By Paul Belien
Thursday, November 17, 2005The media, including the news services, no longer report on the French riots. almost 100 cars were set on fire last night, but according to the French police this is the normal daily figure across France’s no-go areas. Hence, the situation in France is back to normal.
There is some other good news, too. It appears British banks are not going to ban piggy banks after all. according to MediaWatch (MW) the story was hogwash. It was widely reported, also by us, but seems to have been based on an article in a regional paper in the north west of England, The Lancashire Evening Telegraph (LET) that was not checked properly. Or to be more precise: LET quoted bank officials saying certain things – and we did not check with the officials whether they were being quoted correctly – while MW quotes officials from the same banks saying opposite things – and, again, we are not going to check with the bank officials whether this time they are being quoted directly. as people cannot check and double-check every piece of information, a certain degree of trust is always involved: we trusted the facts given by LET to be correct, and now we trust those given by MW to be correct.
Though MediaWatch’s facts may be correct, its comments certainly are not. MW says the piggy bank story was "not just silly" but "nasty and damaging" and adds "Frankly, it was always incredible, but the papers and the talk back hosts didn’t check it out, because it’s grist to their mill and a hot button story guaranteed to light up the switchboard."
That the papers and talk back hosts did not check the story out because it was "grist to their mill" is a statement which cannot be checked at all because no-one can claim to know other people’s intentions. Perhaps they just trusted LET’s reporting like we now trust MW’s reporting. as far as we are concerned, however, the piggy bank story did not seem that "incredible," in the light of so many other instances of actual "silly" decisions taken in order not to offend certain sensitivities that have never before been part of Western society but are now as a consequence of "multiculturalism."
We also wonder what is so "nasty and damaging" about the whole piggy bank story, even if it has been proved to be incorrect, compared to what is currently happening in Denmark, where a newspaper is still under police protection and cartoonists are still in hiding for having made drawings depicting the prophet Muhammad?
The indomitable Fjordman, who will be sorely missed when he quits blogging later this month, is about the only one who keeps the world regularly posted on this ongoing affair which has escalated to a diplomatic "war" between Denmark and moderate Muslim countries, such as Turkey and Egypt, for no other reason than that the Danish government refuses to censor the media.
One may wonder why the international mainstream media do not seem to be in the least interested in this story? It is a good thing that an organisation such as MediaWatch sifts through the news in order to get things straight. Perhaps it can also enlighten us as to why the Danish cartoon affair is receiving hardly any coverage, except by those who did not consider the piggy bank affair to be totally incredible in our post-democratic and post-free, "multicultural" society.
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