Mainstream Media – Anger, Pity or Opportunity?
In a 2,000 word story on the foiled Portland bombing plot, here is what the New York Times provides its readers in the first three paragraphs: A Somali-born teenager who thought he was detonating a car bomb at a packed Christmas tree-lighting ceremony downtown here was arrested by the authorities on Friday night after federal agents said that they had spent nearly six months setting up a sting operation. The bomb, which was in a van parked off Pioneer Courthouse Square, was a fake — planted by F.B.I. agents as part of the elaborate sting — but “the threat was very real,” Arthur Balizan, the F.B.I.’s special agent in charge in Oregon, said in a statement released by the Department of Justice. An estimated 10,000 people were at the ceremony on Friday night, the Portland police said. Mr. Balizan identified the suspect as Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, a naturalized United States citizen. He graduated from Westview High School in Beaverton, Ore., a Portland suburb, and had been taking classes at Oregon State in Corvallis until Oct. 6, the university said Saturday. So the hurried Times reader who reads just the opening paragraphs is basically led to a conclusion that what took place was some sort of aberrant ‘teenager’ behavior by an ordinary, local college student who happens to have the quaint background of an immigrant/naturalized citizen. You can read all 2,000 words and you will never see the statement that the arrested man was a Muslim. You’ll find that he attended an “Islamic center”, and as he was being arrested he shouted “Allahu Akbar!”—which is the same thing the Ft. Hood murderer shouted as he was killing innocents and is the same thing all jihadist martyrs proclaim as they proceed with acts of terrorism, but the Times reader is simply informed helpfully that “Allahu Akbar!” is an Arabic translation of the words which mean “God is great.” So the Times reader is led to believe the arrested man was pretty much like any religious nut (including of course Christians) because, after all, he proudly sought to do the deed by speaking merely an ‘Arabic translation’ of what any American Christian nut would say. Many observers of the Times get angry at this kind of seemingly deliberate obfuscation of the truth in the name of political correctness. And it is hard to believe that at the highest levels of Times management that there is no awareness of just how deliberately deceptive this kind of reporting is. But to fully appreciate just how badly the American Pravda media needs a top-to-bottom overhaul, just consider the possibility that the Times reporter really isn’t engaged in deliberate deception. Maybe he really doesn’t know that what he’s doing is obscuring the truth. Maybe the religious vacuity in mainstream journalism has truly reached zero—there is no concept of religious faith, no understanding of theology, no concept of God that any of these people can identify with. Maybe to them “Allahu Akbar!” really is no different than a Southern Baptist proclaiming that God is great. If the innocent explanation is the accurate explanation, we have a media that absolutely does not know America or America’s founding principles and values. So for those in the media industry or wanting to enter it, there is a huge opportunity to build a media enterprise embraced by the American people. Fox News is a runaway success on the sheer power of the concept of ‘balance’; but they are nowhere near being truly anchored in America’s founding principles and values. The central conflict facing the world today is between so-called ‘radical’ Islam and western civilization. It is plain to anyone willing to see it (or to say it the other way, to anyone who is not determined to not see it. The dots are connected. Now if we only had a national media with eyes to see. Paul Gable November 29, 2010 |