#western journalists

[newsdock]

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (AP) — China gave Western journalists a rare look aboard two People's Liberation Army vessels Saturday during the Rim of the Pacific naval exercises in Hawaii, showcasing a hospital ship with complex medical facilities and a destroyer flying U.S. and Chinese flags. Source: Associated Press

[leavemealonetoread]

I refer of course to the latest "I-spit-on-the-runway-the-Taliban-sashay-down" type of pieces in the American Christian Science Monitor (titled predictably "Lahore Fashion Week Takes on Talibanization in Pakistan") and in Britain's The Times about the just concluded Lahore Fashion Week. The latter may be headlined a bit more soberly ("Pakistan Fashion Week Pushes Back Boundaries") but the prose is nothing less than a deep shade of purple. For example, here are the opening lines:

"A call to prayer echoed over the red carpet. The celebrity guests and socialites of Lahore lifted their diamante stilettos through the scarlet pile, careful not to trip as they showed lipsticked smiles – and bare shoulders – to the flashing camera bulbs."

Just in case you forgot what The Times was aiming to get at, you understand. Gasp! Muslims. Fashion. Shock. Bare shoulders. Horror. But far be it from The Times to simply imply something when they can get their facts utterly wrong in black and white:

"Pakistan’s first Government-endorsed fashion week finished yesterday. There is hope that with it will disappear decades of the government repression that had previously forced the scene underground."

Underground scene? Hellooooo! We just had another fashion week in Karachi, not three months ago! Kind of missed the bus on the "underground scene", by like, two decades, don't you think? 

Western journalists, how do you even.

Are they just making stuff up?  This ultraconservative, everything-nice-is-illegal Pakistan is not the country my dad grew up in.

It might be the province my friends' parents are from, but that has more to do with the people there than Pakistan/Islam. I mean, said friends grew up in the states and still had ultraconservative upbringings.

Such a difference exists among white, "American" families and communities, too. Could it be that a nation's population is not composed of people who are all the same?

This sort of ridiculous media representation contributes to Islamophobia in "developed" nations where the people like to call themselves "educated." Because if journalists present the people of Pakistan this way, their western readers will think they ARE this way. And they'll think their xenophobia's justified, because it can't be the aforementioned westerners who are ignorant, it's the people they're prejudiced against. "They" (Pakistanis, Muslims) are backwards, not "us" (Americans, Christians,whites).

(note 1: Was that last part coherent? and 2: I didn't get very far through the comments of the post in the link, because some of the commenters don't like paragraphs. I prefer them.)