In Human Events this morning I discuss more media bias:
Prosecutors in Cook County said Friday that James Larry, a Chicago Muslim, has confessed to brutally murdering his wife, his seven-month old son Jihad, and two of his nieces. According to the Chicago Tribune, Larry was a prison convert to Islam who had been arguing with his wife over her refusal to become a Muslim and wear Islamic clothing. His sister revealed that he had been clutching a copy of the Koran and telling relatives that “something in the book told him to kill someone.”
Were James Larry a Christian, his murders would be front-page headlines, and talking heads on all the networks would be discussing in hushed tones the dangers of Christian fundamentalism, complete with clips of Robert DeNiro as the Scripture-addled maniacal killer in Cape Fear, or any number of hundreds of other Hollywood fantasies about violent Christian fanatics.
But James Larry is a Muslim, and so true to form, outside of the Tribune and a handful of other sources, mainstream media coverage ignored the story altogether or, at very least, did not deem fit to print or mention all the inconvenient evidence that he was motivated to kill at least in part by such Koranic exhortations as “kill the polytheists wherever you find them” (9:5). The Associated Press story on the murders has none of that. According to AP, Larry was just “hearing voices.”
The whole process of news gathering and news reporting needs to be demystified, even in this Internet age, and news reports recognized not as objective, dispassionate accounts, but as the work of human beings with agendas. While it is possible that Kristen Schorsch, Annie Sweeney and Cynthia Dizikes, the authors of the Chicago Tribune story, are simply better, more thorough reporters than Don Babwin of AP, it is more likely that Babwin had access to exactly the same information that showed up in the Tribune report, but chose not to go with it.
He probably thought it would be “Islamophobic” to do so, or that to do so would fuel one of those fabled but nonexistent “backlashes” against innocent Muslims. So he appears to have decided that it was better to cover up key facts about this incident….