Wednesday, August 9, 2006
The Truth As Reported
Someday Charles Johnson will win a journalism award — if things go as they should. Johnson has long been courageously reporting, citing real sources, shedding light on what the media avoids, for fear of offense, or from some dubious ideological dysfunction. Johnson caught the under-the-radar fools at Reuters at their game — doctoring photos, publishing propaganda.
You can be certain there won't be a more general circumspection at Reuter's about their long history of distortions and failures after this — they think they have resolved the problem. This is an endemic problem — news organizations use stringers who manipulate the media as conduits. The stringers are hired because the world from which they report is toxic and a Western reporter would be in jeopardy just being on the scene — but that toxicity, the context, is never fully expressed in the article; the media become tools, cluelessly broadcasting the propaganda; the news organizations are too mediocre, too lazy, to actually edit the material — to examine raw footage and verbiage with intelligence or fairness.
Charles Johnson:
…Johnson's skepticism of, if not outright hostility toward, the mainstream news media…In Johnson's view, the news media haven't adequately sounded the alarm about threats to Western societies posed by radical Islamic groups…”My main take is that political correctness has kept a lot of the hard truth from being spread by the mainstream media,” says Johnson…
“The vast, vast majority of Muslims want to get along and live a comfortable life just like everyone else,” he says. “But the mainstream media shies away from showing the public the real face of Islamic extremism. They don't want to offend. And they are influenced by some strong advocacy groups that are funded by Middle Eastern countries, which are actively engaging with the mainstream media to promote a point of view.”
Although there is the expected emphasis on “conservative” in this article, in reality, Johnson is just telling the truth, which doesn't have an ideology.