It won’t be long until the Mumbai massacre moves to the back pages of our newspapers and other stories lead the news on the airwaves. This means fewer people will be paying attention to it and most will have completely missed the important fact that Islamists were the ones who did this thing.

Big casualty stories perversely draw people to media. Think of people driving by an accident and straining to get a look at the damage. After the story starts to age though, and the cars are removed, fewer people are paying attention. They just whiz by. That leaves those paying attention with what they got from the media during the first hours of coverage as their context for an understanding of subsequent events and that’s why early reporting contains such crucial information. In this instance, getting or not getting complete and accurate early news of this terrorist attack determines whether or not one knows the dominant role of Islamic fundamentalism in this murderous terrorist attack. About Mumbai, the public got neither accurate information nor the complete story in what they heard and saw in the early hours of this story.

The picture published by Reuters in the early hours of this tragedy is a perfect example of this media sleight of hand where the obvious is pointedly avoided. The man in the picture is clearly holding a gun, but Reuter’s chose the label “suspected gunmen.” (As result, we might justifiably be able to refer to Reuters as a ‘suspected’ provider of news.) With this kind of dissembling, the public misses the crucial point that Mumbai and the hundreds of other killing fields around the world were brought to us by those who commit terror in the name of Islam and who use their religion as justification to murder infidel non-believers like Hindus, Westerners, Christians and of course, Jews.

One terrorist group already has claimed responsibility for this carnage and there’s liable to be others that will try to take “credit” for it as well. It’s likely too that we may or may not have heard of these groups before and might never hear of them again for it is just this kind of deliberate shuffling of names that adds to the confusion as to who is responsible. It is all part of the game. Reasonable observers would note right away that the targets of these barbarians are the same people that the terrorists choose to attack all over the world no matter what they call themselves: women, children, innocent civilians of Western nationalities as well as those who have religious beliefs (and this can include other Muslims as well) that don’t conform to the rigid dogmas of those who kill them. It would also be clear to any objective analyst that the perpetrators are Muslims. But the media, by and large, demurs and feigns an unconvincing innocence about what is really going on.

Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes wrote the definitive piece on this media malfeasance shortly after Chechnyan terrorists attacked a school holding children hostage before killing many of them. After listing the vague words each of the networks used so that they could avoid saying “Islamists” or “terrorists,” he noted that

Politically-correct news organizations undermine their credibility with such subterfuges… the multiple euphemisms for terrorist obstruct a clear understanding of the violent threats confronting the civilized world. It is bad enough that only one of five articles discussing the Beslan atrocity mentions its Islamist origins; worse is the miasma of words that insulates the public from the evil of terrorism.”(See the article at www.danielpipes.org/article/2066).

Aside from the sensationalist and gruesome images networks displayed non-stop in the aftermath of this latest Islamist derived carnage, they are still responsible, by any standard of journalistic decency, to provide answers to the questions of Who, What Where and When. The omission of any of those basic tenets of sound reporting is a judgment in itself. By not getting to the Who, when the information is readily available, the guilty parties area making a politically-correct choice and in the doing displace reporting with their own opinion.

This type of observation can be made after every terrorist attack, but this one is special. It reminds that media is not the only irresponsible party here.

When the news of the horror started spilling into our pre-Thanksgiving consciousness, we not only had a Presidential comment, but had a President-elect comment as well and they both missed an opportunity to bring clarity to this event. Their inability to tell us who did this and their pitiful reliance on the condemnation of “terrorism” and not terrorists is a continuation of the verbal confusion we’ve come to expect over the last several years. When our Presidents begin to tell us who is actually responsible for this carnage and much of the conflict around the world, we will be a step closer to facing up to reality and can begin dealing with these problems at their source.

And then maybe the media will notice too.

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