Fox 'does' Sweden

OK, now it's personal. Fox News recently (11/26) did a report from nearby Malmö, a large city here in southern Sweden, right across the water from Copenhagen, titled Swedes Reach Muslim Breaking Point. A full-page editorial in Sydsvenskan, a major swedish daily, brought the piece to my attention, and searching the Fox News site I found two related pieces from late October, Where the Busses Won't Go and The Swedish Way.

The piece is part of series about the Muslim population in Europe, and while I haven't seen the video coverage due to lacking bandwidth in my chateau, I feel I have enough material to throw a shit-fit just based upon the articles and the Swedish newspaper report.

Here's the Fox money shot:

I'm working on a series on Muslims in Europe and just returned from Malmo, Sweden, a city with a large population of immigrants. During interviews the Swedes would not say anything negative. Doctors, police chiefs, and teachers were all extremely diplomatic in their choice of words. It was only after a long while that they would start to say what they thought, that the city could not handle such rapid immigration, that it was not able to absorb or integrate the immigrants. I interviewed one nurse, then talked with her for a while off-camera, where she said that she was actually afraid to come to work because sometimes people in the emergency room would yell and become physically abusive in their demands for rapid treatment. Her eyes got wide. She said "it is not the Swedish way" to behave like that. So I got the cameraman Barnaby and interviewed her again.

I should take a page from this guys playbook and go running around Iraq asking people if they thought things where under control. If people told me no, I could just ignore them, writing them off as paranoid and not really saying what they thought. Then finally when I found someone who agreed with me I could interview them for my article.

Simply put, this is the height of journalistic irresponsibility: going somewhere with a preconceived notion of how things are (there are muslims, things must be chaotic and criminal) and then searching out that story rather than reporting the situation as it exists. As Sydsvenskan reported [translated]:

Despite the fact that Steve Harrigan traveled all the way from the US to Malmö and Rosengård, he didn't take the time to talk to a single one of those people he refers to as 'hating illiterates.' Muslims are simply depicted generally, without names or identities. They are, simply put, not human.

Yes, there is a huge immigrant population in southern Sweden, and yes there are a lot of kinks that need ironing out, but the matter is currently getting a lot of attention and making progress. It's an integration problem like any other, and like the swedish blog JKL reports [translated],

For those who are concerned about what is happening in Sweden, there are many aspects that need to be considered as part of any explanation, not the least of which is that the problem is not so much muslim--but Swedish.

Sweden has been living peacefully as a terribly homogenous population forever, and the whole blond-hair-blue-eyes thing is more than just a stereotype--50 years ago it was pretty much true. But these days more and more Swedes are named Carlos and Mohammed, and acceptance isn't coming overnight. Especially not if you blame everything on Muslims. I have my own developed opinion of how the problem will eventually be solved, but I'll save that for some other post.

The Fox News piece is clearly a cog in a well-oiled machine working to further establish the muslim/islam - terrorist/criminal word association. The muslim-terror association is the next chapter in the black-thug association perpetuated by the news coverage of the 90's (as shown in Bowling for Columbine). Beyond the inaccuracies and misrepresentations, this type of reporting is terribly destructive and brutally irresponsible. I realize that this is Fox's specialty and that the same shit-fit could be thrown in response to any one of their reports, but this time they've hit too close to home.

The icing on the cake: A looming banner-ad reminding me to WATCH BILLY GRAHAM. (check local listings). Lovely.

Below are some comments lifted from readers of Dhimmi Watch, which claims to have broken the story before Fox:

"Tear gas, clubbings, trip to airport, back to the sandbox.......illiterate lizards."

"My advice to Europeans --- send in the National Guard. Crush them. No group should be allowed this much power."

"Sweden was such a beautiful peaceful country, with such lovely people, a neanderthalic blood-cult should be allowed nowhere near it."

Amazing. Journalism has consequences. I am eagerly awaiting my shipment of James Wolcott's 'Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants: The Looting of the News in a Time of Terror' now more than ever, despite the lame pop-lefty title.