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Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
Caroline B. Glick: Whither American Jewry
Nov. 19, 2009
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: Please Listen to this Godcast (5 minutes)
Jonathan Tobin: ADL Crosses the Line with Report Bashing Obama Critics
Nov. 18, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: What Judaism has to say about the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review May 11, 2004 / 20 Iyar, 5764

Shame on the news media, too

By Dennis Prager


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http://www.jewishworldreview.com | During the very same 10 days that every newspaper and television news program in the world featured photo after photo, day after day, of Iraqi prisoners being humiliated, a government not far from Iraq engaged in mass murder, mass rape and ethnic cleansing of approximately 1 million people.


Is that more serious, more evil and more scandalous than a handful of Americans sexually humiliating Iraqi prisoners?


Not to the world's news media.


To the world's (including America's) news media, the Nazi-like, racist, mass ethnic cleansing warranted minuscule attention as compared with the humiliation of some Iraqis.


Why?


The answer is as obvious as it is painful.


The world's news media are, with almost no exceptions, agenda-driven rather than news-driven. The agendas are:


1. The political bias of the news reporting organization.

2. The monetary need to attract readers/viewers.

3. The desire to be the center of society's attention.

4. Not to be too different from other news media. As one who peruses up to a dozen American newspapers a day, I am struck daily at how virtually identical international news articles are. International reporters are like baseball players — they all do the same thing, just on different teams.


In the case of the massive attention the news media have been giving to the stripping and humiliation of Iraqi male prisoners, all four agendas play a role, but the first one predominates.


How does this explain the tiny amount of news media coverage devoted to the near-genocide in Sudan (and North Korea and Tibet) as compared with the massive 24/7 coverage of the Iraqi prisoners?


The primary reason is the political bias of the news reporting organizations. Virtually every major newspaper in the world is anti-Bush, and most are anti-American. The desire to humiliate America (or George Bush) has deep roots. The America of those who support President Bush portrays itself as a moral beacon, and it has contempt for the moral authority of the United Nations and "world opinion." Therefore, those who loathe this American self-appointed moral role cannot pass up the chance to portray America as morally no better or even worse than other countries.

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The virtually monolithic ideology that drives the world's news media should be a major concern among all those who treasure independent thought, not to mention moral clarity and America's well-being. For example, though free of governmental control, the reporting of the BBC has been almost as predictably leftist as Soviet newspapers.


The news media are numbing the human mind. The anti-American and anti-Israeli news reporting that saturates the European media is the major reason for the recent polling results that show most Europeans regard America and Israel as the greatest threats to world peace.


There is a second and related reason for the mind-numbing coverage of the Iraqi prisoners. The world's Left, which sets the United Nations' and the news media's priorities, is only interested in human suffering when it is caused by whites, Christians or Jews, especially Americans and Israelis. That explains the world's and the media's indifference to the decimation of Tibet — it was perpetrated by Chinese; to the genocide in Rwanda — it was perpetrated by black Africans; to the genocide of blacks in Sudan — it is perpetrated by Arab Muslims; to the genocide in North Korea — it is perpetrated by Koreans. On the other hand, when Israelis killed Palestinian terrorists and bystanders in Jenin, the world press was fixated on it, and the BBC declared it a "massacre."


So, too, the deaths of Arabs at the hands of Arabs — the tens of thousands in Algeria, the hundreds of thousands in Iraq, the tens of thousands in Syria, the thousands of Arab and other Muslim young women in "honor killings" — are of little interest to the news media, the Arab world, the United Nations and the Left. But Americans stripping male prisoners in Iraq? It is the most important story on earth.


It is essential to note that it is precisely because I believe America's role is to be a moral beacon to the world that those pictures from Abu Ghraib prison so anger me. Americans are not dying in Iraq so that other Americans can pile naked Iraqi men on each other and smile for photos next to them. The harm those pictures have done to the cause of good may be incalculable.


But it is not moral revulsion, let alone newsworthiness, that is animating the news media. One day, a Sudanese black will scour the world press archives to find out what the world was preoccupied with while her family and hundreds of thousands of other Sudanese blacks were raped, enslaved, ethnically cleansed of their lands and murdered. She will learn the world was deeply concerned with a couple of dozen Iraqi men photographed in humiliating sexual positions.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

JWR contributor Dennis Prager hosts a national daily radio show based in Los Angeles. He the author of, most recently, "Happiness is a Serious Problem". Click here to comment on this column.



© 2004, Creators Syndicate