“A Conspiracy of Euphemism”

Thoughts on selective self-censorship by the press:

The news reader, Nora Raum, outlined the incident and stated that the shooting appeared to have “religious motivations.” She did not name the suspect, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, or tell NPR listeners what those religious motivations might be. In other words, it could have been a radical Unitarian who gunned down the soldiers, or possibly a violent Presbyterian.

Why the shyness? Why not tell people what is actually happening in the world? We saw this a couple of weeks ago, when the press only gingerly acknowledged that the malevolent though incompetent suspects in the synagogue bombing-conspiracy case in New York were converts to Islam. How is the public served by this kind of silence?

As noted, it’s only one religion that seems to be fair game for discussion as motivation for criminal behavior.

5 thoughts on ““A Conspiracy of Euphemism””

  1. Why not tell people what is actually happening in the world?

    Don’t you just love rhetorical questions that shouldn’t be rhetorical?

  2. Revealing the entire truth is be too painful for these journalists. In most instances there’s a double-whammy, inasmuch as nearly all of these home grown terrorists are not only muslims, but blacks.

  3. If “endimment” is when a commenter increases the general level of dimness, is “condimment” the sharing of that level of dimness? I don’t relish asking, I’m just trying to ketchup.

  4. That’s a good question.

    The fact that I’m capable of endimmening doesn’t mean I grasp the word’s inflections. It’s possible that condimment bears no relationship to endimment at all, nor endimment to endimmening. Jack may have been engaging in endimmnity or endimmeness, for all I know. The entire matter may have something to do with rocket science, and I’m sorry, but that is definitely above my pay grade.

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