The (U.S.) Media Hates You #4: Why Regular Americans Don’t Know What’s Going On

Let us compare two videos. One is from the new-ish international news channel, France 24.

The other is a segment from the Fox News Channel show Hannity & Colmes.

Arif Rafiq lost count at seven ludicrous statements (he missed the silly notion that the 2001 bombing campaign was successful or worth repeating, or that a similar campaign could be structured the same way today).

Anyway, this is sort of intellectual laziness is par for the course these days. Reports like the pretty good recent Newsweek exposé are, unfortunately, all too rare—and half the time aren’t even made available to American audiences.

Update: Laurence forwards on this link to a Channel Four documentary about Hizb ut Tahrir in Kyrgyzstan. It is telling an important story, about how Islam, and even radical Islam, is gaining traction among those left disillusioned both with the endemic corruption in their own countries, and with the failed “democracy” policy of the U.S. Islam, then, is seen as the last remaining third way. Just don’t expect to see anything this informative on American TV.

What’s more, and perhaps fittingly, this is the last piece of work on which Alisher Saipov worked.

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust

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