One of the characteristics of a not-so-free country is a not-so-free press: a press that doesn’t print the truth, but some ‘version’ of the truth more palatable to the elites that rule.
In a free (or freer) country, it’s much better, but there’s still a disturbing trend to report not what happened, but what one would have liked to imagine happened. Truthiness, as Stephen Colbert would say. Rather than report the objective truth, they report what they’d like to be true.
A very fond truthiness that’s been oft-reported is ‘youths’ rioting in Paris and elsewhere in Europe. Rather than reporting the truth — that disaffected Muslims are rioting in thousands and tens of thousands across France, and continuing to burn cars by the hundreds every week, we speak of ‘youths’, and don’t mention the billion-plus dollars in damages they’ve done over the last year.
This allows multi-cultural boosters to bask in the warm glow of feeling that they’re not racist, even while society starts to tear itself apart. It’s not so good for, well, people who drive cars or people who don’t want to be burned to death.
Copenhagen youths stage an unannounced
demonstration last night. AP photo
Last night, the famous ‘youths’ rioted again in Copenhagen. Did I say ‘rioted’? I meant ’staged an unannounced demonstration’. In a story almost worthy of Pravda, Reuters writes:
Protestors throw stones at police vans in a Copenhagen street December 16, 2006 … hundreds of young people started an unannounced demonstration.
What does this mean? Who are these youths? Are the Danish really going that crazy? More:
Several hundred demonstrators threw cobblestones, bottles and fireworks at police and erected blazing barricades made from Christmas trees, trash cans and bicycles, police said.
They were setting Christmas trees on fire. Maybe they were atheists? Maybe they were anti-Christian? Maybe they were Christians unhappy about people saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”?
Ah-ha! Maybe it was leftists:
The conflict over the youth centre has been brewing since 2000 when local government sold the building that houses the centre. Left-wing activist have been using the centre as a base since 1982.
It was certainly very violent:
“It was extremely violent. It looked like a war zone and it’s been many years since we last had to use tear gas on the streets,” police spokesman Flemming Steen Munch told reporters.
Police responded with tear gas attacks and split the main crowd of demonstrators into several smaller ones using armoured cars. Groups of demonstrators walked toward the city centre smashing shop windows, leaving a trail of destruction.
Tear gas and armored cars? Some angry youths.
In the end, this story tells us nearly nothing. We don’t know if it was a mass Muslim riot like almost all the other ‘youths’ rioting in Europe of late; we don’t know if it was a bunch of leftist squatters; we don’t know if it was people mad about Christmas! We read the story, and we’re simply not informed… other than that violence is breaking out.
Truthiness is such a wonderful thing.
-wolfe
I think it means that the protestors didn’t contact the council to obtain permission before their demonstration or distribute informative phamphlets to residents prior to their rally. It may also mean the journalist and authorities had no idea at the time of reporting exactly who rioted or what it was about…but I have a pretty good hunch. They need to extend late night Xmas shopping hours in their city, unfinished shopping can cause much anguish.
I actually would have inferred from the article that the protesters were left wing. I would not have thought about them being Muslim, as I would assume (maybe wrongly so) that this fact would certainly be mentioned in today’s climate. Throwing in the detail about the Christmas trees with no explanation, was, I agree, confounding.
What I remember about the riots in Paris and other parts of France in 2005 and after was hearing that they did primarily involve “disaffected” youth of North African heritage, albeit the word Muslim might not have been used. The articles, however, seemed to stress that the grievances were concerning economic and assimilation issues. The assimilation angle seemed to be coming from a perspective that the youths felt shut out, not that they were not trying to assimilate. Wolfe, do you believe this was an inaccurate slant?
I also remember reading an article more recently about minorities trying to assimilate in Britian, and that in Britian there are no hyphenate Britians, i.e. if you are of Pakistani descent you are never Pakistani-British, but always Pakistani. I’m not sure if this is the whole truth of it or not.
I was reading something in the paper the other day (and I’m sorry, I can’t remember the specific example), but I remember being really irritated because I felt they had left a really crucial piece of explanatory info out of the article, and without that piece of info, the rest of it meant next to nothing.
I do agree that our media have let us down, not merely in slanting the news (which I feel goes both ways, but of course, being left, consider Fox News to be the most egregious example), but also in dumbing down the content of news. It irritates me to no end to have the news finish out with TomKat and J Lo, etc. That’s time that journalists could spend doing real reporting, and educating us about the important issues of the day.
@Female-Is this an issue in Australia?
I probably should not have said “inaccurate slant” I meant inaccurate “take.”
always Ally, rabid insatiable shoppers abound.
If I was a youth, I’d be highly offended by this story.
@Female Ha!
@Diesel Likewise! Fortunately Youths can’t read. Or talk.
@AllyC You actually “would have inferred”. And so would I, had it not been for last year’s spate of articles. As it was, I was unsure.
But even that’s rather interesting. One shouldn’t have to ‘infer’ from a brief news story. Inferences drawn from a novel are great, or analysis of a situation, or a column. But a brief, raw news story shouldn’t leave one inferring what’s meant.On the ‘05 riots in Paris and elsewhere. Occasionally the term ‘ethnic youth’ or some such was used. Rarely ‘North African’ or Algerian heritage.
On your point “the grievances were concerning economic and assimilation issues. The assimilation angle seemed to be coming from a perspective that the youths felt shut out, not that they were not trying to assimilate”.
There’s certainly some truth to that. The banlieus [yes, I know the French is banlieue] can be fairly miserable, soulless places. There was a general sense in Europe that people would be imported almost as ‘guest workers’ to do some dirty jobs, and that they’d be segregated and isolated.
Moreover, along the root cause lines, these are powerful welfare states (France especially) with highly restrictive employment laws that tend to raise unemployment. A generation sitting on welfare… well, look at how well that worked out in Ireland. Or in America’s inner cities.
But that doesn’t excuse rioting, arson or murder.
I do see a troubling propensity on the part of many ‘mainstream’ Muslims and some on the left to make excuses for this sort of behavior, citing ‘root causes’.
I think that the media is replete with such excuses.
As for bias in the media? Definitely, though mostly in my view to the left. I’m not sure if Fox News’ News coverage is that biased. I don’t generally perceive it to be, but I’d certainly agree that a lot of their commentary is highly biased to the right. While Hannity is nominally balanced by Colmes, one has only to watch the show to see who’s in the driver’s seat.
NB- I quite honestly don’t watch enough TV news to be able to speak with authority on whether or not Fox is biased, and of course I’m biased to the right, so might inadvertently fail to be entirely objective.
I agree wholeheartedly with your comments on the ‘dumbing down’ of news. I’m not sure which channel is the worst, though Fox (regular, not the cable news channel) might win the contest there.
Newspaper news isn’t quite as bad… and that’s where I get most of my news. I think the WaPo (somewhat left) and the Wall Street Journal (left wing news, right wing editorial page) are both pretty good. The Guardian (UK) is a good left-wing paper. The Times and the Telegraph (UK) are good right-wing ones. Globe and Mail (Canada; centrist/left) and National Post (Canada, centrist/right) are decent. The Economist (centrist?) is an outstanding publication in my view. (UK ‘Newspaper’ in weekly magazine format).
I used to read Le Figaro (Paris), but have found it to be too biased and too close to an odiously corrupt nominally conservative French government. If the socialists take over in France I might resume reading it. Who knows. My French could use the practice.
I don’t recommend Paris Match. Too biased, on the left.
-wolfe
In the last five? years, we’ve had riots in Sydney and Melbourne so it does seem to be becoming more common. Two have been at G8? summits in Melbourne.
One appears to be racial in nature, where the majority culture (anglo-saxon) exhibited racism against a minority, the minority being youths of Middle Eastern appearance (see Cronulla riots). There is a word for this type of racism, pognomy? something like that, I can’t think of it right now.
The other two were triggered by police chases resulting in the deaths of the chased youth. See Redfern riots, see Macquarie Fields riots. Both youths came from predominantly poor neighbourhoods but both deaths appear to be accidents, though the communities have perceived them as deliberate.
One youth was impaled on a fence after fleeing police on his bicycle. The other lost control of his car. Both deaths were tragic.
have just remembered, it’s pogrom.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom
I don’t know that I, for one, am “making excuses” for anyone, but I think if you don’t try to get at the root causes of why something is happening, and try to do something to address those issues, you won’t get very far in solving the problem, at least not in any long-term fashion.
I also think it is a truism that the one of the most dangerous beings on the face of the planet is a young man who thinks he has nothing left to lose, wherever he is on the planet. I understand that is but one aspect of the problems we are now facing; I do think it is a very important one, though. To address these kinds of things, though, takes longer-term policy and continuity, which given our system of government is hard to achieve. Not that I want the alternative. Staying the course doesn’t look all that good to me right now. Basically, though, I think we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t, now. It’s a mess.
@AllyC, I partially agree, but one of the ‘root causes’ trumpeted about the 9/11 hijackers was the poverty and lack of education and opportunities for Muslims in the mid-east.
The hijackers were generally scions of well-to-do middle-class and better families, most with university degrees.
Sometimes, one of the ‘root causes’ is that certain people are evil. I know that seems simplistic but consider this:
Was the root cause of the Holocaust the Treaty of Versailles? No. It may have been a contributing factor to (and hence root cause of) the second world war, but not to the Holocaust.
The root cause of the Holocaust was the fact that Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime were monstrously evil.
I certainly agree with your line about a young man who thinks he has nothing left to lose. And that’s a difference (often to men’s detriment) between men and women.
-wolfe
WOW - what a great an honest assessment! Although, if I was a young disaffected muslim, I would have been highly offended that you realized that I was the cause of the problem rather than all those iPod toting Parisian rich kids that luckily get the blame now
Thanks for that timely and accurate assessment of our “free” mass-media wolfe. The media is being more calculated information rather than truth by the day. At least we have the Internet to discuss these problems, though I fear we may not even have that in a decade or two’s time.