So there’s some crazy pants minster in some small church in Florida who wants to burn the Koran tomorrow. This isn’t news, or at least it shouldn’t be. But bigger and bigger spotlights have been pointed at Terry Jones in the past weeks and he’s been given a more and further reaching microphones.
The New York Times points out the he and other nut jobs have tried similar stunts in the past with little to no media coverage, and blame this partly on the end of summer slow news season/ 24-hour news cycle.
But I call Bull Shit. There’s no such thing a slow news days/season. Sure, there’s times when huge earth shattering or catastrophic events aren’t happening, and more people are on vacation. But newsworthy stuff is still happening—and this ladies and gentlemen isn’t it. This guy is no different than the religious wackos on the someway screaming about how the end is near. But we don’t put them on the Today Show, the President isn’t issuing statements about them. We recognize them for what they are: possibly in need of medication, but not worthy of debating or trying to reason with.
A person’s message is only as powerful as the platform it’s given. My platform is a blog that’s read by 3 people and the guy on the street who said “Preach it! Fight the good fight!” when he overheard me complaining last night. If anything Terry Jones should be preaching about it’s PR.
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1 comment:
I think the worst part of all this is that he called it off (?) after receiving a call from the Secretary of Defense.
Maybe it's the liberaltarian in me, but there's something unsettling about the Secretary of Defense calling a private citizen and asking him not to commit an act of first amendment expression, however repugnant that act would have been.
Not to mention that now encourages other attention-seeking wackos, who now think that if they think of a crazy enough stunt, someone from the President's inner circle may personally call them and beg them to stop.
Just an awful precedent to have set all around.
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