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| The Riots of the Faithful |
| 05.23.05 (8:01 am) [edit] |
|
by Orson Scott Card So Newsweek prints an uncorroborated allegation about American interrogators flushing Qurans down the toilet in order to get fanatical Muslim prisoners to talk, and there’s rioting and death all over the Muslim world. There are several lessons to be learned from this incident, some trivial, some quite important. 1. The courts have given the news media carte blanche, in the name of the First Amendment – but the media are no better than government at exercising unchecked power. When it’s known that no one can punish you, a certain kind of person stops caring whether he hurts anybody. And such people tend to rise within any organization that doesn’t work hard to have a conscience. Personally, I think there should be legal consequences for editors and publishers and reporters so abysmally selfish and stupid that they would run with a story that they knew would provoke outrage in Muslim lands, without first making sure it was true. I’m not talking about prior restraint, which would be unconstitutional. I’m talking about consequences after the fact. In this case, formal libel and slander laws wouldn’t have much effect, because who has standing to sue? (Though we need to restore a reasonable standard of libel and slander, even for public figures; being famous shouldn’t mean that other people have no obligation to tell the truth about you.) I’m talking about informal consequence, like Newsweek’s correspondents being frozen out of news stories. Being banned from the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department for at least a year. But if any administration did such a thing, all of the media would unite to crucify them. So all that’s left would be a clean personnel sweep of everyone involved in publishing a false story that leads to needless deaths. But it’ll never happen. Maybe some token person, after a lengthy “internal investigation” (i.e., cover-up; after all, we know just how thorough Newsweek’s investigations are), will be ... fired? Naw. Reassigned. So all that’s left is for the public to punish the offenders by ceasing to buy their publication. But that won’t work because 15 minutes after the story, the American people have forgotten it. So Newsweek kills people with a false story that is actually a lie (unlike anything President Bush ever said about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction), and nothing happens to the perpetrators. 2. Too many people in the “American” media have lost any concept of loyalty to their country – if they even consider it their country, rather than just their residence. Yeah, that’s right, I’m playing the “patriotism” card. But not the way you think. Our country is at war. And it’s a war in which victory absolutely depends on the Muslim world perceiving it as a war between the US and its allies on one side, and fanatical murderous terrorists on the other. If it is ever perceived as a war against Islam, then we have lost. The world has lost. So during such a difficult time, even people who think the Iraq war or even the whole war on terror is a horrible mistake still have an obligation of loyalty to the nation that offers them protection, prosperity and freedom. I mean, what kind of idiot breaks a hole in the hull of his boat during a storm, just because he doesn’t like the guy at the tiller and thinks the storm could have been avoided? OSC is one of the most insightful writers of our time. I became aware of him years ago when I read Ender's Game. I recommend him highly. Go read the rest. No finger pointing, simply calm, sound reasoning. http://greensboro.rhinotimes.com/story.html?id=684" title="http://greensboro.rhinotimes.com/story.html?id=684" target="_blank"http://greensboro.rhinotimes.... |
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