A much better story for the pornographic lens of the MSM
We can’t watch the news anymore, even the cable news. Right now it seems to be all Duke Lacrosse, all the time. The story is a little bit interesting, and we are pretty outraged at the fraudulent elements it appears to contain, but there is a limited amount you can say about it. The MSM’s coverage is not pornographic because it is a rape case, but because of the sleazy and inappropriate intensity the MSM bring to everything from bus crashes to tornadoes to poor Natalee Holloway. Meanwhile the TV news media ignore similar stories with much more to offer, including outstanding visuals, multiple story angles, a heroine of amazing courage (below, left), death threats, mad mullahs (below, right), and political intrigue:
The story has some really bad guys (below, left), an exotic locale (below, right) and terrible injustice in a close US ally, for some jolly Bush-bashing. Who wouldn’t want to see Katie Couric or Anderson Cooper doing a stand up in dusty, impoverished streets; they stand out in hurricanes after all:
The story is filled with human interest, cruel injustice, misogynists galore, political and religious angles, strange customs of exotic peoples, and probably some locals who can be made to ask for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation on camera. And yet, the story was barely covered at all, and the satellite trucks never lined the streets of Meerwala next to the donkey carts.
Some of you have probably guessed that this was the story of Mukhtar Mai, whose gang rape was court-ordered by her town council, including the local clerics. It is not that she has been completely ignored by the media. Here are articles from MSNBC and TIME and Der Spiegel on the injustices perpetrated on a woman now likened to Dr. Martin Luther King. Nick Kristof had a piece the other day that highlighted the current drama of her story and an intriguing US angle, since close associates of US-ally Pakistan’s president are threatening to have her killed:
The threats have come from high up. Brig. Ijaz Shah, a buddy of President Musharraf’s, traveled to Lahore in December to deliver a personal warning. He met Dr. Amna Buttar, an American citizen who has interpreted for Mukhtar in the U.S. and heads a Pakistani-American human rights organization that is supporting her (www.4anaa.org).
According to Dr. Buttar, Mr. Shah started by defending the president’s record on women’s rights. But then, alluding to a planned visit by Mukhtar to New York, he added: “We can do anything. … We can just pay a little money to some black guys in New York and get people killed there.”
That’s right. The racism is the least of it: one of President Musharraf’s closest aides was warning that unless Mukhtar piped down, the government of Pakistan might murder her and her American interpreter on the streets of New York.
Wow. What a blockbuster story! An attractive young woman of remarkable courage, serially attacked by brutal men and her own court system, and under death threat from racist buddies of George Bush. Stop the presses! Get the klieg lights on this woman 24/7!
And yet there are no lights, no cameras, no well-coiffed anchors, no talking heads doing the Mukhtar Mai saga around the clock, even though it is in so many ways a much more compelling story than the MSM’s current obsession. What explains the hyper-interest in the one story and the near total lack of interest in the other? Is it the laziness of the TV MSM? Is it the outstanding hotels near Duke? Is it the ease of rehashing the hackneyed story line of American racism with the usual camera-ready spokesmen? Is it the three-fer angle of poor black woman and rich white boys? Is it that the MSM are so debased that they favor a hooker over a woman of courage and virtue? Is it because the MSM are afraid angry Muslims will attack them if they are critical of Islamic laws? Sadly, it is undoubtedly all of the above.
We seem to have reached the point in America where scripted soap operas are more interesting and ennobling than the soap opera of TV news. Of course the gutter snipes of the MSM wouldn’t be doing Duke Lacrosse if people refused to watch it. We advise you to change the channel, or, if the issues raised by the case are interesting to you, do a little light reading instead.