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March 18, 2006

NFTGJ: Journalists Running Amuck

 

 

Young French leftists are at it again – they’re rioting, they’re slashing, they’re burning all because new employment regulations offered by the Villepin government aim to solve the unemployment crisis by freeing up employers to hire – and fire whom they must.

 

Of course, you need to read a few paragraphs down in the BBC article to get that much. Through countless opportunities for training, I knew instantly the early silence on who the actors were meant they were radical leftists or radical Muslims, and I wasn’t disappointed.

 

Had they been young right-wingers even peacefully protesting, we can be sure their political orientation would certainly have made it somewhere into the headline, not to mention every other sentence; but since these hooligans were lefties, they were covered almost as if they were just some generic blob of apolitical hyperactive “youths”. Just “youths”, not menacing youths, not troubled youths, nor even neo-conservative youths; not rightwing indoctrinated youths, members of a youth hate group or Bob Jones University students, but simply “youths”.  

 

It’s nothing new for the press, but it illustrates yet again why it’s so important to have alternative sources of news. The BBC and other international news outlets are in many respects not dissimilar to much of American mainstream press; one need only look at their coverage of the GAT and WTO protests alone to find plenty of proof of this. Their blindness (willful or through shallow mindedness) causes them to completely shut down when faced with reporting unflatteringly on those whom people of their ideological bent by nature support. It causes them to even turn their heads when wanton acts of the cruelest violence or injustice take place right before them and forces them to simply utter the words, “troubled youths took part in civil unrest today, angry over…”.

 

Meanwhile, heaven help a political satirist who dares to make light of one of the left’s protected classes just as he would make fun of any other. This of course was something we saw with the use of the Mohammed cartoons as an excuse for radical Muslims to murder scores of Christians in Africa, several Jews, and even fellow Muslims with acts of vicious violence in Europe and elsewhere; and something we saw with a by far mostly willing press ready to condemn the “evil” West yet again for all of it.

 

That’s why leftists, militant socialists, anarchists, or Islamofascists can throw stones and really hurt people while hardly getting noticed, but someone else merely has to have his words twisted by someone who opposes him to make it a scandal or even a crisis. And it’s why the press is doing just what it did to placate and pave the way for the rise of Nazism in Europe in the 1930’s, having learned nothing since that time.

 

Posted by Martin at March 18, 2006 04:59 AM

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