Islamizing Journalism School: “Covering Islam in America”

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Judith Miller at FOX has picked up on my coverage of islamizing journalism: "Islam on Main Street" for reporters – and aspiring reporters – covering Muslim communities in America. and this back in January,The Society of Professional Journalists: Why We Never Get the Straight Story on Islamic Jihad

Miler signed up for a journalism class, “Covering Islam in America," and was shocked, (shocked, I tell ya) to find the whitewashing of jihad. Miller calls out Poynter Institute and the professors teaching the course. And while Miller believes that "there are excellent individuals in CAIR" (who?) at least she is covering this critical issue and calling out the propagandists.

Journalism Class That Urges 'Context' in Reporting on Jihad Misses Point: Motive Matter by

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The respected Florida-based Poynter Institute, whose mission is to improve journalism in support of democracy, is trying to help journalists cover Islam more effectively by offering a new on-line course free of charge. So I registered.

And I learned, among other fairly uncontroversial facts about what has been among the world’s fastest growing religions, that while approximately 3,000 people were killed on 9/11, approximately 15,000 people in the U.S. are murdered each year. 

I also learned that in most years, “jihad organizations” have accounted for “well under 1 percent” of the half million people who are murdered annually. At its “peak” – of what, Poynter.news University doesn’t tell us– the jihad groups have accounted for under 2 percent of the toll.

Poynter’s professors – Lawrence Pintak and Stephen Franklin, both former foreign correspondents – also tell me that 500,000 individuals die each year from “nutritional deficiencies,” (I suppose in layman’s English, they mean hunger and related causes) “more than 800,000 from malaria, and two million from HIV/AIDS.”

So “jihad is not a leading cause of death in the world,” the course states, “even in the three countries that account for the bulk of the casualties: Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan.”

The professors offer these helpful comparative death tolls to give the 9/11 death toll “some context,” they say. But the implicit message of the course seems obvious enough: 3,000 dead Americans, (and they might have looked up the actual death toll) have been over-covered. Why don’t journalists spend more time covering malaria, or hunger, or especially HIV/AIDS, which the last time I checked, was hardly being ignored by the nation’s media? 

For that matter, why aren’t the media investigating bathtub deaths, since according to “Overblown,” John Mueller’s attack on what he regards as the government’s obsessive focus on terrorism, more Americans die in bathtub accidents each year than in terrorist attacks?

The answer should be fairly obvious to such an august institution as Poynter: just as the press covers murders rather than traffic fatalities, which far outnumber killings in America each year, it covers terrorism intensively because motive matters. “If it bleeds it leads,” may be a rule-of-thumb in journalism, but how and why the person died still determine the importance of the story. Terrorism is not just run-of-the-mill murder; It attempts to strike at the heart of who and what we are as a nation. And to compare the numbers who died in the deadliest terror strike in our nation’s history with the annual homicides, which occur in all countries and cultures, is to miss the point of what happened in and to America on that fateful day.

Just what kind of journalism is Poynter promoting?

Terrorism was legitimately “the” story of the past decade. And we need only look at today’s newspapers – though no longer on the front pages of most of them – to appreciate the potential threat it still poses, despite America’s impressive gains against this intractable scourge. 

As Poynter was recruiting journalism students for its mediocre course on Islam, real journalists were reporting that a “26-year-old man” from “a town west of Boston,” as The New York Times described him in its first graf, was being charged with plotting not only to blow up the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol using remote-controlled aircraft filled with plastic explosives, but also to supply Al Qaeda with detonation devices and weapons to kill American soldiers overseas. The suspect, Rezwan Ferdaus, the Times continues, is “an American citizen” with “a physics degree from Northeastern University in Boston.” 

Are those facts about him more important than something that is never reported in the story – the fact that he is a Muslim? The story dances all around religion, of course. It quotes the FBI affidavit as saying that Ferdaus considered Americans “enemies of Allah,” for instance. But nowhere does it say that he is part of a tiny, but growing, worrisome trend among Muslim Americans – those who are being radicalized here at home by real-life and on-line radical Islamist clerics and by myriad other factors that are still poorly understood.

The Poynter course, “Covering Islam in America,” barely mentions the proliferation of such “home-grown” Islamist terrorism in its discussion of important trends and facts about Islam. Its omissions – documented in detail by the conservative Media Research Center – are legion. Among them are the death fatwas issued by militants Muslims against Salman Rushdie (perhaps that is by now too ancient an outrage to include) or the more modern day threats against Kurt Westergaard, whose cartoon about the Muslim prophet Mohammed sparked riots around the world. 

Although just this week Saudi women were just promised the right to vote – albeit in a municipal election four years from now – the new course gives short shrift to the Wahabism in the kingdom which makes women unable to make basic decisions about their lives – to travel, work, get educated, or open a business – without the permission of a male guardian. It says nothing, as MRC notes, about the fact that the Saudis executed a Sudanese worker last week for the Islamic crime of “sorcery.”

Its list of individuals and organizations for journalists to consult include such groups as CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which the FBI has shunned for a time, and other dubious, self-appointed “spokespersons” for Islam. While there are excellent individuals in CAIR and at several of the other organizations the course lists, there are also some extremely radical voices. But Poynter’s free, on-line tutorial on Islam offers few such caveats. (You get what you pay for, I suppose.)

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Brandy
Brandy
12 years ago

Someone put a link in the comments section of her story (Judith’s). It takes you to another story regarding the funding for the class which comes from…Soros! Read below:
“The George Soros-funded Social Science Research Council, which received $50,000 from the Open Society Institute ”For Initiative on HIV/AIDS and Social Transformation,” is one of the groups behind the initiative, along with the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University. That fits with a theme for liberal financier Soros, who has spent more than $52 million on influencing the media. The Islamic course also links to another Soros-funded entity, the well-financed Center for American Progress.”
Thanks for linking this story Pamela. It’s great reference material when dealing with the issue of bias in the media. I know it will help me because I intend to be relentless when it comes to the stories my newspaper decides to run.

Lgbpop
Lgbpop
12 years ago

The comparative list is comparing apples and oranges. It’s sad that people die of nutritive deficiences, whatever the heck that means in plain English (funny how journalists insist on avoiding plain English) or malaria, and I don’t care about AIDS deaths because the behavior leading to AIDS is deliberate and intentional. Rather like smoking; the victim contributes willingly to his own demise. Darwinism at its best.
Why not compare murders inflicted by religion, and let’s see how many Christians flew planes into buildings at Mecca or how many Gaia-worshippers flew planes into Isfahan. Not very many, I bet. Matter of fact, I daresay there were none. So, rather than avoid calling Muslim murderers what they are, I say let’s celebrate diversity and accentuate the Muslim in Muslim murderers. Read the Koran in Arabic. I finally have. It’s an eye-opener.

Jay
Jay
12 years ago

Virtually each time I read about islam, it is described as a “religion.” The saying, “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck,” applies. Islam certainly quacks like a duck, but it does not walk like one. Indeed, islam is a system of thuggery that masquerades as religion in a stealth maneuver to achieve its ends, which is world domination by a few misogamist pedophiles. Further, islam is described as the “immutable word of god.” Which god? Why, the pagan “moon god” of the pre-Mohammedian Arabs, of course! This god is the one selected by Mohammed from the polytheistic array that these people regarded before his existence. It bears no relationship to the monotheistic concept of god worshipped by multitudes in the Judeo-Christian world at all. Then, there is the “immutable” part. Documented evidence exists which proves conclusively that the koran contains material that existed (a) in the pagan times preceding Mohammed, as well as (b) about two or three hundred years after his lifetime. In other words, what is today termed “radical islam” arose mainly in the 10th century by those who saw opportunity for themselves by co-opting the preaching of that 7th century lunatic (“luna” = moon), Mohammed. These “Johnny-come-lately” haters eliminated dissent by attributing their political ambitions to Mohammed and declaring that any inquiry into their doctrine was “blasphemy.” This trick succeeded in a population that could not read and which accepted tribal culture over nation.
Today, the situation is as it has been; except that the islamics now fuel their despicable movement by dollars that we Americans provide and by subverting the freedoms that our constitution guarantee. One way to fight back is to merely withdraw the tax-exempt status of any imam, mosque, cultural center, etc., from which terrorists or jihadist originate, or at which hatred for America in particular or Western Civilization in general is promoted. Another way, and one we MUST do, is to reject the imposition of sharia law wherever it is attempted in our USA. This means every demand for discriminatory prayer time, differential garb, legal deference to koranic dictates, and everything else that serves to advance these thugs.
By the way, does anyone know where I can get a coffee mug emblazoned with the slogan “Proud Kafir?” Preferably in English, Spanish, Chinese and of course, in Arabic.

yeah, well what about this
yeah, well what about this
12 years ago

“”among the world’s fastest growing …, that while approximately 3,000 people were killed on 9/11, approximately 15,000 people in the U.S. are murdered each year.””
45,000 – 90,000 innocent civilians die every year because they go to the hospital …
and AS FAR AS we know the deaths did not have the imprimatur of an imam
maybe we could call for a congressional investigation

sheik yer'mami
sheik yer'mami
12 years ago

Soros again:
‘Turkey not a threat, only greasy Islamophobes would dream up something like that…’
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/09/30/332632/islamophobes-spike-u-s-alliance-with-islamist-turkey/

cooldude9366
cooldude9366
12 years ago

A congressional investigation just MIGHT reveal that the 45,000 – 90,000 innocent civilians died of natural causes or medical trauma.
Your correlation is in a word…..stupid.

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Thanks for sharing!