“Telephone”-style Reporting on Kenya Terrorists

from the AP Local imams and Muslims, including the A.I.C.’s Abdul Aziz, left, and Imam Abdirizak Hashi, stand in solidarity to speak out against extremism in the Nairobi shopping mall attack, Monday, Sept. 23, 2013, at the Abubakar Islamic Center in Minneapolis. The Minneapolis-St. Paul area has the largest Somali community in the United States, and it’s been a recruiting ground for al-Shabab, the armed Islamic group linked with al-Qaida that has claimed responsibility for the attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi. MANDATORY CREDIT; ST. PAUL PIONEER PRESS OUT; MAGS OUT; TWIN CITIES TV OUT MBO TV is soft out Photo: The Star Tribune, Richard Tsong-Taatarii I cringe every time I hear or read or see the reporting on the Kenya shopping mall terrorism.  It’s a matter of time before all but the most abbreviated coverage mentions Minneapolis and Somalis from our state as part of terrorism.
 
There are some legitimate sources that should be more reliable, but so far aren’t, notably an official spokesperson for the Kenya government:

“…said the Americans were “young men, about between maybe 18 and 19″ years old and lived in “in Minnesota and one other place.”
 
However, a senior U.S. law enforcement official told NBC News that authorities had been unable to verify that Americans were involved, despite aggressive checks of travel records.

That media coverage is horrible, with the accuracy deteriorating as the facts get mangled like the message in a child’s game of telephone.  Jon Stewart last week did a brilliant, scathing group of ‘bits’ excoriating the inaccuracies that flowed through the news media about the tragedy of the Navy Yard mass shooting; this is similar, in spite of the differences.  There is more inaccuracy than fact, but the pseudo-facts are given a lot of energy and attention and distribution.
 
We hear numbers that appear to be grossly inflated of how many Somalis have gone back to Somalia to participate in bloodshed; more factual reporting places the number at around 20.  National news has claimed 40 (or more) actual Somali extremists / terrorists.  What you do not get, besides the inaccurate number of people recruited is that Minnesota has the largest community of people from Somalia, numbering 32,000 as of 2011.
 
Some 22 people, out of 32,000………that is a pretty small percentage.  But bad reporting can make it seem very large, wrongly and hugely frightening. It would be as wrong to blame the Somali community for this terrorism as it would be to blame all Norwegians for Anders Breivik – here or in the home country.
 
That sells news.  That makes money.  There’s nothing wrong, per se, with news, or with money; but there is a lot wrong with merchandising misery and with exploiting tragedy for money, through such blatant sensationalism.
 
Reporting that  context in which to process those numbers would be context, it would provide a larger, better sense of our community than simply bantering about a large-sounding number to scare, to sensationalize, this tragedy.
 
Because they are OUR community, part of our larger city and state, as much so as any other immigrant community at any time, but reminding me especially of our most recent Hmong immigrants, where we had one of the largest group of that new influx of people to Minnesota. ”They” are “US’ now, part of our unique plural, they are “We”, not “Other”, not “Them”.
 
The reality is that people who live here, in Minnesota, lost family members in the attack.  We know that as fact, but at best it gets mentioned quickly, in passing.  We KNOW that.
 
The reality is that we DON’T KNOW that ANYONE from Minnesota was involved in committing or planning the terrorist attack, contrary to media reporting.  It is possible that someone might be involved, but now the newest reporting is describing this as an al Quaida attack, and that it might NOT be an attack by al Shabab; we are hearing that the terrorists might be a multi-national collection of bad guys, and not a group of terrorists indigenous to Somalia, much less from Minnesota.
 
It may turn out that there is a Minneapolis, Minnesota connection to this tragedy, but we need to consider that shame and blame in the context of 32,000 people who are NOT terrorists.  We need to be mindful that the shame and blame of the actions of individuals belong to those individuals, not to all 32,000 people of that ethnicity.  And we need to give thought, to give consideration, to how to come together as a larger community, as a city, as a state…….and as a nation, so that we do not give recruiting terrorists a fertile ground in the future.
 
That starts with being just “US”, not being “Us-versus-Them”; and it continues with seeing that fact gets as much attention and distribution as the false information that misleads people.  Corrections seldom get the promotion that the original error received; but we don’t have to accept that quietly or passively.
 
Terrorism is bad; that is simple.  But our world is deeper, more complex and rich than that simplicity.  We need to remember that as the national media grabs for the tar and feathers and a too-broad factually-inaccurate brush, and then we need to push back, appropriately. Because the alternative, the “Us versus Them” thinking is just another version of crazy Craig Cobb and his neo-nazi “Little Europe” hate-hut-on-the-prairie-wannabes out in Leith, North Dakota — and that, definitely, is NOT US. And it’s not No-Dak either.
cross-posted from MNPP