As I wrote yesterday, the conspiracy brigade was quick out of the gate to peddle some awful conspiracies about the Times Square bombing attempt. In the past, the habit of our journalists to resort to conspiracy theories has been an embarrassment on the national stage. This time, it’s no different.
American newspaper Boston Globe published an editorial today titled, “Pakistan’s paranoid press.” And it gets worse from there. The Boston Globe newspaper has a history of treating the government and President Zardari critically.
Yet it is also this newspaper that says Pakistan’s media “plays into the hands of violent groups that recruit susceptible youth to conduct terrorist operations.” The authors call the reports in our press, “paranoid propaganda.”
It is bad enough that so much of our media is well-known a joke in our own country, but when it gets noticed by the international press, it’s truly humiliating.
Have we already forgotten about the foreign policy journal publicly saying that Ahmed Quraishi misrepresented their work to support his conspiracy theory?
Now we have another foreign newspaper referring to the conspiracy theories that are circulating about Faisal Shahzad “paranoid propaganda.” This has got to stop.
When the American law enforcement arrested the members of a Christian terrorist group, the media did not report that it was some conspiracy by Pakistan or any other country to embarrass Christians or Americans. They can admit that there are some Christians and Americans who are idiots. Actually, they call them ‘evil.’ Why can’t we do the same?
There is a real world here in which idiots like Faisal try to blow people up. There is important information that can be reported about these incidents to help stop this madness from happening again. Why can’t our media be a part of the real world, part of the solution? Dear media, stop being part of the problem, please. Your country needs you in the real world. At the very least, stop making the rest of us look bad!
