Mosque debate corners media attention

Over the past couple of weeks one news story remains as a presence in the heart of the American consciousness.

Repeatedly dubbed as "The Ground Zero Mosque Debate," this cultural controversy surrounds a projected $100 million Islamic community center, which will be built fifteen stories high and include a mosque two blocks from the ground zero site.

Initial speculation has been demonstrated by citizen bloggers and media officials concerned about the building of this Islamic center or mosque so close to ground zero. The prevailing argument is that the community center is insensitive to the families and victims of the attacks from September 11, 2001.

On December 21, 2009 political commentator Laura Inghram appeared on "The O'Reilly Factor" to interview Daisy Kahn, a co-founder of Park 51 (the site for the Islamic community center). She commented saying, "I can't find many people who really have a problem with it. [Mayor] Bloomberg is for it. Rabbis are saying they don't have a problem with it… I like what you're trying to do and Ms. Kahn we appreciate it."

Eight months later, Inghram's position severely changed and her attitude regarding this news scaled from appreciative to fear mongering.

On August, 3 2010 she appeared on Good Morning America and complained about the insensitivity of building an Islamic mosque that was, "600 feet from where thousands of our fellow Americans were incinerated in the name of political Islam." She added, "And we're supposed to be cheering this?"

Inghram's drastically alternating responses to this news story may indicate the extent to which news journalists and organizations will dramatize otherwise soft news into a full-out controversy.

According to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), which tracks coverage across media sectors each week, "the debate over the proposed Islamic center a few blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood was the biggest story for the week of August 16-22, accounting for fifteen percent of the newshole studied."

This report  proved the American news media delegated an overriding importance to a "story" in which exaggeration exists in its presentation as the "ground zero mosque debate."

Although such media phrasing would connote otherwise, the mosque in question does not actually stand-alone. It is to be built two blocks from the ground zero site at 45-47 Park Place in Lower Manhattan.

Sharif El-Gamal, chief executive of SoHo properties and developer of the project 
community center said, "We are Americans – Muslim Americans…we are businessmen, businesswomen, lawyers, doctors, restaurant workers, cabdrivers, and professionals of every walk of life, represented by the demographic and tapestry of Manhattan."

Yet the dramatization of this news story over the past two to three weeks seemed to exploit a majority of Americans who are willing to forsake El-Gamal's constitutional right to practice his religion, because they believe an Islamic mosque two blocks from the site of ground zero is insensitive.

In a CBS News Poll analysis released August 25, CBS News asked Americans "Do the Developers Have a Right to Build A Mosque Near Ground Zero?" A large sector of the population, twenty nine percent, polled no, developers should not be granted that right.

While this debate prolonged, less attention was allocated to news that would more directly impact American viewers such as the Iraq war.

This past week marked the withdrawal of the last American combat troops from Iraq after seven years of conflict but according to PEJ it only made the "Number two story last week, with nine percent of the newshole."

Still, the third most viewed video last week featured MSNBC host Keith Olbermann arguing to keep the project near ground zero.

News stories such as these which continue to recycle and cumulate an excessive amount of airtime and print space, should make readers and viewers question the responsibility of our news media.

Since the escalation of this debate in early August by media extremists, this news story provoked so much of the American consciousness that President Obama announced his political stance on the issue.

"As a citizen and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country," Obama said. "That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan… This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable."

The president's public approval quickly spurred another media frenzy regarding the president's personal religious orientation and speculations regarding whether or not he is Muslim. Not surprisingly, this news topic cornered the newshole this week.

However, these kinds of fear-driven and conspiratorial debates may not be coincidental. 
Richard Hofstadter, a history professor at Columbia University published an essay entitled "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" in 1964. Hofstadter's essay attempted to explain the political paranoia of his generation, McCarthyism by tracing similar social and political upheavals throughout history.

He discovered that when the American culture experiences an outstanding threat to their way of life, such as communist propaganda or Islamic terrorism, a large section of the general public adopts a political style that "has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content."

Hofstadter calls this the "paranoid style", a "style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted" and the threatening group as possessing "the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers... the imperfections of human existence."