The media is once again under fire, this time for its coverage of the Ft. Hood tragedy. In an article about the media's coverage of the event, Pew Research wrote:
And in certain parts of the media landscape last week, most notably some talk shows, the failure to pre-empt the Hasan attack took on ideological or cultural overtones.
Conservative radio talk host Pat Gray, subbing for Glenn Beck last week, declared that “the only reason they didn’t [act against Hasan before the shooting] is political correctness. They’re worried about offending Muslims.”
Similar sentiments were heard on Bill O’Reilly’s November 12 Fox News show when analyst Bernard Goldberg attacked the media’s coverage of the case. “Every rational person in the entire country knows that Hasan shot up the place because he’s a Muslim terrorist,” Goldberg declared. But many journalists have tiptoed around the terror issue, he added, “because they don’t want to offend Muslims.”
This is obviously a sensitive and tricky issue for journalists. The media was more or less damned if they did and damned if they didn’t with this story. Because they were cautious and took time to speculate Hasan’s ties with radical Islamists, they are being slammed for not reporting aggressively enough and being too “politically correct”. But in my opinion, if they would have jumped to early conclusions that Hasan was a Muslim terrorist and it turned out that he was not, that would have been even worse. Reporting something that is factually incorrect is always damaging to a news organization, but because of the especially sensitive nature of the accusation, it had the potential to be even more disastrous if not carefully investigated.
What was known from the beginning, was that Hasan was by definition a terrorist simply from the act he committed, regardless of his political or religious motives. I don’t think there was anything wrong with being cautious about those motives before they were solidly confirmed. Whether he was an American terrorist or a Muslim terrorist or any kind of terrorist, he was still a terrorist who went on a murdering spree. The need to attach some kind of religious association with that terrible act of crime, doesn’t make the situation any more or less tragic.
Being politically correct can sometimes be annoying in the journalism world, but it is so crucial to maintaining credibility and respect from all viewers. Reporting controversial facts as they exist and are known is one thing, but making early accusations that have not been proven and include a supposition of crimes motivated by race, gender, religion, etc. could potentially ostracize an entire demographic from your newscast. Maintaining objectivity is key to responsible reporting.
Well said. I think politically corectness, especially now, is such a huge issue for anyone. No business, whether it be a tv studio, or a journalist, or a bank, etc, wants to be seen as racist, or prejudiced. Just like the situation with Universal over their removal of the black couple in the UK version of the Couple's Retreat poster- they are being called racist. whether or not this will hurt their revenues later on is still to be seen.
ReplyDeletei definitely think that a journalist has an extremely difficult task in maintaining political corectness, along with insuring the validity of their facts, and finding newsworthy stories. Props. I think the media gets far too much crap from people who have no idea what their job entails.
I think it's outrageous for anybody to slam being PC, or say that it's wrong of the media to tiptoe around his race. True, it's easy to jump to conclusions, and maybe that would make for an interesting news story or a new development in the "war on terror." But honestly, our country should never consider it okay to be racist. As you said, he committed an act of terror, no matter what his race. It's tragic and we all wish we could have stopped it. But if we considered racial profiling acceptable, all the freedoms we supposedly stand for would go flying out the window. This is America. People aren't supposed to be prosecuted for their race or religion here, and that's something that I thought we were proud of.
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