Coverage of Koran Case Stirs Questions on Media Role
Steve Johnson/European Pressphoto Agency
News media coverage of plans by Terry Jones to hold a Koran burning grew over the summeE
But plans for a similar stunt by another fringe pastor, Terry Jones, have garnered worldwide news media attention this summer, attention that peaked Thursday when he announced he was canceling — and later, that he had only “suspended” — what he had dubbed International Burn a Koran Day. It had been scheduled for Saturday, the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Unlike the Koran-burning by Westboro Baptist, Mr. Jones’s planned event in Gainesville, Fla., coincided with the controversy over the proposed building of a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan near ground zero and a simmering summerlong debate about the freedoms of speech and religion.Mr. Jones was able to put himself at the center of those issues by using the news lull of summer and the demands of a 24-hour news cycle to promote his anti-Islam cause. He said he consented to more than 150 interview requests in July and August, each time expressing his extremist views about Islam and Sharia law.
By the middle of this week, the planned Koran burning was the lead story on some network newscasts, and topic No. 1 on cable news — an extraordinary amount of attention for a marginal figure with a very small following. On Thursday, President Obamacondemned Mr. Jones’s plan, and his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said that there were “more people at his press conferences than listen to his sermons,” in a bit of media criticism.
Mr. Jones’s plan, announced in July, slowly gained attention in August, particularly overseas. It became a top story in the United States this week after protests against Mr. Jones in Afghanistan and after the commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, warned that the Koran burning could endanger troops.
“Before there were riots and heads of states talking about him, it could have been a couple of paragraphs in a story about Sept. 11 commemorations,” Kathleen Carroll, the executive editor of The Associated Press, said Thursday. “It’s beyond that now.”
In some ways, this week’s events were the culmination of a year’s worth of hateful statements and stunts by Mr. Jones and the few dozen members of his church.
Mr. Jones started to make noise in Gainesville in the summer of 2009, when he posted a sign outside his church that read “Islam is of the devil.” The Gainesville Sun (which is owned by The New York Times Company) wrote about the sign, under the headline “Anti-Islam church sign stirs up community outrage.”
He told The Sun that the sign would not be his last.
The newspaper soon published an investigation into what it called the church’s “financial abuses,” which included a profit-making eBay furniture sales business operating on the church’s property.
The congregation’s protests continued last fall, when some children from the church wore anti-Islam shirts to school, prompting another article by The Sun, which was picked up by The Associated Press and republished by outlets like USA Today and Al Arabiya, an Arabic language news network.
People with the same anti-Islam shirts sometimes roamed the University of Floridacampus in Gainesville, said Fiona Mc Laughlin, a professor at the university, prompting a counterprotest with T-shirts that read, “Ignorance is of the devil.”
The church “never really rested after that first billboard,” said Jacki Levine, the managing editor of The Sun. She said the newspaper’s staff members had repeatedly discussed how to be “responsible” in its coverage — “We walked as carefully as we could walk.”
Islam was not Mr. Jones’s only target. Church members also held protests against Craig Lowe, an openly gay man who was elected mayor of Gainesville in April.
Mr. Jones’s announcement about the Koran burning gained only a little attention at first, with a single short article published by a Web site called Religion News Service. That article was subsequently mentioned by bigger sites, like Yahoo, and by the end of the July Mr. Jones had been booked on CNN, where the host Rick Sanchez called his plan “crazy” but added, “At least he has got the guts to come on this show and face off.”
Alarmed by negative mentions about Gainesville in overseas news outlets, Mr. Lowe released a statement Aug. 3 labeling Mr. Jones’s church a “tiny fringe group and an embarrassment to our community.”
News executives said the proposed burning took on a greater significance after the protests in Afghanistan and in other Muslim countries. In Kabul last Sunday, up to 500 people attended a protest at which Mr. Jones was burned in effigy, according to The A.P.
That, too, is when Ms. Mc Laughlin took notice. With 11 other professors, she wrote a column for The Sun condemning the plan titled “The world is watching.”
“We just saw everything escalating,” she said Thursday, citing the “sum effect” of all the coverage and the ensuing reactions. (The New York Times wrote a substantial article about Mr. Jones on August 26.)
On Thursday, before Mr. Jones suspended his plans, The A.P. determined that it would not distribute pictures of Korans being burned, restating a policy not to cover events that are “gratuitously manufactured to provoke and offend.”
“There are lots of other similarly offensive images that we choose not to run all the time,” Ms. Carroll said. “Most people don’t know that because, of course, we don’t run them.”
Before the suspension, CNN and Fox News Channel said they would not show any images of a Koran being burned.
Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, said in an e-mail message that the newspaper had “no policy against publishing things that might offend someone — lots of people are offended by lots of things — but we try to refrain from giving widespread offense unless there is some offsetting journalistic purpose.”
“A picture of a burning book contributes nothing substantial to a story about book-burning, so the offense seems entirely gratuitous,” Mr. Keller continued. “The freedom to publish includes the freedom not to publish.”
The episode has given rise to at least a little soul-searching within news organizations. Chris Cuomo, an ABC News anchor, wrote Thursday afternoon on Twitter, “I am in the media, but think media gave life to this Florida burning ... and that was reckless.”
Steve Johnson/European Pressphoto Agency
News media coverage of plans by Terry Jones to hold a Koran burning grew over the summeE
Terry Jones statement in full
US pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, has called off his controversial Koran-burning event.
Here is his statement in full:
"This has been for us a very, very difficult, trying time. We have been in much thought and prayer over this whole period.
A lot of times we were asked what would it take for us to call this thing off. We have thought it over many times. We felt very convinced that we should do this.
We thought about what would have to happen for us to call our event off. As we prayed about that, in the past we did have one idea.
This idea we put out in prayer to God. That if he would want us to call this off, if we have accomplished our goal, then our thought was the American people do not as a whole want the mosque at the Ground Zero location.
That if they were willing to either cancel the mosque at the Ground Zero location, or if they were willing to move it away from that location, we would consider that sign from God.
We have, or he has [indicating Iman Muhammad Musri, standing beside him], been in contact with the imam in New York City.
I, with the imam here, will be flying up there on Saturday to meet the imam at the Ground Zero mosque.
He has agreed to move the location. That of course cannot happen overnight. But he has agreed to move that.
We felt that that would be a sign that God would want us to do it.
The American people do not want the mosque there. And of course Muslims do not want us to burn the Koran.
The imam has agreed to move the mosque. We have agreed to cancel our event on Saturday. And on Saturday I will be flying up there to meet with him."
(source:bbc)
Terry Jones won't be the last Qur'an burning publicity hound
Terry Jones outplayed the US media with his plan to burn the Qur'an. But the media may not fall for a similar nutcase
Terry Jones, the swivel-eyed pastor who attracted worldwide notoriety for his threat to burn the Qur'an on the anniversary of September 11, may or may not have a deal. But let's hope he has burst the Qur'an-burning bubble for the rest of America.
Based on his bizarre press conference on Thursday, Jones thinks he struck an agreement to move the site of the Park 51 Muslim cultural centre and mosque away from its current location, which is not very close to the site of the World Trade Centre in New York City.
Latest reports suggest that no such thing was agreed but that won't matter to Jones. This way he gets to save face, extend his 15 minutes of fame a little longer, all without actually burning any Qur'ans. No doubt he'll rail against Muslim perfidy when the mosque doesn't move – but so what?
Jones's threats will be subject to the law of diminishing returns. Next time he threatens to do burn a Qur'an – and I fear there will be a next time – he'll be handled with much more caution by the US media, which has made itself look ridiculous in being outfoxed by the crackpot pastor of a miniscule church in the swamps of Florida.
The most significant news yesterday, prior to Jones's decision to scrap the burning, came from Fox News. The Baltimore Sun's TV critic David Zurawik asked the cable news network if it would show the Qur'an burning. Michael Clemente, senior vice president at Fox News, said it would not cover it, either live, in video or still photography, adding:
"He's one guy in the middle of the woods with 50 people in his congregation who's decided to try, I gather, to bring some attention to himself."
CNN also said it wouldn't show any images of the Qur'an being burned. Then the Associated Press set out some strict guidelines for its staff, stating in an internal memo: "Should the event happen on Saturday, the AP will not distribute images or audio that specifically show Qurans being burned, and will not provide detailed text descriptions of the burning."
Then NBC announced it would film the event but not show live coverage, and decide later on what footage it would use.
All in all, an outbreak of common sense.
By now, though, every crackpot and lunatic in America will have seen Jones's success and be ready to ape it. But their very craziness may be their undoing.
One such group that says it plans to burn some Qur'ans is the Westboro Baptist Church of Kansas, easily the most hated church in America. For whatever insane doctrinal reasons, the tiny WBC protests outside funerals of US soldiers killed in battle, holding signs saying "God hates fags". They did the same thing at the funeral of former president Gerald Ford. Where ever one or two TV cameras are gathered together, so the WBC will be among them.
These days the WBC's antics get no coverage. In fact, in announcing it was to burn Qur'ans, the WBC said it had already burned some. No one cared. It says it also plans to burn an American flag at the same time (I'm not making this up). No one cares.
Qur'an burning may have stepped into that small set of things that are too crazy even for America.
(source:guardian.co.uk)
Koran burning cancelled,Terry Jones,
The Koran burning stunt that threatened to ignite religious tensions around the world was called off last night.
US pastor Terry Jones cancelled the event on condition that controversial plans to build a mosque near Ground Zero in New York were axed.
Mr Jones, who runs the tiny Dove World Outreach Center church, claimed Muslim leaders had agreed to move the location of the Islamic centre.
He said: "We have done an excellent job. This is a victory for America."
But Sharif El-Gamal, who is behind the proposals to build the 13-storey centre near the site where Muslim terrorists killed 3,000 people in 2001, denied that any talks had taken place and said the mosque would go ahead as planned.
There was no official confirmation last night about a deal but Imam Muhammad Musri, of the Islamic Society of Central Florida, talked with the pastor and hinted an agreement had been reached.
Pastor Jones said: "If they were willing to cancel the mosque at the Ground Zero location or willing to move the location, we would consider that a sign from God. The Muslim people have agreed to move the mosque and we have agreed not to burn the Koran.
"If it's not moved, then I think Islam is a very poor example of religion. That would be pitiful. I do not expect that."
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I m am Musri thanked the church in Gainesville, Florida, for "defusing the situation". Shadow Foreign Secretary David Miliband said: "This unacceptable act would have been dangerous, destructive and fundamentally wrong."
The U-turn happened after Pastor Jones came under huge pressure to cancel the Koran burning.
There were fears it would lead to terrorist reprisals and had resulted in protesters burning US flags in Pakistan.
Barack Obama said yesterday: "This is a recruitment bonanza for al-Qaeda. You could have serious violence in places like Pakistan or Afghanistan.
"It could increase the recruitment of individuals willing to blow themselves up in American cities or European cities. I hope he understands what he is proposing to do is completely contrary to our values as Americans."
And Interpol said: "If the proposed Koran burning goes ahead, there is a strong likelihood that violent attacks on innocent people would follow."
Tycoon Donald Trump joined the row yesterday by offering to buy out one of the investors who owns the site where the mosque is due to be built.
A condition of the offer is the centre is moved at least five streets further away from Ground Zero.
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