Farewell, Television News

This is a "Dear John" letter to an old flame of mine: television news.

For the last eight years I’ve gone without having a television or cable hook-up more often than I’ve had it. My wife recently talked me into getting basic cable again, so that she can watch her nature documentaries, which she had grown attached to during our last stint being "plugged in".

Before I got married, I would only watch tv news programming. I would watch a lot of it, a habit picked up from my father. This will be embarrassing to admit today, but I was delighted when I was finally able to watch CNN, back in the late 80’s. 24-hour news..!!! What an innocent thrill that was, to a news junkie.

Then life interfered. To save money we decided to not bother to plug in to television when my wife and I got married. As our fortunes have risen and fallen, and we’ve moved and moved again, so too have we plugged in and out of television’s window to the world. Now we’re plugged in once more.

Bowing to my curiosity, I’ve been checking the odd news show once again. Big mistake, as far as I’m now concerned. I’ve gone from a habit of being a tv news junkie, to choosing to never watch a single program. Frankly: what’s the point?

TV news today reminds me of a newspaper that carried only horoscopes, movie reviews and editorial cartoons.

So many of the headline stories are about polls. That new poll says this, this new poll reports that. Why is this called news?? It might be "fun" to review a poll’s results, but beyond that why would such things have any more practicality than an average horoscope. Polls are to news what astrology is to journalism, as far as I can tell. Am I missing something?

Next pet peeve of mine are the panel discussions. How are these supposed to inform us? An event happens, and the panel is convened to opine on "what this means". Not so much to talk about what happened, but to prophetize what shadow it will cast into the future. Back to astrology again.

There’s also an overwhelming (and unhealthy, I think) pre-occupation with reviewing events as if it were all a staged play. A politician gives an answer to a question at a press conference, and the panel analyzes the theatrical performance with as exacting an eye as any drama critic. Why not show more of the press conference, so that we can see for ourselves what the speaker said? It’s like showing a movie review instead of letting the audience actually see the movie. If time is limited, shouldn’t the details of the actual story take precedence over what the employees of the media company reporting on it may feel about it..??

This ties into my final point of dissatisfaction with tv news: they talk about things, rather than providing information on what it is that they are talking about. It reminds me of an editorial cartoon: you’re supposed to already know the story, so that you can put the cartoonist’s commentary into a context whereby their point adds to your understanding of the story. But first must come the actual story!!
As one of the commercials that interupted my old tv news shows used to say: "Where’s the Beef?"

Now I understand why so much political discussion nowadays is not much more elevated than "Bush is a warmonger!" "No he’s not" "Yes he is!!".

I remember, in the dim light of my youth, that our local news broadcasts used to have segments called "background". The news reader would read a report, for instance, Canadian troops being sent to Cyprus, then announce, "And now for some background on this story we turn to [some guy in a suit]. So why are we needed in Cyprus?" And we would be given a capsule history of Greek and Turkish conflict in Cyprus.

Now, who knows how biased or incomplete or inaccurate the resulting explanations would be… at least there was a pretense at providing a factual, rather than emotional, context for the headline, an intellectual foundation for the points of view later to be expressed in the panel discussions that made the most difference: at the dinner table at home, the water cooler at work or the playground at school.

These days it seems that the tv media have switched jobs with its viewers: now we do the fact-finding, they do the panel discussions.

I’ll tune in for live interviews, where I get to decide for myself what it is that I’m looking at.

Otherwise: it’s a –30– for me, as far as tv news is concerned.

Muslims and free humanity against Sharia

I am happy to find a comment from Muslims Against Sharia at one of our November posts.

I'm not sure which member of the group posted that, but it recalled to mind a Front Page interview with Khalim Massoud, president of Muslims Against Sharia:

Most of American mosques are financed and run by Wahhabis. Wahhabi imams are anything but moderate, hence most of religious leaders are radicals. So-called "civil rights" groups, i.e., CAIR, MPAC, ICNA, MAS, etc. that comprise Muslim establishment are nothing more than offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood and fronts for Hamas and al-Qaeda. They are very well financed and are extremely skilful manipulators of the media. And most of the people in government and media truly believe that those groups are moderate, because they are either too lazy to do research or they choose to ignore terrorist ties.

As a result, when either the government or the media needs an Islamic point of view, Muslim establishment groups are go-to "experts" by default. With the "expert" seat being filled, moderate Muslims are left out.

Another problem with moderate Muslims is they are scared and not organized. They are scared because they cannot speak up in mosques for fear of being kicked out and there are virtually no organizations that represent their views. They are not organized, because, unlike the radical, they do not receive tens of millions of dollars in financial support, therefore they have to work for a living.
[...]
Their strategy is very simple. They constantly claim that they are peaceful and moderate, and Western media is more than happy to repeat that nonsense. They do not praise terrorism in public, but they justify it by playing the Muslim victimhood card. And they are very effective at it.

Many radical organizations have already been exposed by counter-terrorism researchers like Steven Emerson, John Loftus, Rachel Ehrenfeld, Joe Kaufman, Paul Sperry, Zeyno Baran, and many others. The proof that the Muslim establishment is anything but moderate is widely available. However, the government and the media either for political reasons or out of sheer stupidity completely ignore it.

Front Page's Jamie Glazov went on to ask:

I would like to touch on your intriguing point that “the Koran has been corrupted over the centuries, and all we want to do is to revert it as close as possible to the original." Is there any textual support for such a notion? And doesn't this notion run counter to the Islamic doctrine of the perfection of the Qur'an, which insists that the Qur'anic text is the same as it was in the time of Uthman? In light of these considerations, do you think you will gain much support in the Islamic world?

Massoud: We do not have any direct evidence that the Koran has been corrupted over the centuries. However, there is some circumstantial evidence supporting our point. First, if you take two English Korans translated by two different people, the difference could be very substantial. Substantial to the point that the same verses could have completely different meaning. Case in point: a recent arrest of Ghows Zalmay, who, according to the fundamentalists, misinterpreted some verses in the Koran.

Based on these facts, it is reasonable to conclude that when the Koran was copied many times over, the mere mortals who did the copying might have "adjusted" the texts to reflect their personal views, or the views of their superiors.

Second is deductive reasoning. The Koran contains verses that represent mutually exclusive concepts, i.e., human 'life is precious' vs. 'kill the infidels wherever you find them' or 'respect the People of the Book' vs. 'do not take Jews and Christians for friends'.

Allah is infallible and cannot contradict himself, which means that some of those verses are not the literal word of Allah. Also, how can Allah, who is the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate be a source of "kill them [infidels] wherever you find them"?

The only logical explanation is that the Koran we have today was significantly altered.

Glazov was not convinced that Islam could be reformed, pointing out that the violence in the Koran is not incidental to the transcendent meaning of the text, but fundamental to it, a fact confirmed by all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence in their calls for the Muslims to subjugate the infidels to the Ummah. Glazov also notes that Massoud's arguments about contradictions in the Islam seem to be answered by the mainstream's doctrine of abrogation - the later verses of the Koran supersede the earlier, more pacific, ones. Read the rest of the interview, to decide whether Kalim Massoud gives answers that are likely to convince a large number of Muslims who want to live in peace with modernity and its freedoms.

In any case, the comment we received yesterday is full of links to the project of Muslims Against Sharia to provide a reformed version of the Koran, rid of all verses "that promote violence, divisiveness, religious or gender superiority, bigotry, or discrimination". They want readers to check out their reformed version of the Koran and to let them know (koran@reformislam.org) if they are failing in their mandate to rid the Koran of violence. There's a project that could make use of certain bloggers we know.

As anyone who has read the Koran knows, this will not be an easy task. The curses directed towards the unbelievers are ubiquitous in that book, and the more explicit denunciations of the infidels are common.

In any case, Muslims Against Sharia left us with a link,
In Memoriam of Aqsa Parvez.

The recent Canadian media coverage of the Parvez murder is full of all the sins that Massoud discussed at the opening of the Front Page interview; the media seemingly take the words of Islamist front groups that this was "just a horrific incidence of domestic violence" that Muslims condemn, and "nothing to do with religion or Islam", at face value. For example, even when the media reports they are being manipulated, so as to not be able to attend and report on Aqsa's funeral, they still take the blather of CAIR at face value: ""We're not here to talk about religion or culture - it has nothing to do with it - we're just here based on the fact that she lost her life and we just want to work toward stopping this from happening in the future," Ms. Dadabhoy said."

Of course anyone who thinks an honor killing over a daughter's desire to escape from the Islamist dress code has nothing to do with religion is being intentionally disingenuous. The media should just dump the commentators from groups like CAIR, and make people like Khalim Massoud their go-to guys when they need an example of moderate Muslim opinion. And let the CAIR warriors cry to they're wet that people like Massoud are not real Muslims.

As David Warren comments, there are other girls in Canadian society trying to free themselves of Islamic strictures who, like Warren's friend "Harata", know full well "That [Aqsa] could have been me." Anyone with a grain of integrity will want to protect these girls. And that means stopping in their tracks the Saudi-funded apologists for orthodox or "radical" Islam that pervade North American mosques.

Dag wrote a long post on this topic on Saturday at No Dhimmitude.

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