In recent days, media outlets – from cable news to talk radio – have been doing all they can to make a latter-day Moses out of a plainly self-aggrandizing pastor of a little church (or mini cult) in Florida. Unfortunately, this pastor is not delivering the divinely inspired message of the burning bush. Instead, he’s threatening to burn copies of the Quran on September 11 – presumably because God told him that this craven act of religious desecration will unshackle all Christians from the bondage of Islamic terror.
But I won’t dignify this pastor with any further comment. And you’ll forgive me for seeing no point in naming him or his church.
That said, it would have been one thing if this story were merely a viral spectacle on the internet. But the fact that it has become an international sensation – with grave political consequences – says far more about the hopelessly compromised media than it does about this hopelessly misguided pastor.
Indeed, the only thing that is truly worth commenting on is the extent to which the media will stoop these days to make anyone or anything seem newsworthy. Not so long ago, the mantra that governed the singular pursuit of ratings in television news was, “if it bleeds, it leads.” Today that mantra seems to be, the more outrageous the story, the more coverage it gets.
Actually, it seems that CNN and FOX News are now competing with MTV and VH1 for the same brain-dead viewers that have made shows like Jersey Shore and The Real Housewives of New Jersey must-see TV. The final straw for me, though, was when even PBS featured this religious crackpot on its News Hour program last night.
Frankly, this story should have been aired on nothing more than a local AM radio station where kooks who believe in alien babies and conspiracies of every stripe routinely vent their spleen. As things are, I suspect that when historians write about the decline of the American empire they will cite the tabloidization of news reports along with the self-immolating fear of Islamic jihadists, the tower-of-babel-like bickering among politicians, and the inexorable rise of China as primary causes.
For now, though, there’s no gainsaying this surreal and untenable fact: It was only because the media have made this heretofore obscure pastor seem like a national religious figure that the commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, felt obliged to beg him to understand that fanatical Christians burning Qurans in America could incite fanatical Muslims to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq:
Images of the burning of a Quran would undoubtedly be used by extremists in Afghanistan – and around the world – to inflame public opinion and incite violence.
(General Petraeus, Associated Press, September 7, 2010)
That the war strategy of this highly decorated commander now includes genuflecting to this lunatic pastor in this fashion is just the latest indication of what an absolute folly the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have become. All we need now is for the commander-in-chief, President Obama himself, to beg him too. But I digress….
Notwithstanding its farcical nature, if this burning of Qurans in effigy occurs, I have no doubt that every news organization will be there to broadcast it for the world to see – the potential to incite violence against American soldiers be damned.
Clearly there’s precious little integrity left in broadcast journalism. This is why erstwhile irrelevant stories like the serial arrests of dope-fiend and dingbat Paris Hilton, or blatant hoaxes like the boy flying off from his backyard in a homemade flying saucer, now become headline news. Nevertheless, I hope CNN’s de facto ombudsman, Howard Kurtz, has the professional balls to criticize his network for helping to facilitate this Quran-burning farce. Talk about the insane running the insane asylum….
In the meantime, just to prepare us, does anybody know how many Americans were killed after it was reported a few years ago that military interrogators were flushing copies of the Quran down the toilet…?
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