First, the Park 51 Islamic center has been in the works for a long time. It was covered in the press last year without outrage. On Fox News in December, conservative commentator Laura Ingraham interviewed Daisy Khan, wife of the project's imam, and told her that no one seemed to have a problem with the center and that "I like what you're trying to do." Then, about half a year later, a right-wing blogger and the New York Post decided that the project was, in fact, offensive. Whereupon various conservative politicians and pundits, Palin included, determined that they too were very offended, or at least that it was politically advantageous to be. (See Justin Elliott's reporting in Salon for extensive details. Salon, for which I once worked, is admittedly a left-of-center outlet, but the timeline is the timeline.)
The nonstory was suddenly a story because someone decided to make an issue of making it an issue. And you know where we went from there.
The plan by Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Fla., to burn Korans on 9/11, meanwhile, got attention for a couple of sadly predictable reasons. First, because tiny groups of fringe idiots—hate protesters like Rev. Fred Phelps, flag burners—regularly get attention out of proportion to their significance, because they push people's buttons and that means ratings and readers. (If I wanted to drive traffic to this blog, I'd just put "Ground Zero Mosque" and "Koran" in every headline, with the occasional "Bieber" thrown in.) And second, it coincided roughly with stories already in the media—thanks largely to the suddenly-a-controversy Islamic center—about Muslims, tolerance, religious freedom, terrorism, Islamophobia, people-believing-Obama-is-a-Muslim, and sundry other hot-button reliables.
Read more:
http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/2010/09/09/the-media-and-islam-o-mania-gasoline-for-the-fire/#ixzz0zFuFnoxB
