I'm reading Bill Bennett's Why We Fight. He notes that the media went overboard in order to be fair to Muslims and Arabs. They allowed targets of their stories to review the stories before publication.
Leave aside the telltale omission of the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, or any other gang with leftist rather than rightist credentials from the society's list of "groups with a history of [terrorist] activity." Leave aside the fastidious distancing even from conventional Western spellings of Muslim terms lest they smack of ethnocentrism. Leave aside the appeal to the American Muslim Council, a political organization with a documented history of support for terrorist groups, as if it were some objective arbiter of orthographic purity. Leave aside all that. What must be unprecendented is the spectacle of professional journalists actively soliciting supervision, even censorship, from the very objects of their journalistic investigations.I doubt a Catholic priest would ever be given an opportunity to edit any story any time soon. Posted by Bob at May 12, 2002 08:47 PM"Imagine the outcry," wrote Stephen Hayes in reporting on the Society's [Society of Professional Journalists] guidelines in the Weekly Standard, "if a newspaper editor permitted a Catholic priest to revise -- before publication -- a reporter's story about a pro-life rally. Or if a columnist called in a tobacco executive to edit an article about the hazards of smoking."