Mara Liasson and the Arab Media

Yesterday The Fox News panel with Brit Hume had comments by Mara Liasson regarding the bad reputation that Gitmo has among the Arabs. I was rather dumbfounded by this assertion since I read the American press, not the Arab press and it’s obvious that the bad reputation of Gitmo is found overwhelmingly in the American MSM. Perhaps Mara can cite Arab publications to prove her point, but it’s not the Arab press that’s the cause of the push to close Gitmo. In fact, while I cannot be positive, I believe that most of the reporting from Gitmo is done by the American media. Unless one is willfully blind, the connection between Gitmo and a bad reputation runs right through the American media.

Heather McDonald says it well in THIS article in National Review (well worth reading the whole thing):

You gotta admire the liberal media’s modesty. For the last three years, it has been promoting the story that the Bush administration has a policy of torturing terror detainees. Now, such mouthpieces of the anti-administration Left as the New York Times are calling for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility on the ground that its reputation for prisoner abuse is jeopardizing the war on terror. Take some credit, guys! It may be true that Guantanamo Bay has become synonymous with lawlessness throughout vast swathes of the Western and Muslim worlds. But no one is more responsible for that reputation than the New York Times, Newsweek, the Washington Post, and other mainstream media outlets, which have never encountered a prisoner-abuse story that they didn’t find credible and worthy of broadcast.

Since most of the stories of prisoner abuse are either hype or outright lies, the defense of the media that “we have to report the story” is another lie. A rumor does not have to be reported and reported and reported and amplified and rebroadcast and dissected on the editorial pages and the op ed pages until … oh, it’s not true? Never mind. Sorry about the dead. Nothing we can do. And who made you editor of Newsweek?

The ethics of this kind of “reporting” is the reason that MSM has lost its credibility, its standing and its readership. When the NY Times, Newsweek and NPR have the credibility of tabloids reporting space aliens you know the party’s over. Today the news business is the news, and a healthy development it is.

Update: HERE is a great article about Koranic abuse at Gitmo From Max Boot via the LA Times (read the whole thing)

[excerpt]

All the headlines about "Abuse of the Koran at Gitmo" are absolutely accurate. Brig. Gen. Jay Hood's internal investigation has uncovered some shocking incidents. On at least six occasions, Korans were ripped up. They were urinated on three times, and attempts were made to flush them down the toilet at least three other times.

Why aren't millions of Muslims rioting in response to these defilements? Because the perpetrators were prisoners, not guards. As John Hinderaker notes on weeklystandard.com, the most serious desecrations of the Koran at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility were committed by the Muslim inmates themselves.

You'd never know this from the news coverage, which pounced on Hood's finding of five confirmed incidents of Koran abuse as proof that Newsweek was on to something with its phony-baloney report about guards flushing a Koran down the toilet.

Far from confirming accusations of American depravity, what the report actually shows is that Guantanamo is the first gulag in history run on the principle that no sensibility of the inmates should be offended, no matter how inadvertently.