No You Can’t

The audiotape of Malcolm X’s 1961 address in Providence might never have surfaced at all if 22-year-old Brown University student Malcolm Burnley hadn’t stumbled across a reference to it in an old student newspaper. He found the recording of the little-remembered visit gathering dust in the university archives.

My Take: What Tsarnaev gets wrong about Islam – CNN Belief Blog – CNN.com Blogs. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bomb suspects, reportedly wrote that “an attack against one Muslim is an attack against all” on the wall of the boat in which he was hiding from police last month. Variations of this refrain seem to be common among angry young Muslim men, especially those who are attracted to violence. However, such a view ignores history, religious thinking and contemporary reality. It should be seen as a crass advertising slogan rather than a declaration of belief.

It’s a good, basic criticism of associational strategies in new stories. I do, however, take exception to the fact that Fox is the only guilty of this. They may be the most inelegant, but they are not alone. Why I Don’t Watch Fox News « Et cetera. I don’t try to assess whether or not news channels and newspaper companies are biased, because there is no question that they are all biased towards one thing or another. It is virtually impossible to be completely objective in any kind of news story. It is not, however, virtually impossible to provide good…