“RED” Ken Livingstone has been caught out. His PC Brigade have brought out a report on just how beastly our media are to Muslims – only for it to be torn to shreds by a left-leaning journalist for its dodgy methodology.
According to a no-holds-barred article in Spiked, Ken (pictured below) and his cohorts have “crossed a line normally only transgressed by despots”.
“Strip away all the PC lingo about ‘protecting Muslims’, and the London mayor’s latest initiative comes across as an intolerable attack on press freedom,” writes the article’s author, Brendon O’Neill. “Livingstone argues,” O’Neill says,
”that there is an increasingly ‘negative portrayal of Muslims and Islam in the media’, which is helping to ‘[sow] divisions among London’s diverse communities’.” He continues,
Elsewhere, the report argues that such coverage means “Muslims understandably feel vulnerable to hate crimes and unlawful discrimination”; indeed, the “drip-drip-drip” repetition of “abusive and emotive language” about Muslims could lead to “more hate crimes and acts of discrimination than otherwise” (p. 128). In short, the media’s irresponsible coverage of Muslim issues is a threat to social cohesion and a potential harbinger of violence.
However, says O’Neill, Ken and Co. are using “questionable, one might even say dodgy methodology to show that the media are continually ‘abusing’ Muslims”.
He goes on to show how the authors of the report – titled “The Search for Common Ground: Muslims, Non-Muslims and the UK Media” – took what they decided would be a typical week, and then produced their “What the Papers Say”, purporting to show how many more negative than positive stories there were featuring Muslims.
But that “typical” week was the week that the report into the 7/7 London bombings came out, a week that was likely to see more negative than positive stories concerning Islam. There were also stories that were just plain irrelevant to such a study. Read the article – it’s worth studying.
We’ve known for some time that Ken likes to butter up his more unsavoury Muslim friends, instanced by his courting of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the man who thinks it’s OK to kill gays and who defends Palestinian suicide bombers (see this Telegraph story from 2004) – a courtship that has caused no little controversy, even among left-wingers.
In planning their trawl of the Fourth Estate, the researchers used a number of key words: Islam, Muslim, Sunni and Shia (we thought they’d split up after “I Got You, Babe”), radical, fundamentalist, extremist. With those last three words, is it any surprise that there will be a bias towards “negative” stories?
“In other words,” writes O’Neill, “even an article about an ‘extremist’ online al-Qaeda sympathiser, say, could be selected as a negative story about Muslims, even if it did not say anything about his religious identity.”
So, an unbiased report from City Hall, then.
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
November 24th, 2007 at 10:33 am
While that ius true I do however note that most of the articles I read in sites like yours (and Pagan Prattle - another good rerad) which concern muslim lunacy I have already come across in the ‘mainstream’ media, whilst those about the fundie christians are more often ignored. So maybe there is a little truth in the idea? I would also doubt Mt O’Neill’s motives. I’ve read some of his stuff and he often makes Jeremy Clarkson sound rational.