Category Archives: Media

“Wafa Wows the West” (But not Muslims and Media)

It’s … of special significance that members of the American news media—not Al-Jazeera—have distorted what [Wafa] Sultan has said, introducing their bias into her unambiguous words. Equally intriguing is the fact that Al-Jazeera—not the American Fourth Estate—introduced Sultan to the world…
For my money, if Al-Jazeera continues to provoke viewers with the likes of Sultan, I’ll be signing on when they start to transmit here. It’s a whole lot better than enduring Chris Matthews’ incestuous love-ins with “The ‘Hardball’ hotshots.” That’s when MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson, Joe Scarborough, and Rita Cosby aka “Throaty McHuskington,” who each torture us independently during their respective programs, combine to amplify the unedifying effects.
As for the girls at CNN—Paula Zahn, Kyra Phillips and Anderson Cooper appear indifferent to professional competition. Edgy reporting elsewhere never rubs off on this crew. They prefer to kvetch interminably about colorectal, breast and lung cancer; anorexia nervosa, and Katrina. In this stream of soporific, soft-news stories, Wafa Sultan is indeed a rarity.

Wafa Sultan is the reason I praise Al-Jazeera in my new column, “Wafa Wows the West (But not Muslims and Media).”

"Wafa Wows the West" (But not Muslims and Media)

Islam, Media, Middle East

It’s … of special significance that members of the American news media—not Al-Jazeera—have distorted what [Wafa] Sultan has said, introducing their bias into her unambiguous words. Equally intriguing is the fact that Al-Jazeera—not the American Fourth Estate—introduced Sultan to the world…
For my money, if Al-Jazeera continues to provoke viewers with the likes of Sultan, I’ll be signing on when they start to transmit here. It’s a whole lot better than enduring Chris Matthews’ incestuous love-ins with “The ‘Hardball’ hotshots.” That’s when MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson, Joe Scarborough, and Rita Cosby aka “Throaty McHuskington,” who each torture us independently during their respective programs, combine to amplify the unedifying effects.
As for the girls at CNN—Paula Zahn, Kyra Phillips and Anderson Cooper appear indifferent to professional competition. Edgy reporting elsewhere never rubs off on this crew. They prefer to kvetch interminably about colorectal, breast and lung cancer; anorexia nervosa, and Katrina. In this stream of soporific, soft-news stories, Wafa Sultan is indeed a rarity.

Wafa Sultan is the reason I praise Al-Jazeera in my new column, “Wafa Wows the West (But not Muslims and Media).”

Danes and Deniers

Anti-Semitism, Free Speech, Islam, Israel, Jihad, Journalism, Judaism & Jews, Media

Holocaust denier David Irving, whom I’ve defended here, has become the cause celebre for the terminally self-righteous. Some in the West simply refuse to defend the Danes in a meaningful and morally unambiguous manner. So instead, they bang on about the admittedly shabby treatment of Irving. In their eyes, the Danes and their controversial drawings cannot be disentangled from the Irving issue.

At the risk of repeating myself, the need to repeal laws prohibiting hate speech and Holocaust denial cannot be overemphasized; nobody wants to see Irving jailed for being a jerk.

So what of those who say hounding this Holocaust denier makes the West “guilty of the crimes with which we charge the Muslims”? Well, the idea that aggression exists on a continuum is asinine—pure left-liberalism. According to this slippery-slope illogic, the European laws banning Holocaust denial—and they are indefensible—are as distasteful as beheading—or scheming to behead—”heretics.”

Now that’s a howler!

Dick and the (Media) Dickheads

Media, The Zeitgeist

My WorldNetDaily Colum today, “The ‘Presstitutes’ Vs. The VP,” elaborates on this post. Append your comments to this entry.

No wonder the [media] went crazy after learning of the shooting accident from a Texas paper…Cheney is telling the men and women assigned to cover the White House that they are irrelevant.

With these vainglorious and vapid words, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek excused his colleagues’ latest mindless fit of pique. For over a week now we’ve been subjected to media grand mals over Cheney’s accident. Or, rather, over the delay and circuitous way in which they found out about the shooting.

As longtime readers of this space know, I’m no fan of the Vice President or his boss. I’m even less enamored of the media, liberal and illiberal. They are, for the most, enablers of power. So long as they’re being treated as the demigods they think they are, they act like lap dogs to the Big Dogs. Did not the “presstitutes” enable the invaders of Iraq? You bet they did.

Members of mainstream media have no allegiance to the truth; only to their perches. Alter openly admits that Cheney and his handlers messed with his colleagues’ (read: ME, ME, ME) collective sense of importance by releasing the information to a local newspaper, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.

This is not to say the incident was handled efficiently or even forthrightly. What I’m saying is that this private tragedy is almost immaterial in the grand scheme of things—Iraq, the debt, Darfur, and the Islamic conniption over the Danish cartoons, which the bums failed to publish or process.

Any half-wit with a vaguely normal range of affect, moreover, has to know that Cheney’s mishap, not uncommon among hunters (our shooting instructor, who lives to popularize guns, told us he never goes hunting and advised the same), must have devastated all involved, including the VP.

Alter added this patronizing bit of pomposity:

The media often focus on relatively unimportant, easy-to-understand stories as metaphors for shortcomings that the normal conventions of the business (and the inattentiveness of the audience) make hard to convey.

Oh, the condescension!

Yes, the sages who slept with their sources at the onset of the extravaganza known as “Operation Iraqi Freedom”; the same sorts who subjected their readers and viewers to a perspective as monochromatic as the green of night-vision optics, and who regularly privilege spectacle over substance—these stellar reporters are now, for our benefit, focusing their powers of observation on the symbolism of the accident.

Fiddlesticks! The media have not concentrated on this story as a service to the public or to the truth. Their coverage of the accidental shooting of Harry Whittington has been entirely self-referential and self reverential. This is about them, not Cheney.

I can think of many material, not metaphoric, stories that would benefit the mulcted and misled masses. This was not one of them.

More to the point, members of the media ought to be in the business of reporting about reality, not acting out on their immense egos by assigning “symbolic” meaning to relatively minor events.