A Battle for the Soul of Islam by Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser

Author:Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Threshold Editions

7

AMERICAN RESPONSES TO FORT HOOD

I believe that everyone who cares about the future of the media in this country should read Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Mainstream Media Distort the News, a book written by Bernie Goldberg a few years back. Goldberg spent twenty-eight years at CBS and progressively began to see a trend at his news station (he worked for Dan Rather) and others of a liberal bias in their news reports. For instance, one of the stories that Goldberg talks about is how back in the 1980s the media, in lockstep with each other, began to report that the AIDS epidemic that had just begun would soon be extremely widespread in the heterosexual community. At the time, the disease was primarily confined in the United States to male homosexuals and IV drug users. The prediction that the disease would soon be widespread throughout the general population of the United States, like a modern Black Plague, was presented to the American public as though it was fact, though if one looked closer there did not appear to be hard research to back up this claim. There was a reason for that. There was no hard research, but merely the opinions of AIDS activist groups who speculated that the disease would soon decimate Americans regardless of sexual orientation.

The groups’ mission was to get more attention focused on the problem of AIDS, which they justly felt was being ignored by a lot of Americans, including influential politicians, many of whom looked at it as a disease that affected only gays and drug addicts, and therefore seemed unconcerned about doing anything to help the afflicted. These groups wanted more focus on treatment and prevention, and if they had to bend the truth to make that happen—by making the possibility of a widespread epidemic seem like unquestionable fact—then so be it. The problem is that the media went with the story without bothering to question it. This, of course, was a major problem, since there was not even the pretense of objectivity. When Goldberg questioned reporters and producers about this, their responses were fairly uniform: Perhaps the story was not based on fact, but it was for a good cause. What did it matter, they seemed to say, that the story was based on speculation if in the long run more people got helped?

The problem with this kind of thinking is that no matter how good the cause, objective thinking gets tossed aside. Was it noble to want to help minorities with a terminal illness who were being marginalized in many quarters? Of course. Was it okay to stretch the truth toward that end? No.

The problem is that these biased scenarios continue to play out in the mainstream media over and over again, and the Fort Hood massacre was no exception. The media’s PC whitewash brigade came out in full force, and as we shall see, without intending to, many of them encouraged the sort of victimology mind-set that is at the core of Islamist thinking and violence.

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