Lemmings or sheep... they report, you decide.

I attended a luncheon this week and the topic of discussion was the Islamic Center in NY. I had recently written about the subject, so I was eager to hear what others had to say. The speaker was Peter White, the eminent founder of The Southern Center for International Studies. Peter is a New Yorker, from the Bronx originally, and his take about the Center was, to paraphrase, “What's the big deal?” It is not at ground zero and there are thousands of Muslims who live and work in the area now.

He rather quickly went to questions and answers and the topic of the threat to burn the Koran came up. I asked about the media's role in that controversy. White mentioned that you can't expect the line level show producers to resist covering such things and that upper management, “Mr. Murdoch,” among others, needed to set the ground work for how these things should be covered, in a more responsible way.

“Censorship!” a woman in attendance shouted. “I went to journalism school and that is censorship.”

Would it be?

Of course not. The media do not report everything that they hear, nor every picture or piece of video that they have available; far from it. People who work in network newsrooms see the images available for air, beheadings on tape, US soldiers who were obviously bound and executed, children with their feet hanging by a thread being wheeled into a hospital after a bombing, it is a constant flood of horror that is, as many say, left on the cutting room floor.

I had a lesson in January 1987 when a national desk (domestic US) press conference was coming in while I, a CNN International Editor at the time, was taking in feeds from London. I first noticed the audio reaction from the press in that other news conference, which was to my left. It did not seem like a usual sound for such an event, the sighing and slight moaning from the press. Something uncomfortable was coming in on that monitor. Then the man on the screen, Robert “Budd” Dwyer, who said he had been framed when he was convicted of having taken a bribe, was handing envelopes to his staffers, one to each of three or so. Something serious was about to happen and the attention of everyone in the feeds area was on that screen. This was striking behavior. Then from another envelope, he pulled out a .357 magnum revolver, right there on a live feed into our newsroom, put it in his mouth and fired. We were stunned. The woman sitting to my left screamed. Bob Furnad, Senior Executive Producer, was there immediately, “Put a hold on that tape! Not to be aired! You got me?”

Was that censorship?

There are rules about “broadcast” news. We don't report suicides and we don't report bomb threats, for example. This is not censorship. Every day, the river of video that comes through network newsrooms are filled with images that cannot go on the air in America.

Many of you have experienced another reality in the images allowed in your homeland, those other than the US. When children are wounded in battle, they are shown on the air there, but not in America.

There are more subtle choices to make, not so much too gory, but perhaps insensitive. An example is a case, that happened early in my career in south Florida, of a mother, coming back to her apartment complex where her daughter had been shot and killed. Video comes in that shows her entire reaction, fighting with the police to get to the body, which they don't allow, her falling to her knees sobbing, wailing in Spanish. Her daughter had walked around the corner of their building and someone was shooting at someone else in the front yard and she was hit and killed instantly. How much of the mother's grief do you show?

What is your motivation? Some of us think that one should see that. This little girl is not just another number and an increase of a body count, she is someone's little girl. Others think that this is very personal and should not be aired. “What if it was you on the video?” Then there are those who see the ratings potential of using the video to tease their newscast, in promos before the show, then throughout. “Can we get a live shot from the neighborhood, at 11pm?”

In Los Angeles in the late 80s, a meeting was held at KTLA-TV, among all the stations. The topic was whether drive-by gang killings were actually happening because we were covering them on TV news. The idea was that gang-bangers would kill someone and then go watch the 11pm news. It was agreed that they would cooperatively not cover them. The shootings dropped off immediately. Cooperative responsibility can occur even in this market-driven media madness.

Television news is not a conduit, a free flow of whatever happens out there. That is why they call them Editors. They are supposed to make judgements about the impact of a story that is reported. Bomb scares encourage copy cats. Suicides prompt depressed people to go ahead and kill themselves. Koran burning threats incite violence world-wide. This pastor of 30 in Gainesville, a town I love, in which I spent my college years, should not get 15, not even one minute of fame for his rantings. If the local media want to cover it, that is fine, but for all the networks to dispatch reporters and crews to provide round the clock coverage is just plain irresponsible.

Ground Zero Wedge Issue

He disembarked carrying everything he owned. The morning chill was not alien to him, though the humidity of this more southerly and coastal land made the cold that much more biting. He had been on deck for several hours waiting for the dawn and was glad to be moving down the gangplank. As his right foot touched the stone on the wharf, he sighed heavily and tears welled instantly. A shove from behind and he moved on, into a cue where his papers were examined. It was February, 1735 and the port was Savannah, in the new colony of Georgia. Frederick Wilhelm Mueller, a clockmaker from Franconia, Germany, had completed the journey from the other side of the ocean, one of thousands escaping the persecution brought on because of their Protestantism. They had been invited by King George II of England, himself a German Lutheran, who offered these Germanic immigrants, known collectively as the Salzburgers, a refuge, a place where they could practice their minority religion without interference. They were greeted at the port by James Edward Oglethorpe, the founder of the Georgia Colony.

This is one story of the origins of America. It had already been repeated for more than a hundred years and is still going on today. Mueller's story is particularly interesting to me because one of his descendants, Louisa Miller, married my great-grandfather, himself an immigrant escaping ethnic cleansing of Gaels in Sutherland, Scotland.

In recent decades, a group that has been pouring into America are moderate Muslims, escaping oppressive governments, both secular and, more pertinent to this story, radically religious. But, upon arrival, the “leader of the colony” is not greeting them at the port. It seems that many Americans are acting just as those who drove their forebears from their homes.

These new oppressors are holding up poll numbers, from among their own ranks, and as in 1730s Salzburg, where Count Leopold von Firmian, the Prince and Catholic Archbishop forced twenty-thousand protestants out, they are demanding that the majority determine the ability of the minority to practice their religion as they choose, on private property no less.

The people who are pointing to the polls, in most cases are both the same people who recently have said that polls should not determine policy and the same people who have recently been hearkening back to our founding fathers, of course, only when the founders' words fit their argument.

We are blessed in this country still, though, because we are able to openly discuss such issues as the “Ground Zero Mosque,” which by the way is neither a Mosque, nor at ground zero. It is to be called Cordoba House. The name was chosen because in the city of Cordoba, Spain, Muslims, Jews and Christians once co-existed and thrived. Yes, the Muslims were in power, having vanquished the Visigoths who had brutally ruled Iberia, and, yes, the Jews and Christians had some restrictions on them, but their co-existence and cooperation led to incredible advances in civilization. No one is telling Muslims that they will be able, for instance, to practice all of their beliefs, in terms of Sharia law, but as in medieval Cordoba coexistence can lead to wonderful advances. For these poll watchers though, understanding and using the community center's actual name would blow the opportunity to create a wedge issue that could impact elections. That is what is going on here. Issues such as Same Sex Marriage amendments have already been used twice and as some powerful people have said in the past: “...fool me, … you can' t get fooled again?” When one day after an election there is not one word about the wedge du jour, even the least informed voters know that they have been hoodwinked. Or, do they.

Recently, such comparisons as Newt Gingrich's equating Cordoba House to Nazis building a center near the holocaust museum are eating up the airways. The phrase “Ground Zero Mosque” itself is part of the campaign and is used by virtually all media.
The group Think Progress reported recently that Laura Ingraham, a FOX News contributor, who often sits in as show host, as recently as last December publicly supported the idea of Cordoba House, saying, “I like what you are trying to do” when interviewing Daisy Kahn, the wife of the Imam who is leading the project. At that time it was, as Kahn said, “a blow to the extremists,” but in August, Ingraham, who is promoting a book, said that building Cordoba House means “the terrorists have won.”

Khan's husband, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has recently been vilified in this new wedge campaign.

What his accusers are ignoring is that the Bush Administration's Justice Department brought Rauf in to help them deal with the Muslim community and he repeated his oft-spoken observation, “Islamic extremism for the majority of Muslims is an oxymoron. It is a fundamental contradiction in terms.”

You would never know about the Imam's moderate views though lately, as Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and consequently millions of others reading from the same script quote the Imam in 2001 saying that “The United States' policies were an accessory to the crime that happened because we have been an accessory to a lot of innocent lives dying in the world. In fact, in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA!” Of course, as comedian Jon Stewart pointed out, Beck himself, just in April, with his chalkboard in tow, said, “Were we in bed with dictators and abandoned our values and principles? Yes. That causes problems.”

I point out the pundits' inconsistencies to make the point that the current furor over Cordoba House is fabricated. It is a trumped up wedge issue and it is having an impact.

Recently Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, running neck and neck with a Tea Party candidate in Nevada, gave in to the wedge, advising against Cordoba House's location. Fool me four times. Shameful.

This story is a moving target, as more reactions create more issues. The Anti-Defamation League has weighed in, opposing Cordoba House, a complete 180-degree turn from their mission statement of protecting freedom of religion. And now the Archbishop of New York's Catholic Church, Timothy Dolan has expressed a desire to help mediate with the preconceived opinion that it should be built elsewhere. These two reactions, as with many others, show a complete lack of understanding of Cordoba House. It is supposed to be a “blow to the terrorists” to show that America is tolerant of Islam, just not the terrorist's bastardized version. Now that these groups have weighed in, there can be no decision but to build it where it is planned. Otherwise, the radicals will be able to tell their supporters and those in the Muslim world who are not quite sure where to stand that Christians and Jews in America control whether, how and where Muslims can pray.

As Americans we should be promoting such institutions that bring us together, increase understanding and promote the true meaning of this shining light in which we live. For me, it is for that clockmaker, Herr Mueller, whose grandchildren suffered in our revolution as their town, Ebeneezer, GA was used for English cannon practice. The commander in chief of that revolt, George Washington, would later write “May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy.” Insh'allah.