PressEthic

An India-born British national was sentenced to a minimum of 40 years of prison in London, the New York Times reported today.

The headline was simple ; "British Muslim Sentenced in Terror Attacks."

I was casually skimming through the paper. I went on to the next one, then to another one, then something hit me, so I came back.

Here are the first two paragraphs.

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A British Muslim was sentenced Tuesday to a minimum of 40 years for planning terror attacks in the United States and Britain intended to bring what the judge in the case called carnage “on a colossal and unprecedented scale.”

The defendant, Dhiren Barot, 34, was said by the police to have been the most senior figure of Al Qaeda brought to trial in Britain. The sentence he received was one of the longest handed down in recent years, reflecting claims by British counterterrorism officers that they had thwarted major conspiracies when they arrested him in August 2004, after he made detailed observations to plan synchronized attacks in New York, Newark, London and Washington, D.C.

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As you see, the report is factual. Yes, it's obvious the writer is against terrorism, but I don't count it as a bias. (Does anyone not agree?)

However something's not right.

Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization of Islamic fundamentalists. Barot was one of them and it's fair to say his religion played a role in his crime.

He's a sentenced criminal, so let's forget about being dead correct for a second and assume he did everything the British police said he did.

Even if so, he is not a representative of his religion. Does the paper have to say in headlines he's a Muslim? Is it relative? Even if it's relative, is it appropriate? We are not supposed to run a headline saying "A Black (or Asian or White or Hispanic) Sentenced in Terror Attacks," are we?

One more question. Is it same to be a Muslim and to be an Islamic fundamentalist?

I'm working on a story on the upcoming New York Arab American Comedy Festival for another class, and have been frequently talking to a Palestine-descendent New Jersey-born stand-up comic.

Here's one of his punch lines. "There's two news stories about us: bad ones where we are described as gunmen, terrorist or militants, balanced by the good ones where we are described as alleged gunmen, militants or terrorists."

I don't have an answer to the question I raised. I probably would have written the same headline, "British Muslim Sentenced in Terror Attacks," too.

But there's something in the headline that made me think I finally got the comic's message right.