat to the American Homeland. Seemingly out of nowhere, a new terror group was created in media lore.
The unveiling of this new group was performed in a September 13 article by the Associated Press, who cited unnamed U.S. officials to warn of this new shadowy, worse-than-ISIS terror group...
The way "Khorasan" was announced, seemingly out of nowhere, felt dodgy. A bad sleight-of-hand; a clumsy way of nudging the American public to war, with what may be an easily pronounced (and therefore easily repeated on air) name. That may not be the case, though, given simple incentives of the US administration, and a hungry press.
From Jack Goldsmith's piece in Lawfare, On Glenn Greenwald’s Skepticism on Threat Claims About the Khorasan Group:
When one faces terrorist threat information, and is responsible for the consequences of that threat, and for building support for the President, one sometimes over-reads the threat facts. And in the short run, journalists, desperate for access and scoops, sometimes report this information uncritically.
Remain skeptical of everyone's fervor.