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News Nanny: The Race to Censor Internet News If we don’t fight now, conservatives will vanish from the internet. Daniel Greenfield

How can you tell that internet censorship is really taking off? Easy. It’s becoming a business model.

Steven Brill is raising $6 million to launch News Guard. This new service will rate news sites on their trustworthiness from green to red. Forget politically unbiased algorithms. The ratings will be conducted by “qualified, accountable human beings” from teams of “40 to 60 journalists.” Once upon a time, journalism meant original writing. Now it means deciding which original writing to censor.

“Can trust be monetized?” The Street’s article on News Guard asks. But it isn’t really trust that’s being monetized. It’s censorship. It’s doing the dirty work that Google and Facebook don’t want to do.

The Dems and their media allies have been pressuring Google and Facebook to do something about the “fake news” that they blame for Trump’s win. The big sites outsourced the censorship to media fact checkers. The message was, “Don’t blame us, now you’re in charge.”

Facebook made a deal with ABC News and the AP, along with Politifact, FactCheck and Snopes, to outsource the censoring for $100K. When two of these left-wing groups declare that an article is fake, Facebook marks it up and viewership drops by 80%.

Facebook is reportedly considering adding the Weekly Standard to its panel of fact checkers. Even if that were to happen, it would be the difference between putting the New York Times without David Brooks or the Times with David Brooks in charge of deciding what you can read on Facebook. Adding a token conservative who is acceptable to the left doesn’t change the inherent bias of the system.

Not only does the roster of fact checkers lean to the left, but so do its notions of what’s true and false. For example, Snopes and Politifact both insist that General Pershing’s forces never buried the bodies of Muslim terrorists with pigs. But General Pershing specifically stated in his autobiography, “These Juramentado attacks were materially reduced in number by a practice that the Mohamedans held in abhorrence. The bodies were publicly buried in the same grave with a dead pig.”

Permanent Investigation: How the Media Uses the anti-Netanyahu Playbook Against Trump And how to resist it. Daniel Greenfield

The latest news from Israel’s left-wing media outlets is that Ratan Tata, an Indian billionaire, testified to the Israeli police about Prime Minister Netanyahu. The story turned out to be fake news. And that’s true of most of their anti-Netanyahu hit pieces along with the police investigations that accompany them.

But that doesn’t matter.

Americans are just now being introduced to the permanent investigation and its scandal rolodex. Israelis have been living with this Deep State assault against their democracy for much longer. Over eight long years, leftists in the judicial system and the media have manufactured a non-stop campaign of scandals and investigations against Netanyahu. The investigations and the scandals fall apart, but it doesn’t matter because there are usually several being rotated in and out from the scandal rolodex.

The scandals and investigations fall into two categories that should be familiar to Trump supporters.

Category one scandals link some random billionaire to Netanyahu through a chain of connections. The random billionaire in this case is Indian. Then there’s an Australian billionaire in Mexico, German shipbuilders and whatever part of the globe the media-judicial alliance throws a dart at next.

The fake news media in this country is following the same game plan. The latest media hit pieces target Wilbur Ross, Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, in much the same way. Indeed the Russia scandal developed out of media hit pieces that used Trump’s international network of businesses to build up very similar conspiracy theories about foreign interests and influences.

These types of scandals constantly imply corruption without ever actually proving it. But by generating a whole lot of them, they create the sense that Netanyahu or Trump must have done something wrong.

Though no one can say what, because no one can keep track of all the fake scandals.

Category two scandals are character attacks. “He’s a bad person.” Typical examples are Trump’s condolence call controversy and accusations that Netanyahu’s wife is mean to employees.

Another Terrorist Attack, Another Whitewash of Islamic Jihad Willful blindness sixteen years after 9/11. Bruce Thornton

After a Muslim immigrant from Uzbekistan murdered eight people on a bike path in New York, the usual “expert” pundits and commentators began recycling the same clichés they always use to avoid a hard, uncomfortable fact: these killings are perpetrated by Muslims who are faithfully following fourteen centuries of Islamic precept and practice.

Sixteen years after 9/11 we still don’t get the reality of Islamic jihad.

Indeed, we can’t even get simple facts straight. The NYC terrorist’s cry of Allahu Akbar, the traditional Muslim battle-cry, is consistently mistranslated. As Robert Spencer has repeatedly pointed out, the phrase does not mean “God is great,” an equivalent, as Senator John McCain has claimed, of “Thank God.” Rather, it means “Allah is greater.” Using the mistranslation obscures the triumphalist intolerance at the heart of Islam. Since the 7th century, Muslims have gone to war for the same reason Mohammed did: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah.’” Allah is “greater” because all other gods are “idols” or, as with Christians and Jews, distortions of Allah and his revelation to Mohammed. Hence jihad, the effort to “slay the infidels wherever you find them” until Islam and sharia law––practiced by the “best of nations,” as the Koran says, “raised for [the benefit of] men” –– comprise the sole legitimate political-social order for all of humanity.

Having misinterpreted the jihadist war-cry, these same commentators then try to separate the jihadist from the vanguards of modern jihadism such as ISIS. Despite his frank boasts of allegiance to ISIS, or the thousands of videos and photos on his cell phone including beheadings, or his request for an ISIS flag in his hospital room, we continue to hear that he is a “lone wolf,” a “self-radicalized” anomaly much like the Las Vegas mass murderer. Hence the progressive apologists retreat into the psychological analyses that have replaced philosophy and religion in the secular West. Rather than sacred scripture and doctrine, rather than glorious Muslim history and Koranic injunctions, now social conditions and mental derangement must account for this act.

So according to The New York Times, the Uzbek jihadist is the product of a “rootless life,” a neurotic with a “monster inside.” How could he be a Puritanical fundamentalist? He cursed, liked fancy clothes, and showed up late to mosque services. The Wall Street Journal reports that he was a homesick momma’s boy. As The New Republic put it, he is just a “desperate soul” vulnerable to the propaganda of ISIS, the latest in a string of mass murderers who suffer from a mental disorder, one weaponized by mass gun ownership, violent jingoism, and the “politics of fear.”

Hence after the attacks the widespread false analogy with the Las Vegas shooter. Mostly this trope was an excuse to bash Trump for his different responses to the attacks. But beyond that is the same assumption that only psychological dysfunction could explain why someone would brutally run-down bikers and pedestrians. Yet the falseness of the analogy is obvious: The Las Vegas shooter did not have a worldwide virtual community of like-minded believers inspiring and counseling Muslims to inflict murder and mayhem on unbelievers. He did not have a historical precedent in the long record of Islamic violence and aggression. He did not have several models for his crimes like the Muslims using vehicles for murder in London, Nice, Barcelona, Stockholm, Berlin, and Israel. He did not have a belief system in which such violence is enjoined as a command of God and a mark of righteousness. He did not shout “Thank God” as he mowed down his victims. He did not believe that his acts would turn him into a martyr destined for a life of eternal pleasure. He had no global organization eager to take credit for his deeds.

How Leftism Makes Us Stupid By Andrew Klavan

Perhaps the worst thing about having an exclusively leftist media is that it makes all of us, right and left, stupider. Take for example that media’s reaction to the latest Islamist terror attack in Manhattan. Evil loser Sayfullo Saipov follows the ISIS playbook by driving a rented van over innocent civilians, killing eight. He jumps out of the van shouting “Allahu Akbar!” (Allah is the greatest) and later tells police he’s glad about what he did and requests an ISIS flag in his hospital room. (I know just where to plant the pole.)

In reporting the event, CNN Crime and Justice reporter Shimon Prokupecz refused to share the police description of the killer after he was caught. Because he’s a journalist, and the last thing we want is to have journalists going around giving people information! CNN’s Jake Tapper responded to news of the loser’s Arabic shout by remarking inanely that Allahu Akbar is “sometimes said under the most beautiful of circumstances, and too often we hear it being said in moments like this.” He later clarified that he was referring to beautiful circumstances like weddings and births. Yeah, what if the guy had been waving a Confederate flag? They wear those at some weddings too.

The New York Times, a former newspaper, ran two separate articles trying to justify the triumphalist Islamic battle cry, one headline reading, “Allahu Akbar: An Everyday Phrase Tarnished by Attacks.” Actor James Woods responded by tweeting: “Let me yell it out at 35,000 feet while you’re eating Chicken Florentine in first class. Then hope someone knows the Heimlich Maneuver…” When I tried to quote this tweet to my wife, I laughed so hard I couldn’t get the words out.

None of which is to make fun of a tragedy, of course, but only of the absurd reaction of the leftist press. Because, being leftist, they reduce every issue to a binary choice: their way or hatred. Ignore the worldwide connection between Islam and terror or you’re a bigot. Support gay marriage or you’re a homophobe. Buy into government health care or you want people to die. Buy into affirmative action or you’re racist. And so on. In each of these cases, there are rational arguments to be made on both sides and, as President Trump pointed out when discussing iconoclasm, “some very fine people” who support those arguments.

But the left has, for the most part, abandoned rational argument altogether, not because leftism is always wrong about everything but because it is wrong and has been proven wrong on its central premise. It is now irrefutable that socialism destroys every nation it touches. Small homogenous nations that are essentially protected by American might can fool around with confiscatory taxes and massive social programs, but even they will have to privatize industry sooner or later to stay solvent. Otherwise socialism gets you Venezuela, and that’s only if you’re lucky enough not to wind up with the Soviet Union or Red China, with over 100 million human beings exterminated in the name of paradise.

And since each of the left’s arguments is being made not in support of Islam or blacks or women or anyone else, but in support of a bigger government with an eye toward ultimately achieving socialism, leftists can’t afford to accept or even hear the arguments from the other side.

Thus we end up with a press corps full of idiots: leftists too stupid to deliver the straight news about an act of Islamist terror. CONTINUE AT SITE

New York Times’ coverage of Mueller is peak liberal bias Michael Goodwin

A friend likens The New York Times to a 1960s adolescent who refuses to grow up.  In a perpetual state of outrage, it is a newspaper of college snowflakes who embrace all forms of diversity except thought.

It sees its liberal politics not as a point of view, but as received wisdom that cannot be legitimately disputed.

The fixation on conformity reached a new low last week when the paper rolled out a coordinated attack on those of us who believe special counsel Robert Mueller ought to resign. I say coordinated because the newsroom and the opinion page produced similar pieces on the same day, showing again how Executive Editor Dean Baquet has erased the barrier between news and opinion and turned every page into an opinion page.

In the Times’ view, there are only two reasons to question Mueller’s credibility: insanity or treason. And so we detractors stand accused of engaging in a conspiracy that will embolden adversaries like Russia and produce a “constitutional crisis.”

The animating impulse for the assault is obvious — the Times is locked into its mission of destroying President Trump, and, like Hillary Clinton, still cannot accept Trump’s election as legitimate.

Consider that the paper’s dozen Op-Ed columnists are all Never-Trumpers. That’s either a remarkable coincidence or a litmus test for hiring.

But the paper, following a bad habit it developed during Barack Obama’s presidency, is not content with advocating its positions. Behaving like a party propaganda outlet, it takes a coercive approach to anyone with a different view. Objections are demonized as heretical.

The reactionary tone of both pieces last week, and following ones by columnists Nicholas Kristof and Bret Stephens, carries the unavoidable assumption that Trump is guilty of colluding with Russia, and so critics of Mueller are subversives with unpatriotic aims.

Story Laundering: Fusion GPS, Fake News, Russians and Reporters The media’s real business is ‘story laundering’. November 3, 2017 Daniel Greenfield

“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Ben Rhodes gloated. “That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Rhodes, the White House’s “Obama whisperer”, was explaining how he had pulled the wool over the media’s eyes on the Iran Deal to a journalist. The media responded to the story by attacking the journalist who reported it, not Rhodes for viewing them as easily manipulated useful idiots.

The media knew that it knew nothing. And it didn’t care. It just didn’t want outsiders to know it.

What ties together the debate about Russian collusion, fake news and Fusion GPS is the implosion of the media. What were the professional reporters doing while Rhodes was manipulating the 27-year-olds? They were working at places like Fusion GPS and ‘story laundering’ narratives to the kiddies.

The media markets its investigative journalism chops even as investigative journalism no longer fits into its business model. Companies like Fusion GPS and political manipulators like Ben Rhodes step into the vacuum by covertly providing them with the core product. Much of the media is really in the business of ‘story laundering’ by rewriting talking points, smears and hit pieces from organizations like Fusion GPS.

The readers get talking points served to them without ever knowing who actually produced them. The forensic examination of the Trump dossier answered some of these questions. Hillary Clinton hired Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS hired a British former intelligence officer. And he got his material from, among other sources, a Russian intelligence officer. And they passed the material to the media and the FBI.

It took a great deal of effort, including a congressional subpoena, a national scandal and the threat of impeachment, to peel back the workings of the media and expose how the dossier sausage got made. Most packaged media stories never receive this level of scrutiny. And the media is quick to indignantly defend its lack of transparency and reliance on anonymous sources in its Trump hit pieces.

But what the current controversy really reveals is the decline and fall of the media.

The media has outsourced story generation to the shadowy underworld that produced the Trump dossier. Much as NPR outsourced its coverage of the Iran Deal to Ploughshares and the Iran Lobby in exchange for $100K. This isn’t bias in the conventional sense. It’s native advertising all the way. The media ‘rents’ space to outside interests. It rewrites their stories in the house style and runs them.

Sometimes, like NPR, there’s a financial arrangement. Other times the media gets stories that it lacks the resources and the time to generate on its own. Or access. And sometimes it’s just a political alliance.

Ferguson: A Dramatist Corrects Journalists Playwright Phelim McAleer has done a public service in depicting how all the destruction that the town rained down on itself sprang from one man’s errant decision. By Kyle Smith —

Missouri declared itself under a state of emergency on two occasions, months apart, after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., on August 9, 2014, and there were many other outbursts of violence and property destruction. All of this unrest was based on a lie started by Brown’s unreliable friend Dorian Johnson and amplified by an eager, credulous media: That Brown was unresisting, had his hands in the air and was begging not to be shot when he was killed by police officer Darren Wilson.

Sometimes it falls to a dramatist to correct journalists, and the journalist-turned-filmmaker-turned playwright Phelim McAleer has done a public service in sifting out the truth in Ferguson, a breathless 90-minute courtroom drama in which all dialogue is taken verbatim from the 25-day grand-jury proceedings that resulted in a decision not to charge Wilson. (The current production closes November 4 at the 30th Street Theatre in Manhattan but the play, which is being funded via crowdsourcing, will be restaged later in a different venue if interest is sufficient.)

Thirteen actors, some performing multiple roles, play the witnesses and the prosecutors who question them in a case everyone is aware the world is watching. Brown, routinely described in the media as an “unarmed teen,” as if the fists of an enraged 289-pound man do not constitute a threat, was under the influence of a large dose of marijuana when he and his friend Johnson were stopped by Wilson because they were walking down the double yellow line in the middle of the street. In Brown’s right hand, the officer noticed, was a box of cigarillos, which was of interest because he had just heard over the radio that a man matching Brown’s description had just robbed a small convenience store of a box of cigarillos and angrily shoved a clerk who tried to stop him.

McAleer and director Jerry Dixon begin the play, which takes place on a single set representing the grand-jury room, in an unassuming manner. Secondary witnesses describe unimportant encounters with Brown in the hours before he lost his life at noon. One laborer remarks that Brown was mentally “slow.” A cop who trained Wilson describes him as eager to work with the mostly black community and says he enjoyed buying meals for young people. The testimony of one sketchy witness, a white woman, falls apart when she says she walked through a passage that was physically blocked, and denies having read newspaper accounts of the shooting. In fact, she has posted Facebook comments beneath one such story, comments expressing such sentiments as “They need to kill the f*****g n*****s.” Another witness, a black man, has told the FBI he saw Wilson standing over the prone body of Brown pumping many bullets into his back. A prosecutor drily informs him that as he has a) given a statement inconsistent with the autopsy report and b) changed his story, he stands no chance of being invited to testify at any trial in the matter.

The Pot Calls the Kettle Black By Marilyn Penn

The Sunday Times offered a full page editorial on the subject of sexual harassment in America (Post-Weinstein, What’s Different 10/29/17) One of its paragraphs deals with How to Change the Culture and what various mega-chains like Walmart and McDonald have done to require their tomato growers to prevent harassment and assault of farmworkers. This seems a particularly odd concern considering the tenor of our mass culture that couldn’t be better illustrated than the Sunday Styles section of the Times itself.

The front page has two lead articles with accompanying photographs: “On the Street Where She Still Works” – a look at how hookers influence fashion and the arts, and “Future Sex is Here” – a look a virtual pornography. The photo accompanying the first piece is that of Maggie Gyllenhaal, star of the series “The Deuce”, wearing a ratty fur jacket over a skimpy slip. I watched five minutes of The Deuce during which Maggie was nude with flashes of her breasts and pubic hair visible to the prime time audience – undoubtedly an essential artistic element in the plot. The article about pornography printed in large font type, details the solo masturbation scene of the young actress who has been in the porn industry since her college days and takes it almost as seriously as the newspaper does, sparing us nothing including mention of her erotic electrostimulation (electrosex) I wonder whether the women in the Times workplace while the paper was being readied for printing were disturbed by this content and might be justified in considering this a form of harassment. What about the women reading it – does mainstreaming pornography not play a big part in the rapid rise of sexual assaults on young women on campus? Does the fact that the blonde porn queen started her profession from her dorm room further normalize and sanction an unsavory industry? Does its mass distribution not affect what men have come to expect from women? How many articles has the Times itself published concerning the changing mores of sexual intimacy between couples as increasing numbers of men prefer the gymnastic deviancy on their computer screens to the more humdrum activity in their beds.

One of the other paragraphs in the self-righteous editorial concerns power and money and how these combine to allow predatory men to silence women who fear for their jobs. What about publishers of a newspaper rapidly losing its subscription base, turning to the good old-fashioned lure of sensational sex to attract those readers who like to look at pictures and respond to words like “coy, flirty and dirty, sexy as hell, bondage fetishes, live X-rated performances.” Is this sort of titillation what we expect in the newspaper that pretends to object to the misdeeds of Harvey Weinstein?

The Times editorial closes with this caveat: “In the end, though, the most lasting change will have to come from men, who are doing virtually all the sexual harassing. Boys must be raised to understand why that behavior is wrong, teenagers need to be reminded of it and grown men need to pay for it until they get the message.” Will the feminists don their pussy hats and protest the elevation of prostitution and pornography to fashionable subjects of STYLE? Will women boycott a newspaper whose male management opts for these editorial decisions? Anita Hill was offended by a tasteless joke about a pubic hair on a coke bottle; what might she have said if, like the female reporter in the Times, her assignment was to write an upbeat piece headlining a woman who went into pornography, not our of financial desperation, but as her profession of choice? In all probability, Mr. Sulzberger would not have been confirmed.

Facebook, Social Media, Aiding Jihad; Censoring Those Who Counter Jihad by Benjamin Weingarten

That major technology companies are openly stifling the free speech of people trying to counter jihad is bad enough; what is beyond unconscionable is that they simultaneously enable Islamic supremacists to spread the very content that the counter-jihadists have been exposing.

According to the legal complaint, the names and symbols of Palestinian Arab terrorist groups and individuals were known to authorities, and “Facebook has the data and capability to cease providing services to [such] terrorists, but… has chosen not to do so.”

A separate lawsuit claims that Twitter not only benefits indirectly by seeing its user base swell through the increase of ISIS-linked accounts, but directly profits by placing targeted advertisements on them.

When jihadist content is permitted to spread unchecked across the globe via cyberspace, it is a matter of national and international security. Tragically for Western civilization, its tech and media icons have been colluding — even if unwittingly — with those working actively to destroy it.

For the past few years, large social media and other online companies have been seeking to restrict or even criminalize content that could be construed as critical of Islam or Muslims, including when the material simply exposes the words and actions of radical Islamists.

The recent attempt by the digital payment platform, PayPal, to forbid two conservative organizations — Jihad Watch and the American Freedom Defense Initiative — from continuing to use the service to receive donations, is a perfect case in point. Although PayPal reversed the ban, its initial move was part of an ongoing war against the free speech of counter-jihadists — those working to expose the ideology, goals, tactics and strategies of Islamic supremacists, and who are trying to defeat or at least to deter the Islamic supremacist global agenda.

Examples of this kind of censorship abound. In October 2016, for instance, conservative radio host and author Dennis Prager’s “PragerU” — which produces five-minute clips presented by leading experts in the fields of economics, politics, national security and culture — announced that more than a dozen of its videos were facing restricted access on YouTube, a subsidiary of Google. In theory, this meant that users who employed the filter for sexually explicit or violent content would be blocked from it.

Among these restricted videos however, were six relating to Islam: “What ISIS Wants,” presented by Tom Joscelyn, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; “Why Don’t Feminists Fight for Muslim Women?” presented by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute and Harvard’s Belfer Center; “Islamic Terror: What Muslim Americans Can Do,” presented by Khurram Dara, a Muslim American activist, author and attorney; “Pakistan: Can Sharia and Freedom Coexist?” and “Why Do People Become Islamic Extremists?” presented by Haroon Ullah, a foreign policy professor at Georgetown University; and “Radical Islam: The Most Dangerous Ideology,” presented by Raymond Ibrahim, author of The Al Qaeda Reader.

PragerU is not alone in having its content — presented by reputable thinkers — treated by social media companies as comparable to pornography, or similarly inappropriate or offensive material. For instance:

In January 2015, a mere two weeks after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg penned a #JeSuisCharlie statement in defense of free speech — in the wake of the Islamist terrorist attack on the Paris-based satirical journal Charlie Hebdo — Facebook censored images of the prophet Muhammad in Turkey.
In January 2016, the Facebook page “Justin Trudeau Not,” which contained content critical of the Canadian prime minister’s views on Islamic supremacism, was deleted by Facebook as a “violation of community standards.” The offense? The page’s authors “contrasted Trudeau’s immediate condemnation of a pepper spray attack against Muslims in Vancouver with his complete refusal to address a firearm attack by Muslims in Calgary.”
In May 2016, the administrator of a pro-Trump Facebook group was banned from Facebook for posting: “Donald Trump is not anti-Muslim. He is anti ISIS. What Trump is trying to say is that Homeland Security cannot differentiate which Muslim is [a] radical wanting to cause harm and which is a harmless refugee. Who is willing to sacrifice their family’s safety for the sake of political correctness? Are you?”
In June 2016, YouTube removed a video — “Killing for a Cause: Sharia Law & Civilization Jihad” — elucidating the aim of Islamic supremacists to subvert the West from within.
Also in June 2016, Facebook suspended the account of Swedish writer Ingrid Carlqvist for posting a video, produced by Gatestone Institute, on “Sweden’s Migrant Rape Epidemic.” After Gatestone readers responded critically to the censorship, the Swedish media started reporting on the case, and Facebook reinstated the video, without any explanation or apology.
In May 2017, Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of Britain First, a party “committed to the maintenance of British national sovereignty, independence and freedom,” was banned from Facebook for 30 days for “repeatedly posting things that aren’t allowed on Facebook.” The post that reportedly triggered t

The EU Lectures Journalists about PC Reporting by Bruce Bawer

Nor, we are told, should we associate “terms such as ‘Muslim’ or ‘Islam’… with particular acts,” because to do that is to “stigmatize.” What exactly does this mean? That when a man shouts “Allahu Akbar” after having gunned down, run over with a truck, or blown to bits dozens of innocent pedestrians or concertgoers, we are supposed to ignore that little detail?

But that is what this document is all about: advising reporters just how to misrepresent reality in EU-approved fashion.

It is interesting to note that while many people fulminate over President Trump’s complaints about “fake news,” they are silent when an instrument of the EU superstate presumes to tell the media exactly what kind of language should and should and should not be used when reporting on the most important issue of the day.

“Respect Words: Ethical Journalism Against Hate Speech” is a collaborative project that has been undertaken by media organizations in eight European countries – Austria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Slovenia, and Spain. Supported by the Rights and Citizenship Programme of the European Union, it seeks, according to its website, to help journalists, in this era of growing “Islamophobia,” to “rethink” the way they address “issues related to migratory processes, ethnic and religious minorities.” It sounds benign enough: “rethink.” But do not kid yourself: when these EU-funded activists call for “rethinking,” what they are really doing is endorsing self-censorship.

In September, “Respect Words” issued a 39-page document entitled Reporting on Migration & Minorities: Approach and Guidelines. Media outlets, it instructs, “should not give time or space to extremist views simply for the sake of ‘showing the other side.'” But which views count as “extremist”? The report does not say – not explicitly, anyway. “Sensationalist or overly simplistic reporting on migration,” we read, “can enflame existing societal prejudices” and thus “endanger migrants’ safety.” Again, what counts as “sensationalist” or “overly simplistic”? That is not spelled out, either. Nor, we are told, should we associate “terms such as ‘Muslim’ or ‘Islam’… with particular acts,” because to do that is to “stigmatize.” What exactly does this mean? That when a man shouts “Allahu Akbar” after having gunned down, run over with a truck, or blown to bits dozens of innocent pedestrians or concertgoers, we are supposed to ignore that little detail?

Or perhaps we should entirely avoid covering such actions? After all, the document exhorts us not to write too much about “sensationalist incidents involving migrants,” as “[v]iolent individuals are found within every large group of people.” If, however, we do feel compelled to cover such incidents, we must never cease to recall that the “root causes” of these incidents “often have nothing to do with a person’s ethnicity or religious affiliation.” What, then, are those root causes? The report advises us that they include “colonialism, racism, [and] general social inequality.” Do not forget, as well, that there is “no structural connection between migration and terrorism.”