From Bangladesh:
Jamaat-e-Islami Ameer and Industries Minister Matiur Rahman Nizami has said the role of media is not less than that of terrorists.If a Western politician told a Press Club that the media was as bad as the terrorists, he would be eaten alive in the papers forever after. Not so much in Bangladesh, though, where the press operates under fear of arrest or "falling ill" under interrogation.
The minister was addressing a seminar on 'Fundamentalism, militancy and Islam' organised by Bangladesh Quran Shikkha Society at the Jatiya Press Club yesterday.
...
Nizami said an international clique is engaged to implicate Jamaat-e-Islami in terrorist activities and the persons being used as their tools are tarnishing the image of Islam under the garb of alems (religious scholars).
He urged the leaders and activists of the party to remain alert against this force.
...
The Jamaat chief said a newspaper ran a report that 40 percent of the arrestees from across the country on charge of bomb attacks are Jamaat members, which is totally untrue.
And when we protested the news item, the newspaper published our rejoinder, but it was done in a way so as not to be clearly noticed.
This is one reason we have such a hard time in the media wars. All bloggers can do is chide the media. Our political leaders daren't even do that. The radicals in so many places, though, can openly warn even international press agencies to beware what they say.
It's worth remembering that. Reuters, AFP, and the lot of them, they are under much darker kinds of pressure than any blogger offers. In order to operate in the unfree places at all, they are forced to strike fearful bargains. It means they are not able to report the news honestly. The only other choice, though, is not reporting it at all.
That doesn't excuse the domestic press when they refuse to produce a Yon, or to get basic facts correct, or set aside their 1960s assumptions about the way the military works. It is something to keep in mind, however, when we are thinking about the international agencies.
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