Recently in Media Category

In what is surely the most welcome comeback since the return of Classic Coke, Ross Douthat is once again doing what few do as well as he, and no one does better.

I just had a great phone interview with Dr. Zuhdi Jasser of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, the transcript of which will be published in the Dallas Morning News this weekend. At one point, I brought up David Brooks' column today, especially this point of Brooks's:

A shroud of political correctness settled over the conversation. Hasan was portrayed as a victim of society, a poor soul who was pushed over the edge by prejudice and unhappiness.

There was a national rush to therapy. Hasan was a loner who had trouble finding a wife and socializing with his neighbors.

This response was understandable. It's important to tamp down vengeful hatreds in moments of passion. But it was also patronizing. Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts. If public commentary wasn't carefully policed, the assumption seemed to be, then the great mass of unwashed yahoos in Middle America would go off on a racist rampage.

Worse, it absolved Hasan -- before the real evidence was in -- of his responsibility. He didn't have the choice to be lonely or unhappy. But he did have a choice over what story to build out of those circumstances. And evidence is now mounting to suggest he chose the extremist War on Islam narrative that so often leads to murderous results.

The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality.

Dr. Jasser says this is absolutely correct, and that by refusing to discuss the role of religion in this act, the U.S. media and elite opinion makers are not doing American Muslims any favors. The only way the U.S. Muslim community is ever going to be forced to deal with the radicals within their own communities -- and in their pulpits -- is through outside pressure. He told a story about an imam at a Phoenix mosque who, during a sermon, held up a provocative propaganda picture from the Iraq war, which featured an Iraqi woman holding up a sign claiming that a U.S. soldier standing next to her impregnated her. Dr. Jasser said the image was probably Photoshopped in the first place, but the more important thing is how provocative it was. He told me he confronted the imam afterwards, and chastised the cleric for poisoning the minds of people in his congregation. Dr. Jasser said there must have been 500 people in that congregation, but to his knowledge, he was the only one who spoke up. He added that everyone he talked to from the congregation subsequently objected to what the imam had done -- but they had remained silent.

This can't continue, Dr. Jasser said, because the American people aren't stupid. He said it's really true that American Muslims, as a whole, don't sign on to the anti-American Islamism of the Muslim-American leadership class (e.g., CAIR, ISNA and other wolves in sheep's clothing). But if things like the Hasan massacre keeps happening, and there's no real attempt by Muslims to confront Islamism in America, Americans are going to quit giving their Muslim countrymen the benefit of the doubt.

We in the news media who keep ignoring the inconvenient truths about this story are in harming the long-term interests not only of America, but of American Muslims. Along those lines, a reader makes a good point here:

Another thing that is aggravating, at least to me, is how the media is piling on the Army for not rooting this guy out earlier. I'll agree that in looking at what the army knew it doesn't look good, at least in hindsight. However, as a reader of Nassim Taleb's books, I'm sure you'd agree that things always look obvious in hindsight as we can pick the details that fit with the outcome that happened and build a story out of them.

Like I said, maybe they should have been able to figure it out.
However, here's the aggravating part. If they had kicked this guy out of the army, started watching him, charged him with subversion, or whatever before anything happened, can you imagine what the story would have been like then?

Of course I'm just guessing, but I bet it would have been framed as "Here's this upstanding Muslim citizen volunteering to serve his country who is being picked on by the very people he serves. All he's doing is exercising the free speech rights we all hold so dear, and his opinion is as valid as the next guy's, maybe moreso..."

Bishop Robert Duncan, head of the TEC breakaway Anglican Church in North America, had a great line capping his Q&A in today's New York Times Magazine:

Q: I see a lawsuit was filed by the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh to take away both money and property in your control as the longtime bishop there.

A: There is an ongoing lawsuit. They may get the stuff, but we'll get the souls. They may get the past, but we've got the future.

God grant the good bishop many years! The only time I've heard Robert Duncan was in an interview he gave in 2004 to Terry Gross of the public radio show Fresh Air. I tuned in after he'd been introduced, and didn't know who he was. It was clear that he was against same-sex marriage, and that he was an Episcopalian cleric, but that's all I knew. I was really struck by how gentle and humble he was, especially given how tense and hostile the host's questioning was. I haven't been able this morning to find a transcript of the interview, but I did find this quote from Bp. Duncan's 2004 interview in a transcript of a more recent one Gross did with TEC Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori:

Bishop ROBERT DUNCAN (Former Episcopalian Bishop, Pittsburgh): What I'm saying and what we are trying to say in the gentlest, most graceful, most Christ-like way is that we didn't make the rules here, that God did, and that we believe God knows what he's doing, even if at times we question it. Again, scripture describes the human race as fallen and all of us as sinners. And if, even if it were allowed, which, again, is much disputed that orientation has some genetic part of it, as well as what all would agree is an environmental part. Even if it has some genetic part, there are many genetic conditions that people have to live with, have to work with, have to work through and work around.

The Church loves us in whatever disorder, disease we may be afflicted with by the fall in this - in the creation. And that's all I can say about the affectional same sex that's sort of wiring, that it's an affectional disorder. That's - those are hard words, but I think they're true words. They're at least consistent with the scriptural description of who we are and how God's made the world.

I remember thinking as I listened to that interview how remarkably patient Duncan was with his interviewer, who was bristling with hostility (not in a talk radio way, but in that muted way that characterizes everything on NPR -- which, I must confess, is why I really like NPR).
That, by the way, is par for the course with Terry Gross. I generally like her program, and listen to it on podcast, but the two topics she returns to over and over again are homosexuality and television (especially anything related to Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert). I'm a fairly regular listener, and have been for years. The host struggles audibly to conceal her lack of comfort with the occasional social or religious conservative she has on the program, as Doug LeBlanc has observed. No, she's not a lesbian; she's married to a jazz critic for the Village Voice. Anyway, I like her show, but I wish she were more fair to thoughtful social and religious conservatives, and had them on her program more often. I'm a big supporter of NPR, but I do wish its commitment to diversity included having more conservatives on the air. There are quite a few of us who don't listen to talk radio, and who like NPR precisely because it offers such reasonable, elevated discussion as a general rule. I support NPR for the same reason I subscribe to The New York Times: because the quality is there, and a pleasure to partake of, even as I believe they are often unfair or dismissive of people like me. They can do better.

Sorry, I didn't mean to go off on that NPR tangent. I just want to say that I thought Bp Duncan had a great line, and that based on what I know about him, Anglicans under his authority are indeed fortunate to have him as their spiritual father.

We now know that the Fort Hood shooter, Hasan, was a Muslim, and fancied himself a devout one. We know that he shouted "Allahu akbar!" as he executed American soldiers. We are informed by a retired Army colonel and co-worker of Hasan's that he had been talking about how America has no business in the Muslim world, and that Muslims should rise up against the military. And we know that on the day of the killings, Hasan went out in traditional Arab garb; you don't see that often in Killeen, Texas, suggesting that the Army major, who was raised in America, had developed a strong identification with his ethnic and religious background. One of his neighbors in Maryland, the last place he lived, remembered him fondly as calm, nice and, quote, "religious."

No matter how badly the media try to spin it another way, or to ignore the religion ghost in this story, Hasan's religion was to all appearances a key factor in the mass murder he committed. You don't have a Muslim shouting "Allahu akbar!" as he executes people one by one, and conclude that religion is incidental to his crime. You have to be a moral idiot to draw that conclusion, a politically correct nitwit.

So: how should we regard the role of Hasan's religion in this infamy? Read on below the jump for a discussion.

According to National Public Radio's ombudsman, the National Association of Black Journalists wonders aloud about black senior staffers at NPR who have left recently:

"It is NABJ's belief that actions speak much louder than your words," said the NABJ letter on Tuesday. "It is not enough to provide internships for young people or hire them into entry-level positions. Diversity must also be reflected among the managers who decide what news gets covered and who gets to cover it."

To which NPR chief Vivianne Schiller said:

"Well, that's too bad, but let me explain something to our friends at NABJ. I'm trying to run a national news organization that's suffering through serious budget cuts, like every other news organization in this country. We will not discriminate in hiring or firing on the basis of race, but we do not have the luxury now, in this time of intense difficulty for journalism, to set aside jobs for journalists on the basis of race. We're all struggling to keep our heads above water these days, and professional competence, not demographic desirability, must be by far the most important factor in hiring and retaining personnel."

No, actually, this is what she said:

"I couldn't agree more that NPR must increase the diversity of its staff -- particularly in management and editorial," wrote Schiller in response to NABJ's letter. "I am on the record with the media and our employees, stations and board in acknowledging that NPR must take a leadership position in diversity, just as we do in high-quality journalism and digital innovation."

The NABJ's kind of complaint, and NPR's kind of response, is completely unexceptional in mainstream journalism. If top media executives spent a fraction of as much time worrying about viewpoint diversity as they do about ethnic diversity, we might have a truly more diverse media in terms of content. In any case, I wish folks like Vivian Schiller, instead of kowtowing to people like the NABJ, would instead challenge them to recruit more minorities for college journalism programs. I haven't looked at any numbers lately -- so if you have access to them, please correct me -- but in general, minority candidates for journalism jobs are relatively scarce. A friend of mine at a big newspaper told me a couple of years ago about trying to recruit a Hispanic for a plum position, and having a very difficult time finding qualified applicants. He said that there's so much demand for minorities now that the media outlets with the greatest resources tend to scoop up the better candidates as quickly as they come on the market.

It is unjust to come up with a racial quota for achieving "diversity" in a newsroom, without taking stock of what a newsroom's needs are, and what the pool of minority candidates consists of. Most newsrooms are suffering from dramatically shrinking budgets, and are letting people go, not hiring them. To expect newsrooms in which fewer people are having to do more work with less to commit itself to hiring people on the basis of their ethnic background -- which unavoidably means putting white journalists at a competitive disadvantage through no fault of their own -- is morally wrong. With so many journalists of all colors terrified of losing their jobs now, the idea of having minority set-asides for fewer and fewer newsroom positions is hard to justify, or so it seems to me.

In fact, with all the layoffs in newsrooms, a higher percentage of minorities are working in journalism today. But according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors (of which NPR is not a part, I'm pretty sure), there's no way newsrooms can keep parity in diversity hiring with the growth of non-whites in the population. But you know, so what? Personally, I don't care whether the people who write and edit my newspaper (or produce my favorite news radio shows) are white, brown, black, or spumoni-colored. I don't care if they're gay or straight. I just want them to give me news and information that's well-written, accurate and relevant. If every story is written and edited by an African-American (or an Asian, or a Hispanic, etc.), that's perfectly fine with me. Journalism is not a product that can be created like widgets, with people like interchangeable parts.

To be clear, I'm certainly not against trying to diversify one's newsroom staff; in, for example, a newsroom like the one I work in, if you don't have people who can speak Spanish (even if they're not Hispanic), you're going to be at a disadvantage in covering much of Dallas. On the other hand, given our readership demographics, and given how fast and how far our circulation has fallen, it's a serious question as to whether or not it's a wiser use of resources to hire a reporter based on his or her ethnicity (this, on the theory that you can reach out to ethnic communities), or to hire another reporter, whatever his or her ethnic background, who is better prepared to cover the news, period, or who is more capable of covering news likely to be more interesting to the largely white suburban communities who make up the bulk of our newspaper's readership. These are the kinds of decisions journalism executives are having to make all the time now. I'm not saying one decision is right, and the other is wrong. You have to know the circumstances. I am saying, though, that for the NABJ or any other activist group to tell a news organization struggling to stay alive that it "must" meet a certain quota in minority hiring is unrealistic in this economic environment. It's like telling telling the British commanders being pushed toward Dunkirk that they had better make sure that a sufficient number of Welshmen are placed in senior officer positions, or else.

This continued agonizing among journalism executives with "diversity" (which I put inside ironic quotes because they have a very specific take on diversity that excludes diversity by other measures, i.e. religion, politics, and so forth) takes place on a planet different from the one we're actually living on. Here we are watching an entire industry sink like the Titanic, and these well-meaning folks want to make sure that enough chairs on the deck are reserved for people of color.