Misleading Journalism

Last month there was a report on German TV from a very prominent journalist lady, who is supposed to be an experienced and well-informed war reporter on Iraq and other countries of the Middle East. However, the report she had compiled for Stern TV came as a shock to me. In it, Ms. Antonia Rados, reported about the drilling of young children in Iran to become religious fanatics.

She showed two children, a boy and a girl, aged 8 and 6 respectively, who were already famous in Iran for being religious preachers. Ms. Rados explained that the young boy was moving his large audience in a mosque to tears, heating their mood by glorifying the suicide bombers in his speech. What a shock! However, I was not shocked about the young preacher, but about the journalist's reporting! She was lying deliberately. The young boy did not glorify any suicide killer, BUT one of the most important Islamic personalities in history, Imam Hussain son of Ali son of Abi Talib, the grandson of the Prophet of Islam. He died on the tenth day (of Muharram), just as the boy told his audience in a so-called matam or religious centre and not in a mosque, and his eyes burst out and his head was cut off. Yes, that happened, and that was whom the audience were crying for and what his followers have done since Imam Hussain's martyrdom almost 1400 years ago. Neither did the boy preach anything radical about the Quran, nor did the little girl recite the Quran in her speeches, who was also shown in the report.

No matter what we think about little children acting like adults, be they dressed up as preachers for religious events or made up as contestants for a beauty pageant, no professional journalist should distort the facts in her report, to paint a false picture. Some blogger writings as reaction to her report were naturally devastating after this kind of distortion.

In the same way, a totally unprofessional or even unethical way of reporting shows the difference a simple headline can make for one and the same picture of the winner of a beauty pageant for little girls: "Little Miss Beautiful" or "How Little Girls Are Drilled To Sell Their Bodies". Western media has, unfortunately, proven again to be more unprofessional than I thought possible.