“Our Insular Media”

The retraction by Newsweek has reopened the debate on practices of the American press and its uses of news sources. This focus, however, blurs the true question: why did Muslims, offended by an American magazine’s reporting - true or false, react with riots that ended in bloodshed?
Before the Newsweek editor made his retraction, the publication of this article provoked street fighting that resulted in the deaths of 16 people in Afghanistan. That statement was weak consolation to the US soldiers who had to face the inflamed multitudes in Kabul that destroyed automobiles, stores, and the offices of both the UN and the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan. Though possibly in the beginning the demonstrations were peaceful, they degenerated into a torrent of rage, observed also in Pakistan, Indonesia and Egypt. In fact, these riots are the cause of the meeting Muslim world’s rage-caused per years of bad leadership-and fascination with the American media.
Our media is richer, freer and more reliable than that in the majority of the world. The problem consists in that our media likes nothing more than denouncing the policies of the United States. The consequence is, therefore, the insistence on coverage of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, while the names of prisons in the rest of the Muslim world are ignored.
This is where we should concentrate our efforts.