Unpleasant Spin
At the Toronto Star, Rosie Dimanno reveals something we already know.
.........There are, these days, immense challenges in writing about subjects — from the war in Iraq to homeland security to global terrorism — that often brush up against Muslim sensitivities. News organizations bend over backwards not to provoke and not to generalize. We walk softly and talk even more softly, though that sometimes ends up — by my estimation — in weirdly reticent and pre-emptively self-censored reportage.
The latitude routinely extended to columnists — who, let's face it, deal largely in the realm of opinion — shrinks when the subject is Islam or Palestine. Editors huddle and debate the potential repercussions from all possible angles.
I can think of no other constituency that is more respectfully — or hyper-obsequiously — treated. And it doesn't matter how carefully I qualify anything I say, or recount the kindnesses extended to me in Muslim countries (especially Afghanistan, my favourite place on earth) or how often I include all the deferential acknowledgments about Islam — a great religion of peace, its tenets hijacked in recent years by some extremists that commit barbarous acts in its name — it's never enough to satisfy those who accuse others of promoting hatred while never examining the hostile bitterness in their own hearts.
In this paper, commentators can bluntly equate President George W. Bush to Osama bin Laden, Israel be endlessly vilified as a terrorist state, the United States broadly demonized and caricaturized as a superpower gone nuts — and nobody bats an eye. That's all free speech, which I defend without reservation. But the goalposts shift when the subject is Islamist terrorism or the conflict in the Middle East.
Objectivity — a phony construct in itself — is not the same thing as balance.
Sometimes, there is no inherent balance and trying to wedge it in there simply subverts truth.
thestar.com |
