Journalistic Ethics Or Bias?
By John David Powell (02/10/05)
Kudos to the much-maligned Mainstream Media (MSM) for their remarkable restraint in reporting last month’s massacre of a Jersey City, NJ family. Unless you live on the east coast or get your news from Internet sources, you probably have no idea of what happened.
Sometime around Jan. 14, one or more individuals entered the home of the Hossam Armanious family and killed everyone: Hossam, 47, his wife Amal Garas, 37, and their two daughters, Sylvia, 15, and Monica, 8. Police found the four in different rooms. The killers bound and gagged their victims before repeatedly stabbing them. The younger daughter locked herself in a bathroom during the attack, but the killers broke down the door and butchered her.
Although autopsy results will not be released until next month, newspaper stories say the prosecutor’s report and death certificates indicate stab wounds to the throats as the preliminary causes of death. According to the New York Sun (www.nysun.com), family members describe the victims as having their throats slit, with two or three thumb-sized holes drilled into the lower parts of their throats.
Investigators say the motive may have been robbery; no money was found, the father’s pockets were turned out and his wallet emptied. Jewelry was left behind, however, along a $3,500 ring on the mother’s finger.
The belief on the street is that Islamic thugs murdered the Coptic Christians from Egypt. The father was known in some Muslim online communities as an outspoken Christian who liked frank debates with Muslims on PalTalk (www.paltalk.com). Two months before the killings, a Muslim PalTalk user threatened Armanious. “Stop this bull . . . or we are going to track you down like a chicken and kill you,” he wrote.
The FBI is investigating barsomyat.com, described as a radical Islamic web site that posted photographs and information about people who expressed anti-Muslim points of view in PalTalk chat rooms. VizaWeb Inc. (www.vizaweb.com), a Minnesota hosting company, took down the site last month after someone posted photos of Armanious and his wife along with text describing them as a “filthy dog” and “his filthy wife.”
And this is where the MSM earned their dubious kudos. Despite evidence the killings may have been something other than a burglary gone bad, despite years of distrust between the Muslim and Christian communities of Jersey City, and despite documented terror-related activities planned or executed in and around the town, the MSM took a collective step back and consciously chose not to hype what may have been just another New Jersey killing.
The MSM has not always occupied this journalistic high ground. Imagine if the family had been outspoken toward neighborhood crack dealers and pimps.
“There’s disturbing news out of the normally quiet New Jersey community of Jersey City, this morning,” a morning news show host would tell us. “A family of four -- a father, a mother and two daughters, one of them just eight years old -- discovered brutally murdered in their home just days after the father allegedly received a death threat from a crack dealer and pimp who he had been arguing with in an Internet chat room.”
Or, what if the victims were gays or lesbians who had argued with an evangelical Christian pastor? Or a missing rich white woman as was the case with a Fox News exclusive investigation into the disappearance of a socialite authorities later determined fell off her yacht while drunk and drowned.
When the MSM covered the killings and their effect on the city’s Christian and Muslim communities, they either did so briefly or they tried to soften it as did The Washington Times (www.washtimes.com), which fixed up a Jan. 21 Associated Press story (“N.J. slayings revive anti-Muslim feelings”) that ran in the paper Jan. 23. For example:
“The dirty looks and shouted slurs started in 1993” (AP)
“The suspicious looks and shouted insults started in 1993” (Washington Times)
“A few days later, Muslim leaders called a press conference designed as an interfaith rally to try to calm religious tensions . . . The killings have spread fear among Coptic Christians far beyond Jersey City . . . On Long Island, N.Y., members of the St. Abraam’s Coptic Orthodox Church in Woodbury said the killings appeared to be ‘a religiously motivated hate crime against Coptic Christians.’” (AP)
The newspaper deleted those passages, along with the last ten paragraphs of the wire story.
Why, then, have the MSM passed on the story and its relevant sidebars? One answer is that this may be the start of the return to old-fashioned journalism where reporters cover stories instead of creating them, and where hype and hysteria have no place in the newsroom.
Some say an anti-Christian bias is at play. The murders of Coptic Christian immigrants are not sexy to pluralistic producers and editors. And besides, the MSM rarely, if ever, cover anti-Christian hate crimes.
Others posit a more intriguing argument, which is the likelihood that news executives do not want to appear anti-Islamic by reporting on the prospect that hate-filled, murdering Muslims are on the loose in New Jersey. Under this scenario, MSM honchos would rather let biased e-zines, bloggers, and Christian activists cover the possibility that cutthroat Islamists stalk cyberspace and roam our streets. Kudos, indeed.
Mundus vult decipi.
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