Both FoxNews.com and Fox Nation have chosen to reproduce a ridiculous NewsBusters post by Katie Yoder accusing "90 percent of the top ten ... daily newspapers" in America of insufficient Islamophobia because yesterday their front-page headlines -- not their front-page stories, mind you, just the headlines -- failed to scream "MUSLIM! MUSLIM! MUSLIM!" in response to the Nairobi mall attack.
What's strange is that this story appeared on two Fox sites despite the fact that The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post are among the papers deemed to be lacking in Muslim-hate. (Or maybe that's not so strange. Maybe Roger Ailes, or whoever is his surrogate at the Fox sites, thinks the corporate cousins have gone wobbly on the belief that Islam is implacably evil.)
From the story:
... on Monday, September 23, 90 percent of the top ten (via circulation numbers) daily newspapers' headlines in the United States censored the words "Islam" and Muslim" from Nairobi and Pakistan reports....Um, the story also includes this:
The Wall Street Journal's (WSJ) headline by Heidi Vogt announced that "Assault on Mall Stuns Kenya" and called the act a "terrorist attack" by "armed militants." In a small reference to the Pakistan Christian fatalities, the newspaper credited a group linked with the "Pakistan Taliban."
A French man eating at a tapas bar said a gunman yelled "Allahu akbar!" -- Arabic for "God is Great!" -- as he opened fire on the diners.And this:
"Their mission was to kill, not to steal," said Edwin Omoding, a 26-year-old stocker for the Nakumatt supermarket inside the mall....I'd say that constituted an acknowledgment of the Islamist nature of the attack, but I guess NewsBusters has higher standards. Go on, Ms. Yoder:
"They were questioning people, and they said, 'If you are Muslim you are on the safer side, but if you are Hindu or Christian you will be killed,'" Mr. Omoding said.
The New York Post's front page read "BLOODY RAID" and "Kenyan soldiers storm mall, save most hostages. Its Sunday cover showed a woman running with a baby above the words "Terror massacre in Kenya." ... Only inside the piece were the assailants described as "Islamist attackers” related to "Somalia's al Qaeda-linked Shebab insurgents."Oh. So -- in a newspaper known for not putting a lot of words on its front page -- it doesn't count if the reference to al-Qaeda appears on an inside page. Right. Got it.
I probably shouldn't make too much of Fox using its sites to go after other Murdoch media properties -- the M.O. at Fox often seems to be that whatever makes the audience's blood boil is worth publishing, and a headline or lede that accomplishes this is good even if the story veers off in an inappropriate direction a few paragraphs in. The rest of the story does go after such papers as The New York Times and the Chicago Sun-Times, so that fits the dominant Murdoch narrative -- evil liberal press and all that. But still, Fox reproducing an attack on the Journal and the Post seems like the media equivalent of Ted Cruz-ism.
