Tuesday, September 11, 2007
CAMERA Video: Double Standard in CNN's "God's Warriors" Series
CAMERA's article comparing CNN's "God's Jewish Warriors" and "God's Muslim Warriors" programs points out that, even though the number of Jewish religious extremists is miniscule relative to Islamist extremists, Christiane Amanpour repeats the phrase "God's Jewish Warriors" 22 times in the segment about Jews, but links "Muslim" and "Warriors" only five times in the segment about Muslims. CAMERA's article asks: "Why does she utter the words "Jewish warrior" more than five times more often than "Muslim warrior" when violent Muslims have inflicted thousands of times more death and destruction in the world than violent Jews have?"
The following video shows this disturbing discrepancy with clips from the CNN documentary. Check back later for additional video revealing the bias and distortions in CNN's series...
Don't miss the illustrative short video at the link.
It's a familar ploy. You try to make up with rhetoric what is lacking in weight and substance. It's all about "even handedness". I am very disappointed that Christiane Amanpour should resort to these kinds of tricks more in line with polemics and propaganda.
In an article today, Martin Amis calls this kind of slavish insistence on even-handedness "the fetishisation of “balanceâ€". It's a wonderfully apt definition, to be added to the list of other rhetorical fallacies:
"At this point I started looking from face to face
in the audience, and what I saw were the gapes and frowns, not of disagreement,
but of disbelief. Then a young woman spoke up, in a voice near-tearful with
passionate self-righteousness, saying that it was the Americans who had armed
the Islamists in Afghanistan, and that therefore the US, in its response to
September 11, “should be dropping bombs on themselvesâ€! I had time to imagine
the F16s yowling in over Chicago, and the USS Abraham Lincoln pumping shells the
size of Volkswagens into downtown Miami – in bold atonement for the World Trade
Center, for the Pentagon, for United 93, United 175, American 11, and American
77. But then my thoughts were scattered by the sound of unanimous applause. We
are drowsily accustomed, by now, to the fetishisation of “balanceâ€, the
groundrule of “moral equivalence†in all conflicts between West and East, the
100-per-cent and 360-degree inability to pass judgment on any ethnicity other
than our own (except in the case of Israel). And yet the handclappers of
Question Time had moved beyond the old formula of pious paralysis. This was not
equivalence; this was hemispherical abjection. Accordingly, given the choice
between George Bush and Osama bin Laden, the liberal relativist, it seems, is
obliged to plump for the Saudi, thus becoming the appeaser of an armed doctrine
with the following tenets: it is racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian,
inquisitional, imperialist, and genocidal."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article2424020.ece
Amanpour has always been over-proud and too self-assured - incurious when it comes to much self-examination. But she channels the zeitgeist with aplomb and additionally combines enough solid reportage with her ideological forays and spins that it all blends into a seemingly seamless stream of seemingly unbeguiling and matter-of-fact reports. On both counts, not so. This is but the latest, and a more blatant, example.
She's savvy and articulate and when she provides information it can be - informative. But she's not content with being informative, she wants to be more important than that, hence all the interpretive spin interwoven with the information. Flies in the ointment.
Check out my blog for Dan Abrams' evisceration of Amanpour's fluff piece on Islamofascism.........
BHG
Who bankrolls CNN again?