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The Media is the Greatest Enemy of a Free Press

July 3, 2017

The Media is the Greatest Enemy of a Free Press, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, July 3, 2017

Americans, from the government to the streets, must make it clear that there is no fourth branch of government. Only when the media cartel has been broken, can a free press rise once again.

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The media finally found its hero.

The hero was Brian Karem, the sweaty, surly and unshaven correspondent for Playboy, who whined that Sarah Huckabee-Sanders, the Deputy White House Press Secretary, was “bullying” the abused media.

Vox dubbed Karem “heroic” for defending “CNN’s honor.” The media’s “honor” has fallen so low that it needs defending by the red light district. If the media’s honor gets any lower, its honor will need an assist from the Mafia, Mexican drug cartels, NAMBLA and the Toxic Waste Association of America.

Karem claimed to be inspired by the tantrums of CNN’s Jim Acosta. CNN was particularly upset by the White House denying the network the precious video that it needs to show off its latest Trump attacks.

Off-camera briefings are a good start. Off-media briefings would be even better.

Under the illiterate headline, “We Stood Up to the Administration Today Because Free Press is Crucial,” Karem wrote at Playboy, “The administration supports the First Amendment – just not the people who practice it.”

And the only people entitled to practice the First Amendment, according to the media, own the media. They don’t need to know basic grammar. They don’t need to have their facts right. They just need to be part of huge media conglomerates with left-wing politics whose mission is attacking conservatives.

What got Karem’s goat (and the goats of the rest of the media herd) was that Sanders had given the first question to Breitbart. And conservative sites are not entitled to the protections of the First Amendment.

A free press is crucial. And when the White House fights for a free press by diversifying the press corps, it’s upholding the spirit of a free press that the media cartel is fighting to kill.

The entire “Fake News” outcry that Karem and the rest of his “honorable” colleagues in the media are whining about began with a media plot to censor conservative sites on social media for “Fake News.”

Why does the media believe that Playboy, but not Breitbart or the Daily Caller, have a right to be heard?

“I don’t like the entire institution of the press and free speech being castigated,” Brian Karem wheedled. “The foundation of a free republic is a free press.”

The media has reached rock bottom when a porn magazine’s correspondent starts claiming to be foundation of a free republic.

And when the media enthusiastically agrees.

The foundation of a free republic is free people. Free people have the right to say what they please. They can do it on social media, at a political protest or in the pages of a newspaper. Freedom doesn’t begin and end with the media cartel. Even though the media cartel would like nothing better.

“We can’t take the bullying anymore. It’s undermining the fourth estate, it’s undermining the first amendment,” the Playboy correspondent whined elsewhere.

America isn’t supposed to have a Fourth Estate. That’s France. But that’s what the media is. It’s not a free press. It’s a cartel that leverages control over what was once the free press. Few conservatives are allowed into its ranks. Its partisan mission is to support the left and oppose the right.

The First Amendment gives the media the freedom to do it. Not the institutional authority.

It’s the media that has zero respect for the First Amendment. Its contempt for the religious freedoms of the First Amendment is notorious. But its hostility for the free press is a more recent innovation.

The media has viciously fought the White House’s effort to diversify the press corps by bringing in conservative media. Karem’s tantrum was an outgrowth of that larger battle. Its push for “fact checks” is a cynical effort to embed censorship of conservative media outlets into Facebook and Google News. The media is the greatest enemy of a free press. And it should be treated that way.

It’s an unelected and illegitimate fourth branch of government backed by a handful of powerful interests that insists on setting the national agenda, determining who gets elected and impeaching them if the voters disagree. That is the coup that the fourth branch is busy trying to pull on President Trump.

And the media insists on determining who gets to belong to it. Playboy, yes. Breitbart, DailyCaller and Front Page Magazine, no. Playboy is a heroic defender of the media’s “honor.” Conservative sites must be censored so all that the media deems “Fake News” doesn’t undermine its political agenda.

But the media doesn’t get to decide who can belong to a free press. And what news is fake.

President Trump, Sarah Sanders Huckabee and others have called out the media as “Fake News.” And that outrages the media cartel because it challenges its institutional authority.

The media’s institutional authority shouldn’t just be challenged, it must be broken.

A free press is open to everyone. The media is a closed cartel. A free press has a diversity of opinions. The media has only one. A free press is a dialogue. The media silences dissent, from individuals to conservative outlets. A free press does not attempt to usurp democracy. That is the entire purpose of the media cartel. It manufactures an artificial consensus through mass communications propaganda.

The internet has made the media irrelevant. It also killed the very last of its ethics and journalistic integrity. All that remains are a network of partisan left-wing sites trailed by dead tree paper and dead cable outlets integrated into one heaving mess that connects CNN to ESPN to Playboy to Teen Vogue.

The media cartel is a network of money and power. This illegitimate network intersects with other institutional left-wing networks in the non-profit sector, the political sector, the academic sector and many others. Each network is a thread in a spider web that is choking the life out of this nation. And at the center sit the radical spiders that pull all the strings.

The obscene efforts of the media cartel to wrap itself in the tattered shrouds of the First Amendment are as disgusting as a man who murdered his parents begging the court to have mercy on an orphan.

The media is waging a ruthless campaign to censor its opponents under the guise of “Fake News”. Yet it plays the victim when it is criticized (rather than censored) for the dishonest lies of its partisan agenda.

It has made war on the Constitution. It rejects some parts of the Bill of Rights entirely. It is now engaged in a gargantuan effort to reverse the results of a national election. And when it is called out for its abuses of power, it contends that to criticize it is to undermine the foundation of a free republic.

How can you possibly have a free republic without CNN, MSNBC and the Washington Post? But a better question might be, how can you have a free republic when a leftist media cartel is running it?

The government should not privilege a media cartel or confuse its arrogance with authority.

Off-camera briefings should become off-media briefings. Media outlets that want to act like campus crybullies should be booted. Dot coms that clamor for Net Neutrality but then use media “fact checks” to censor conservative competitors should be called out for their partisan hypocrisy.

The White House’s battle against the media cartel is the best defense of the First Amendment.

Americans, from the government to the streets, must make it clear that there is no fourth branch of government. Only when the media cartel has been broken, can a free press rise once again.

Categories: "Fact checkers", "Journalists", "Mainstream media", Freedom of speech, Freedom of the press, Media and Trump, Press briefings, Trump and media
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Why James O’Keefe Is a More Honest Journalist than the MSM

June 29, 2017

Why James O’Keefe Is a More Honest Journalist than the MSM, PJ Media, Roger L. Simon, June 28, 2017

The rap on James O’Keefe — whose latest bombshell caught CNN’s quasi-Marxist star pundit Van Jones with his well-tailored pants down — is that his Project Veritas videos are “unfairly edited.”

I have news for O’Keefe’s critics. All videos (and films) are basically unfairly edited, as Sergei Eisenstein and the early Soviet directors demonstrated a hundred years ago. It’s the nature of the medium. Some things get left out and others put in.

Nevertheless, the video or movie camera is a recording device. On close examination, looked at specifically, the actual photographs and recordings finally don’t lie, juxtapose them how you will. Van Jones did say “Russia is a nothingburger!” The network’s John Bonifield did call CNN’s Russia narrative “bullsh$t” concocted for the money. The repellent lady from Planned Parenthood did offer to sell fetal parts. The equally repellent Democratic Party operatives did instigate violent demonstrations at Trump rallies to make the candidate’s supporters look like thugs. O’Keefe himself did walk back and forth undeterred across the Rio Grande from Mexico to the USA dressed as Osama bin Laden to show the pathetic level of our border security.

I could go on. There are many more, including examples unmasking the shibboleths of voter registration, but the point is obvious. Despite some selective editing (but not any that materially alters the facts) and sometimes overly portentous music (why bother when you have the goods?), what James O’Keefe reports is true. It happened.

Because they so often rely on leaks — no photographs, videos or anything like them, often nothing concrete at all — what the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and so many others (even the front pages of the Wall Street Journal, alas) report is very often, one is tempted to say most often, either a distortion or an outright lie. This is particularly true when what they are reporting has political relevance — and so much does.

If not the root cause — that’s uncontrolled and unacknowledged bias — this excessive reliance on leaks has seriously exacerbated the precipitous decline of the mainstream media. For much of our media, leaks are an opium-like drug that clouds their thinking and to which they are literally addicted. They are waiting for the phone to ring like the junkie is waiting for his next fix. That the leakers all have motivations of their own, known and/or unknown, yet are able to remain anonymous to the public, makes what they leak almost de facto dubious and unreliable, in fact dangerous (as well as illegal, obviously).

Yet the MSM reporters gobble them up, eager to scoop their competitors and at the same time — much like overweight, self-satisfied picadors — weaken Trump and his administration for the final kill, doing, in their own eyes anyway, good works while advancing their careers.

O’Keefe has revealed them to be fools, remarkably unsophisticated in their response to his revelations. (Jeff Zucker, et al., looked like dimwits walking into the most obvious trap by dismissing Bonifield as a mere “medical” producer with the famous Van Jones already queued up for humiliation.)  At this point, only the most naive believe what the MSM says. CNN is already a joke, but the NYT, WaPo, etc. are not far behind. We are all reading Pravda now.

Ironically, Woodward and Bernstein are responsible for a lot of this. They made a giant success off leaks, turning journalists into culture heroes (really false gods) to be portrayed by Redford and Hoffman in the movies. Generations of aspiring journalists sought to follow in their footsteps — to be these false gods. Only there was no there there. No Nixon to upend. So they turned Trump into the New Nixon and manufactured a crime to go along with it.

W & B also inadvertently encouraged a new kind of leaker that is endemic today. Call him or her the “score settler,” a loathsome character lurking in the bowels of the Deep State or intelligence agencies, a remnant of the previous administration, who thinks his or her reasons for telling a partial, misleading truth are justified, are for the public good, when they are almost invariably only for their own good or some supposed ideological good they wish to impose regardless of the wishes of the voters in a democracy. (These are both often enmeshed.)

This created an extreme, almost pathological, will-to-believe the leakers on the part of the MSM as illustrated by the recent firings (sorry, “resignations”) of three CNN employees in the face of a $100M lawsuit. One of these credulous employees, Eric Lichtblau, was once a Pulitzer Prize winner at the New York Times.

Woodward, to his credit, seems to have recognized how extreme the situation has become. He chided the NYT today, saying, “Fair-mindedness is essential.” His own paper, under Bezos, has become even worse. But never mind. Give him credit for a half-truth. (By the way, CNN’s Jeff Zucker is a working stiff compared to Jeff Bezos. What’s Bezos’ excuse?)

But more importantly — it’s over. Well, if not over, a new, positive rung has been reached. The MSM, as we knew it, is, if not destroyed, seriously wounded.  They are — channeling a phrase from the Vietnam Era — a “pitiful, helpless giant.”  The work begun in 2004 when many of us spoke out against Dan Rather’s deceitful promulgation of the forged Bush National Guard papers on “Sixty Minutes” has, thanks to O’Keefe and others, not to mention the irrationality of the MSM itself, finally reached a critical mass. If only Andrew Breitbart were here to see it.

Celebrate for ten seconds. But as another of the original group, Glenn Reynolds, keeps reminding us — don’t get cocky.

Categories: "Journalists", "Mainstream media", CNN, Faked news, Great Trump - Russia conspiracy, Leaks, Media and Democrats, Media and Trump, Media melt-down, New York Times, Project Veritas, Wall Street Journal
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The New Media Should Drive the News Cycle

June 12, 2017

The New Media Should Drive the News Cycle, American Thinker, James Lewis, June 12, 2017

(Funding? — DM)

I believe that the New Media deserve major credit for deconstructing the Old Media narrative.  Right after James Comey’s much-hyped congressional testimony, several New Media sites picked up the real news – namely, that Comey had actually outed himself as a top leaker in the Deep Government by sending his own written memo, typed on government time, on a government computer, to attack the president of the United States, with no proof of illegal or unethical behavior at all. 

That should have been the lead story for the New Media.  We had the Comey leaker story, and we told the story, but it was reactive; it took the false narrative of Trump’s supposed obstruction of justice as the point of departure.  That seems to validate the false accusation against Trump and only pointed out its falsehoods.

The Old Media don’t play defense.  They play offense, and let the truth be damned.  The New Media are winning the battle for American minds, but they have not yet learned to actively drive the news cycle. 

As a result, Trump’s magnificent spectacle in Saudi Arabia, which turned the Saudis, along with 50 national Muslim leaders, along with Egypt, Israel and the United States, against Iranian aggression and Iran’s proxy state, Qatar, went more or less unnoticed.  Today, the Gulf Council alliance, backed by the United States, is starting to choke Arab commerce with Qatar, and if that campaign succeeds, the Qataris will have to back down.

On top of all that, for the first time since 9/11, we have pinpointed a major source of funding and direction for horrific massacres in the West – namely, Qatar.  This is a clear move against the Iranian terror sponsors as well, therefore this is a strategic move against the Shi’ite half of jihad.

The Saudis have to do much, much more.  But Trump (aided by Mattis and Jared Kushner) has started a major turning point in the jihad war.  The huge MOAB weapon against ISIS in Afghanistan is part of the strategic turnaround.

Some of the New Media have done an excellent job in covering the MOAB and the Saudi Trump celebration.  But we have not used this major event to drive the news cycle.

That is because we will leave the aggressive role in the media wars to the New York Times and its corrupt left-jihadist P.R. gang.  We have direct evidence for headline collusion and endless lying from the NYT-led media aggressors.

But the New Media should steal the lead from the NYT and its historically communist ally, the U.K. Guardian, which also controls the BBC.

We are like that losing football team that gives up offensive plays, so it gets pushed back and back and back.  Conservatives complain that we are always on defense.  But from our current state of play, taking the offense is not difficult at all.  All it takes is a changing of mindset from being a loser to being a winner.

Look at all the news driver’s we’ve missed.

Trump’s overturning of Obama’s bizarre and anti-American attacks on U.S. industries.

Trump’s opening up of U.S. hydrocarbon production, thereby driving down the cost of fuel around the world and putting OPEC in a double-bind.

Trump’s victory in getting Israel and the Pals to sit down and talk turkey on the details of a settlement.

Putin’s eagerness to ally with the United States to destroy ISIS, which also includes Russian Chechens, who assassinated children in an elementary school in Beslan twenty years ago and held Moscow citizens hostage in a theater.  Putin and his Russian Orthodox establishment hate the jihad, and they never want trained Chechens to come back from Syria.  Strategic cooperation therefore serves both sides.  One reason for the sudden anti-Russian hate campaign from the Democrats is easy to guess: the Dems are now getting lots of money from Iran.  This is perfect for a real investigative journalist to figure out the details, which are not hard to dig out.

What’s needed is for the New Media to unify around one of these themes – not to copy others, but to add value to their exposés – in order to drive the message home over and over again.   Today we pay too much attention to wacky Nancy Pelosi, as if her scripted and inarticulate verbal bombs are actual news.  They are not.  We make them news.

We can snipe at Pelosi and her wacky ilk all we want, but we need aggressive, positive news memes that all multiple New Media grab as a story – like Comey’s self-confessed corrupt leaking – and use to drive the news cycle.

I’m giving just a few examples, but the New Media are creative, and many people have unique insights.  (We are also much smarter than the mannequins of the Olds.)

Competition is good, but sometimes we should pull together and get our American audience thinking about a clear and present danger.  There are plenty of them.

One reasonable goal would be for the New Media to drive every other news cycle.  That would make it humanly possible to do, rather than being driven crazy to write alarming headlines every 24 hours.  We can follow the real news rather than make it up, as the competition does.

Taking the initiative in driving the news will require discipline and a willingness to work together – not as a mandatory rule, but when the opportunity arises.  The Comey confession to leaking to the NYT is one example.  But this administration gives us many examples.

A vigorous offensive style by the New Media might also stiffen the spine of Republicans in Congress.  It might help to guide and to be guided by the 50 million (or more) Americans who voted for Trump.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance.  Let’s not blow it.  Don’t copy the Olds.  Drive the initiative!

Categories: mainstream media, New media
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Kerry: To Avoid ‘Islamic’ or ‘State,’ Call ISIS ‘World’s Most Evil Terrorist Group’

October 12, 2016

Kerry: To Avoid ‘Islamic’ or ‘State,’ Call ISIS ‘World’s Most Evil Terrorist Group, PJ Media, Bridget Johnson, October 11, 2016

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“But it’s just — you kind of resort to the use of those letters because it refers to a state — it’s the Islamic State — and it’s not a state. There’s nothing legitimate about it. There’s nothing Islamic about it. It’s a complete misnomer. It’s their title and we shouldn’t use it and I feel that very strongly,”

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Secretary of State John Kerry suggested referring to ISIS as “the world’s most evil terrorist group” so as to not use the acronym references to “Islamic” or “State.”

Kerry noted at the Virtuous Circle Conference on Monday in Silicon Valley that he “rarely” uses the terms “ISIS” or “ISIL” at all.

“I’ve been on a lot of campaigns to get everybody to say “Daesh” because it’s a pejorative in Arabic — the initials — and I haven’t won that campaign at all,” he added.

“But it’s just — you kind of resort to the use of those letters because it refers to a state — it’s the Islamic State — and it’s not a state. There’s nothing legitimate about it. There’s nothing Islamic about it. It’s a complete misnomer. It’s their title and we shouldn’t use it and I feel that very strongly,” Kerry continued. “But it has gained — it’s the recognized term and if you want people to know what you’re talking about, unfortunately, sometimes you are forced to.”

He stressed that “it would be great if we could get away from that, and the key is the media to begin really to call it something else.”

“The terrorist group Daesh — that would be the best moniker, I think,” he said. “Or the most evil — the world’s most evil terrorist group.”

Daesh also incorporates Islamic State, just in Arabic. It stands for al-Dawla al-Islamiya al-Iraq al-Sham. It’s one letter away from the word “daes,” which means to crush or trample. ISIS hates the Daesh term and has threatened violence against people who use it.

“Anyway, it’s hard,” Kerry added. “Today’s media is so — it’s so labelized and it reduces everything into these simplistic things. It’s very, very hard to break out once something has stuck.”

Kerry also talked at the technology confab about the State Department’s Global Engagement Center “mostly focused on countering violent extremism.”

“And we have 131 employees authorized, I think we’re currently at about 68. Why are we not at full force? Because it’s pretty competitive out here and tough to get people… it’s hard to find the talent and fill the slots, number one. It’s just been a slower growth process than we would have liked,” he said of the department meant to counter terrorist propaganda online.

“We’re messaging and changing the narrative of ISIL, of Daesh. And countering that narrative very forcefully. We use a lot of defectors, a lot of survivors of Daesh’s brutality. And they are the people who are messaging. They are the communicators. They’re the people who are debunking the extraordinary lies of a fairly sophisticated Daesh operation, I might add. It’s quite amazing how effective they’ve been for a while in proselytizing propaganda and so forth,” Kerry said.

“Their narrative is caliphate, we’ve taken territory, we’re the future of true Islam, and on you go. And you have to find a way to counter that that’s effective and I think we’ve gotten pretty good at it. We know we have reduced recruits. We know we have cut financing. And I am absolutely convinced, not any exaggeration, that we are going to destroy ISIL as we know it now, in the sense that there’s still a few al-Qaeda folks around, but there’s not the day-to-day threat that existed. We’re moving on Mosul, we’re moving on Raqqa, we’re shrinking their space significantly. They haven’t taken one piece of territory and held it since May of last year and their leadership is being decimated person by person.”

Al-Qaeda has been growing in the past few years, from the opening of its al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent chapter to numerous attacks by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. The Treasury Department recently sanctioned “part of a new generation of al-Qaeda operatives” being sheltered by Iran.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) told CBS on Sept. 11 that al-Qaeda “continues to metastasize” and “is very, very good at seeding people in and waiting. They’re very patient… they’re spreading globally very, very slowly.”

Kerry added that “the problem is there have been thousands of fighters over the course of five years, some of whom have gone back to other countries, where through the Internet they’ve been able to build subgroups of the group, or create affiliations with Boko Haram, with al-Shabaab in Somalia.”

“And so we’re going after them too, and that’s why Somali is one of the languages we’re working in now, and French for Boko Haram,” he said. “And we’re getting pretty good at this.”

Categories: al-Qaida, Islamic State, Islamic terror groups, Kerry, mainstream media
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Witnessing the Final Demise of “Mainstream” Media

October 1, 2016

Witnessing the Final Demise of “Mainstream” Media, Power Line, John Hinderaker, October 1, 2016

If this year’s presidential election has a silver lining, it is the final demise of “mainstream media.” Which is not to say that liberal media are going away; they aren’t, of course. But liberal media’s claim to being mainstream–reliable, objective, fair, unlike fringe or partisan news sources–is gone forever. That is a good thing.

No one could follow this year’s campaign without understanding that the media formerly known as mainstream (sorry, Prince) have jettisoned any pretense of neutrality, or even of journalistic integrity, in their desperation to preserve the status quo by electing Hillary Clinton president. Fair enough. We know where they stand.

One of the last vestiges of liberal media’s pretense to authority is its legion of “fact checkers.” “Fact checkers” like PolitiFact, the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler and others purport to rule judiciously on claims made by candidates of both parties. In fact, as those who pay attention have long known, “fact checking,” in pretty much all cases, is just liberal activism under another name.

All of which is preface to this: Rasmussen Reports finds that voters are no longer fooled, if they ever were, by newspapers’ fact checkers:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that just 29% of all Likely U.S. Voters trust media fact-checking of candidates’ comments. Sixty-two percent (62%) believe instead that news organizations skew the facts to help candidates they support. …

Eighty-eight percent (88%) of voters who support Trump in the presidential race believe news organizations skew the facts, while most Clinton backers (59%) trust media fact-checking. Among the supporters of Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, sizable majorities also don’t trust media fact-checking.

It stands to reason that a slim majority of Democrats trust media fact-checkers. Why not trust those who are in the business of agreeing with you? What could be more objective than that?

A college friend of mine once said, “Objective is what I think. Subjective is what you think.” That sums up the fact-checker mentality very well, and after all these years, no one–not even the Democrats who purport to trust the fact-checkers–is fooled. Breitbart.com is a sort-of-conservative news source, while the New York Times is a massively liberal news source. Neither is impartial or has any inherent authority. Which one is more reliable is a case-by-case, day-by-day evaluation that is left up to the reader, and as to which there will be nothing like consensus.

If just about everyone now understands this, it is a good thing.

Categories: 2016 elections, mainstream media, Media and Donald Trump, Media and Hillary Clinton
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How Western Media Enable Islamic Terrorism

December 19, 2014

How Western Media Enable Islamic Terrorism, Front Page Magazine, , December 19, 2014

(Please see also Sharyl Attkisson’s Stonewalled for explanations of what happens in the legitimate “news” media and why. — DM)

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If the West is experiencing a rise in the sort of terror attacks that are endemic to the Islamic world—church attacks, sex-slavery and beheadings—it was only natural that the same mainstream media that habitually conceals such atrocities, especially against Christians and other minorities under Islam, would also conceal the reality of jihadi aspirations on Western soil.

As The Commentator reports:

[T]he level of the [media] grovelling after the tragic and deadly saga in Sydney Australia over the last 24 hours has been astounding.

At the time of writing, the lead story on the BBC website is of course about that very tragedy, in which an Islamist fanatic took a random group hostage in a cafe, ultimately killing two of them.

He did this in the name of Islam. But you wouldn’t get that impression if you started to read the BBC’s lead story, which astoundingly managed to avoid mentioning the words Islam, Islamic, Islamist, Muslim, or any derivations thereof for a full 16 paragraphs. The New York Times, which led by calling the terrorist, Man Haron Monis an “armed man”, waited until paragraph 11.

In the Guardian’s main story – whose lead paragraph simply referred to a “gunman” — you had to wait until paragraph 24.

If you’d have blinked, you’d have missed it.

….

In the wider media, reports about Muslim fears of a “backlash” have been all but ubiquitous.

If these are the lengths that Western mainstream media go to dissemble about the Islamic-inspired slaughter of Western peoples, it should now be clear why the ubiquitous Muslim persecution of those unfashionable Christian minorities is also practically unknown by those who follow Western mainstream media.

As with the Sydney attack, media headlines say it all. The 2011 New Year’s Eve Coptic church attack that left 28 dead appeared under vague headlines: “Clashes grow as Egyptians remain angry after attack,”was the New York Times’ headline; and “Christians clash with police in Egypt after attack on churchgoers kills 21” was the Washington Post’s—as if frustrated and harried Christians lashing out against their oppressors is the “big news,” not the unprovoked atrocity itself; as if their angry reaction “evens” everything up.

Similarly, the Los Angeles Times partially told the story of an Egyptian off-duty police officer who, after identifying Copts by their crosses on a train, opened fire on them, killing one, while screaming “Allahu Akbar”—but to exonerate the persecution, as caught by the report’s headline: “Eyewitness claims train attacker did not target Copts, state media say.”

A February 2012 NPR report titled “In Egypt, Christian-Muslim Tension is on the Rise,” while meant to familiarize readers with the situation of Egypt’s Christians, prompts more questions than answers them: “In Egypt, growing tensions between Muslims and Christians have led to sporadic violence [initiated by whom?]. Many Egyptians blame the interreligious strife on hooligans [who?] taking advantage of absent or weak security forces. Others believe it’s because of a deep-seated mistrust between Muslims and the minority Christian community [what are the sources of this “mistrust”?].”

The photo accompanying the story is of angry Christians holding a cross aloft—not Muslims destroying crosses, which is what prompted the former to this display of Christian solidarity.

Blurring the line between victim and oppressor—recall the fear of “anti-Muslim backlashes” whenever a Muslim terrorizes “infidels” in the West—also applies to the media’s reporting on Muslim persecution of Christians.

A February 2012 BBC report on a church attack in Nigeria that left three Christians dead, including a toddler, objectively states the bare bone facts in one sentence.  Then it jumps to apparently the really big news: that “the bombing sparked a riot by Christian youths, with reports that at least two Muslims were killed in the violence. The two men were dragged off their bikes after being stopped at a roadblock set up by the rioters, police said. A row of Muslim-owned shops was also burned…”

The report goes on and on, with an entire section about “very angry” Christians till one confuses victims with persecutors, forgetting what the Christians are “very angry” about in the first place: nonstop terror attacks on their churches and the slaughter of their women and children.

A New York Times report that appeared on December 25, 2011—the day after Boko Haram bombed several churches during Christmas Eve services, leaving some 40 dead—said that such church bombings threaten “to exploit the already frayed relations between Nigeria’s nearly evenly split populations of Christians and Muslims…”  Such an assertion suggests that both Christians and Muslims are equally motivated by religious hostility—even as one seeks in vain for Christian terror organizations that bomb mosques in Nigeria to screams of “Christ is Great!”

Indeed, Boko Haram has torched 185 churches—to say nothing of the countless Christians beheaded—in just the last few months alone.

Continuing to grasp for straws, the same NYT report suggests that the Nigerian government’s “heavy-handed” response to Boko Haram is responsible for its terror, and even manages to invoke another mainstream media favorite: the poverty-causes-terrorism myth.

Whether Muslim mayhem is taking place in the Islamic or Western worlds, the mainstream media shows remarkable consistency in employing an arsenal of semantic games, key phrases, convenient omissions, and moral relativism to portray such violence as a product of anything and everything—political and historical grievances, “Islamophobia,” individual insanity, poverty and ignorance, territorial disputes—not Islam.

As such, Western mainstream media keep Western majorities in the dark about the Islamic threat, here and abroad.  Thus the “MSM” protects and enables the Islamic agenda—irrespective of whether its distortions are a product of intent, political correctness, or sheer stupidity.

Categories: Christians, Egypt, Europe, Foreign policy, Ideology, Islamic jihad, Islamic slaughter, Israel, Jews, Middle East
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