Mensch tracht, und Gott lacht

Thursday, February 16, 2006

A Different Kind of Media Bias

S.T. Karnick has expanded on his analysis of the odd unbalancing act performed by the Western press that adores defecating on Christianity while it abhors bad taste in Muhammed portrayals.

Check it out at Tech Central Station, which seems to have had a makeover (nice).

3 comments:

Linda said...

Superb analysis - marred only by one tiny error:

Pat Robertson's apparent call for the assassination of Panama's president

That would be Venezuela's president...

Matt Huisman said...

Nice catch, Linda. I just assumed that I had missed that episode of The 700 Club.

James F. Elliott said...

Similarly, the widely feared assault against American Muslims after the 9/11 attacks never came. Muslim words of hatred of the West, by contrast, led to the 9/11 attacks and many others, yet the connection between Muslims' statements and the "clear and present danger" of action upon them has been continually minimized by the Western Left and their satraps among the press.

I think the above statement calls for both words of caution and words of agreement. I don't believe it is accurate or proper to portray a widespread adherence among Muslims to such beliefs or aims. There is a danger of overgeneralization there. However, you are quite right to point out that Western media in general is unwilling to criticize the encouragement the Arab/Muslim establishment and Muslim governments tend to give such words. They are often portrayed and abetted by official state media in those countries and you are correct that Western media does very poorly in calling them on it.

Why, then, are Western intellectuals and their bag carriers so concerned about the sensitivities of a decidedly alien people living thousands of miles away in self-created nightmare conditions when these same Western eminences are so unmoved by the concerns of their Christian neighbors?

Does it concern no one else that this way lies xenophobia? Sentences such as these encourage "us/them" thinking.

Given the enduring power of Christianity in the United States and the weak foothold of Islam here, it seems likely that it will take something much more dramatic to change attitudes among the American Left and their bully boys in the press. Undoubtedly that dramatic event will have to be a horrible catastrophe of some sort, which is tragic in itself.

I remain wholly unconvinced that Islam is antithetical to Western traditions, nor do I believe that such a fallacious argument will hold true. I think that a very real divide exists between Right and Left in the perception of the threat. The Left tends to view the threat narrowly, in terms of terrorist acts. The Right tends to view individual actions as part and parcel to a more insidious and culture-wide system of belief and action. I honestly feel that the latter opinion is monocular (perhaps myopic might be a better term) at best, and that conclusions such as Mr. Karnicks only fan a paranoid flame. Perhaps, in the end, only time will tell.