An Insightful Voice from the Field of Journalism
American “influencers” are a very clever breed. From the Ivy Leaguers, neocolonialists and billionaire caste to the Beck, Joe-Blow, and hangers-on caste—these influencers spend a lifetime formulating alphabetical listings of “bogeyman” (bogeyman according to their convenient definitions of bogeyman). And, in the public sphere, they declare their creation “terrorist.”
These clever influencers manufacture meanings for dictionaries and weave subliminal messages into audio, visual and textual environments tailor made for mass media and school curricula, from children’s basic readers to motion picture scripts and images. Theirs is a singular “us-them” - “we good-they bad” (white hat-black hat) narrative and indoctrination intended particularly to warp the minds of generations of the citizenry of the United States of America.
In contemporary times, United States loose talkers and a variety of personalities loosed on the public airwaves and the World Wide Web shout to the rooftops when US police or government investigative agencies “politicize” laws enforcement. But these conveniently “outraged” personalities are strangely silent when these agencies and critical sectors of the public leap to predetermined conclusions affecting other people and groups.
Leading media headlines in the New Year is an example of prejudicial mischaracterizing of crimes (whether at home or abroad). Hearing of two incidents on US soil (one in New Orleans, one in Las Vegas, both involving US military personnel or US military-trained individuals who had gone through a North Carolina military installation), US influencers, right out of the gate (so to speak), attempted to wrap the situations in their convenient alphabetical imaging and “terrorist” language.
- No need to investigate the happenings.
- No need for due diligence on the part of public officials, public figures, or journalists.
- Just slap on a label, let it go viral on the World Wide Web; and go on home to supper with the family, TV watching, or betting on sports team.
- Who cares about the people who have been slandered by the contrived alphabetical / “terrorist” labeling?
- Who cares about American immigrants?
- Who cares about international relations between and among peoples and cultures?
Not these American influencers and their “followers.”
In the current period of mass hysteria and deliberate misrepresentation, one international journalist broke through, and pleaded the case for due diligence. She is Soraya Salam, an international journalist, who “has directed documentaries and produced interviews with some of the world’s most prominent political players and thinkers. She is currently manager and overseer of Al Jazeera English Online (and aljazeera.com), engaged in managing news reporting teams working in major cities of Qatar, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, and the United States of America.
“In the Louisiana city of New Orleans, the new year began with a horrible tragedy after a man ploughed his truck into a crowd of revelers in the early hours of January 1, killing at least 15 people and wounding dozens of others,” Soraya Salam reports. The suspect (dead at the scene) in the New Orleans incident “was not an impressionable youth but a middle-aged military veteran with significant life experience and a lot of baggage.” And though the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and current US president have said publicly “that the attacker (dead suspect) was ‘inspired’ by (alphabet) ‘ISIL’” and the FBI almost immediately began “treating the incident as ‘an act of terrorism’”—neither the US president nor the FBI revealed “the full extent” of the FBI’s “evidence.”In the early days of this tragedy, media entities in the US-led collective west “seem to be choosing the easy path, … following a well-tested formula when covering this tragic story…, a narrative (that) conveniently ignores the complexity of (the dead suspect’s) circumstances and (that) sidesteps deeper questions about his mental state, his time serving in Afghanistan and the personal crises he faced.”
Soraya Salam poses the question
“How do we, as journalists, extrapolate our reporting from official statements versus the broader context of facts?”“For all we know,” she writes, the dead suspect “may have been ‘radicalised’ by what he experienced during his time in the US military…. We just don’t know enough yet. What we do know is that we should be asking more questions.”
In this insightful January 2, 2025, editorial, well worth reading in full, Soraya Salam concludes:
“As journalists, we know that the process of reporting developing stories is a journey. First, we break the story with the few facts we know, often relying on official lines because that’s all we have at the time. This is an understandable and necessary first step. But as more information comes to light, it is our responsibility to avoid oversimplifying what is often a complex and multilayered story.”Narrowly drawn narrative-driven coverage, however, negatively affects the lives of many people. Moreover, journalists “owe it to the families of the victims to uncover and report the whole truth of what happened that day. They deserve to know the real motives of the attacker and whether anything could have been done to prevent the tragedy.”
“… None of this is to say we should ignore potential evidence of something bigger at play here.” The key is “discernment,” Soraya Salam says. Going forward in reporting on this tragedy, she concludes, “let us centre the facts and the context necessary to paint the most accurate and responsible picture.” Salam, Soraya Al Jazeera Editorial January 2, 2025 “Do not fall for simplistic portrayals of the New Orleans attacker” “We owe it to the public, the victims and marginalised communities to report responsibly and challenge official narratives when necessary.” https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/1/2/do-not-fall-for-simplistic-portrayals-of-the-new-orleans-attacker
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PROLIFIC SOUTHERN-BORN AMERICAN WRITER DR. CAROLYN LADELLE BENNETT focuses on People, Press, Politics USA; Domestic and Foreign Affairs (no copyright claimed in direct quotes and individual image)
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