LGF’s Charles Johnson posts about what he claims is the Associated Press’ “PC Blindfold” - not mentioning Muslims or Islam in an article describing suicide bombings on Friday in Uzbekistan. The article he links to doesn’t carry the text he includes anymore, but the Yahoo!-carried story may have been updated since its original posting.
Though the story does state that the group was “allegedly linked to al-Qaida,” this doesn’t seem to be specific enough. I searched around for a good portion of the text of the article Johnson linked to, just to see if it looked different in various places. I found a few articles that seem to contain additional differences from the original, including items at the Sacramento Bee, the Moscow Times, ABC News, AZCentral.com, and others. Many of these articles do reference “Muslims” or some related terms. In fact, if you look around enough, you’ll find multiple versions of the same article - some were obviously edited for space, etc - which, if you do any basic research on how newspaper articles are put together, you’ll learn that many, many times details are put into an article that don’t make it past the editor’s desk. That’s why the “Tell them what you are going to tell them. Tell them. Tell them about what you told them.” rule is in effect when writing an article.
In a related story, the top item on the FOXNews.com website on Sunday contains exactly zero references to “Islam” or “Muslims.” The report, if you haven’t read it already, describes an announcement that the ‘chatter’ from al Qaeda seems to offer details on very specific threats towards financial institutions and buildings in the New York/New Jersey area as well as Washington, D.C. The article was put together by Kelly Wright and Anna Stolley of Fox, plus the Associated Press.
Blindfold, indeed.
