L.A. Times Story Mis-covers Muslims

By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet. Posted December 24, 2003.

A humbling experience any journalist should have to suffer is to be part of a story rather than its observer, because it is a wonderful reminder that "the first draft of history" is indeed just that. As with the parable of the blind men and the elephant, the reproduced sketch of reality will sound remarkably different depending upon whether the reporter grabbed the tail, the trunk or the ear.

Usually, varying interpretations and often minor mistakes are the result of earnest attempts to do the job under the serious time and financial restraints most journalists work under. There are times, however, and far too many of them, when reporting seems to be so sloppy that one must question either the reporter's professional ethics or the publishing institution's unacknowledged biases.

Such was the case on Sunday, in a mild little article in the Los Angeles Times entitled "Muslims Ponder Postwar Iraq," which surely garnered little attention from both that newspaper's huge readership or its editors. While holding no hint of libel or slander, and having no glaring factual errors that I can see, the piece is a clear if subtle example of how reportorial laziness or bias can give consumers of media a picture so misleading that one would be better off not reading it at all.

"With Saddam Hussein's whereabouts no longer in question following his highly publicized capture, hundreds of Muslim Americans spent Saturday pondering another puzzle: How will democracy take shape in postwar Iraq?" reads the lead paragraph of Times Staff Writer Julie Tamaki's article. "The topic was one of more than a dozen up for discussion at the annual convention of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which promotes the idea of an American Muslim identity. The weekend conference, 'Progressive Islamic Thought and Human Rights,' was expected to draw more than 1,500 people to the Long Beach Convention Center."

So far, so good. It's nice, after all, that the Times felt it worthwhile to send a reporter to an event advertised as both politically progressive and religiously Muslim, since neither of those interest groups gets much play in its pages. However, the depth of the Times' commitment to the story becomes clear once we realize that Tamaki apparently spent very little time at the two-day conference -- perhaps no more than an hour.

How do we know this just by reading the 428-word story? Well, because the entire story is about a one-hour "working lunch" panel on Iraq, and everybody quoted in the story is from that panel, with the exception of one innocuous comment from the organizing group's executive director about the convention in general. And the vague language of the article -- "scheduled workshops included …", "was expected to draw…" -- make it clear that she relied heavily on the convention's press release to fill it out.

OK, so the reporter did some drive-by reporting. Big deal, right? Wrong, because the one panel featured in the story was not at all representative of the convention, which I attended as a panelist and guest. By quoting only its outspoken participants, the story gives us the completely false impression that most of those attending likely support the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Nowhere does the Times report that for many, the panel's speakers were oddly out-of-step with much, if not most, of the audience -- and the convention's other speakers, which included Colgate Prof. Omid Safi, editor of "Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism"; legendary anti-war and human rights activist Blase Bonpane; Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman, who showed a video which graphically displayed the censorship of images of war and occupation seen by the rest of the world's media, even on CNN International; and even the Times own columnist (and my father) Robert Scheer, who received a standing ovation for his aggressively anti-occupation keynote address.

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