In an April 18 post, one of my classmates details the media and publication arm of ISIS, an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organization. My classmate points out that the employees of the ISIS arm are some of the most well compensated in the organization. I’d like to extend on his post to talk about the relationship between Daesh “journalists” and their western counterparts.

The cruel irony of the ISIS media arm is that while they reward their own media professionals handsomely, they’ve made Western journalists one of their most sensational pawns in their propaganda war. In a Feb. 2015 Longform Podcast, Rukmini Callimachi, who covers ISIS for the NY Times, said that ISIS has realized that journalists are “the creme de la creme for targets in their propaganda videos”. A NY Times graphic, also published in Feb 2015, showed that 11 out of the 23 foreigners held in the same ISIS prison were journalists and photojournalists. The other prisoners were aid workers from Europe and the United States.

Everyone remembers seeing the freelance journalist James Foley kneeling in front of a DAESH caliphate in a desert, dressed in an orange jumpsuit. His beheadding by
ISIS fighter “Jihadi John” was the first in a series of journalist killings by ISIS. Another American journalist, Stephen Sotloff, was executed a month later.

“We have never been prouder of our son Jim,” Foley’s mother, Diane, said in a Facebook post days after his death. “He gave his life trying to expose the world to the suffering of the Syrian people.”

Diane Foley’s remarks hint at why Western journalists are such a threat to ISIS. My classmate writes on his blog that “Under Daesh’s propaganda model, benevolent broadcasts are utilized to lure the in-group into new membership, with battle scenes serving to further alienate the out-group.” In their quest to reveal the suffering of Syrians, Western journalists have interests that are at diametric odds with the ISIS media strategists. They therefore have the most power to destroy the work of the ISIS media arm, making them prime targets for ISIS combatants.

 

 

In the past few months alone, America’s paper of record has proven itself to be dreadfully out of touch when reporting on two populations: Millenials and Muslims.

I’ll only consider the latter here. Whenever the New York Times publishes an article about Muslim states, you can be fairly confident its headline will have all the trappings of click-bait sensationalism.  Two recent examples include the opinion pieces, “How Muslim governments impose ignorance,” published by Mustafa Akyol on March 16, 2016, and “The Sexual Misery of the Arab World,” a piece by Kamel Daoud that ran in February 2016. Both op-eds criticize  practices of Islamic governments, such as the stifling of intellectual freedom and the imposition of puritan sexual mores. The writers suggest that such moral injustices only happen in backward states “over there,” as if we would never permit them in the progressive West.

Akyol criticizes the censorship of canonical western books in Muslim states, including Darwin’s The Origin of Species, the Bible, and Karen Armstrong’s more recent study of Islamic faith, “Islam: a Short History.” Aykol, whose own book was subject to scrutiny by censors in Malaysia, concludes that “the Muslim world today is in a state of malaise,” calling them “underdeveloped” in science, technology, economics, and culture. Akyol says that this backwardness “will be overcome only with more freedom. Progress depends on more Muslims questioning whether policies that promote ignorance are really devised to protect their faith — or to protect the power of those who rule in its name.”

In his piece on sexual freedom, Daoud comdemns the “rigorous codes and discreet puratism” of Muslim governments that enable them to obstruct desire in their citizens, or “guilt trip” those who manage to feel any at all. “People in the West are discovering, with anxiety and fear, that sex in the Muslim world is sick, and that the disease is spreading to their own lands,” Daoud writes. Daoud wrote his essay just after the mass molestations of women on New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Germany, and suggested that the assailants were driven by the repressive influence of Islam.

Both of these opinion pieces ignore similar offenses by Western governments, holding Islamic states to an unfair double standard. For example, one could also say that the Obama administration has “imposed ignorance” by making information less accessible to the press and the public: Obama’s administration is responsible for blocking reforms to the Freedom of Information Act, a revelation that (ironically) came out through a FOIA request.

According to VICE, documents obtained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation confirm longstanding suspicions that Obama’s administration halted reforms to FOIA: though the reforms got overwhelming bipartisan support in the house and senate, they never appeared for a final vote before either body. A separate investigation by VICE found that the FTC also tried to disrupt the FOIA reforms, since those reforms would have required the trade agency to enact more transparent practices. Commentary in the Washington Post in March 2016 concluded that Obama’s administration is not likely to be a model for transparency for generations to come, despite the president’s primise to run the “most transparent” administration in American history.

As for Daoud’s piece, it’s almost too easy to argue that sex is also “sick” in America, particularly if you’re writing from the vantage point of a college campus. In the US, 1 in 4 american college students will be assaulted by the end of their academic careers, and their uneducated counterparts are 30 percent more likely to be victims of sexual violence. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers have tried to pass legislation declaring porn a “public health crisis.” Both the articles by Akyol and Daoud show that it’s important to read American media coverage of the Middle East with a critical eye, and to try to see through the undue scrutiny the West places on Muslim governments and populations.

The twitter-fueled revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia raise important questions about the intersections of social media and news. There’s no denying the necessity of social media in both countries, where governments suppress media outlets and imprison dissident journalists. The oppression of the media has led many citizens to rely on social media platforms to get their news: In a 2013 study, 52% of Tunisians reported using Facebook as their “primary news outlet.” In Egypt in 2011, “tweets became one of the most important sources of news in Egypt, as well a tool for coordinating activism and protest.”

While it’s important to have alternative, independent news sources in states with authoritarian regimes, it’s also important to distinguish the role that social media sites play in disseminating news. If you read Facebook for updates that citizen journalists post to their personal accounts, you can consider it a news outlet. But if you read it for stories from radio or TV stations, it’s an aggregator. There are problems with using it in either way. Hassan Zargouni, CEO of the Tunisian survey company Sigma Conseil, acknowledges that “The problem with Facebook is that some people become ‘journalists,’ and they are not used to it [acting as credible journalists].” In addition, “there is a problem of manipulation. Facebook can be manipulated by an invisible hand.”

That “invisible hand” could be the algorithms that Facebook uses to cater your newsfeed to your perceived political and cultural preferences. All Facebook users unwittingly impose their own editorial perceptions on their Facebook feed based on the stories they engage or ignore. Slate technology writer Will Oremus explains how the Facebook news feed is engineered to predict user preferences and curate stories that they’re likely to find interesting:

“Media organizations have historically defined what matters to their audience through their own editorial judgment. Press them on what makes a story worthwhile, and they’ll appeal to values such as truth, newsworthiness, and public interest. But Cox and his colleagues at Facebook have taken pains to avoid putting their own editorial stamp on the news feed. Instead, their working definition of what matters to any given Facebook user is just this: what he or she would rank at the top of their feeds given the choice.”

Facebook is no replacement for independent news outlets, and concerned citizens with camera phones and twitter accounts are no replacement for trained journalists. I say this not only because it’s in my professional interest to believe it, but because social media websites aren’t programmed to prioritize objectivity or even accuracy.