| I went and looked up the study; sure enough it's a tranzi taqiyyah whitewash sponsored by...the University of Maryland. Feh. Linky. |
The study, titled "The 'Good' Muslims: US Newspaper Coverage of Pakistan," released by the International Centre for Media and the Public Agenda, says that top American newspapers continue to contribute to public confusion over the perception of the global terrorist risk, even as more than five years have passed since the WTC attack.
Susan Moeller, who writes for online site YaleGlobal, says in the study that when reporters from non-American news outlets write about the Bush administration's "War on Terror," they typically place the words in quotation marks to indicate a distance from the White House's political rhetoric. But most mainstream media in the US use the phrase as generically as the words World War II or the Vietnam War.
The Daily Times quoted the study as saying that American journalists too often failed to challenge the President's representation of the dimensions and immediacy of the terrorist threat. The language that the White House chose to tell its story was the default way the events were described. And, the papers' use of American officials as their key sources further reinforced the Bush administration's politicised packaging of events.
Pakistan has received a fair amount of attention in the US press due to such reports. And, audiences are taught to be afraid. The study found that newspapers, in breaking stories, as well as in editorials and op-eds, too readily conflated different kinds of terrorism. Articles did not adequately distinguish between state terrorism, such as that formerly practised by the Taliban, and terrorism by distinctive terrorist groups, such as Al Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba, the paper reported. The study analysed news coverage by 13 major US newspapers over two time periods: September 11, 2001, to December 31, 2002, and January 1, 2006, to January 15, 2007.