The Media Failure

In Tech Central Station, Stephen Schwartz writes:

We have reached the fourth anniversary of the terrible attacks of September 11, 2001. I am sorry to say that, in my view, the U.S. and Western media have completely failed to meet the challenge of reporting on Islam, in the four succeeding years since then, or in reaction to the atrocities that followed, including the extremist violence in Iraq, which I would not dignify with the titles “insurgency” or “resistance,” the Madrid metro and London underground bombings, and the terror assaults in Indonesia, Morocco, Turkey, and elsewhere.

On September 12, 2001, it was as if two civilizations, the Judeo-Christian and the Islamic, which had shared the planet and had contacts with one another for 14 centuries, sometimes violently, sometimes peacefully, but nearly always fruitfully, were completely unknown the one to the other. Indeed, it seemed that Muslims knew a great deal more about the West than the West knew about Muslims. To borrow a simile from the film industry: in this “war of the worlds” the Muslims may as well be “invaders from another planet,” whose beliefs, customs and habits are completely unknown and incomprehensible to Westerners.

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