With this mediocre production Mark Basseley Youssef has demonstrated the radical right’s eagerness to provoke Muslim outrage with deliberate sacrilege while simultaneously making visible the criminally irresponsible face of fundamentalist Islam. At the same time, he’s seeded a minefield for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, who can’t denounce this hypothetical movie (or its all-too-real trailer) in any but the vaguest terms without alienating the Reblican base from which it sprang. […]
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Tthe Republic Party’s base, which Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan courted so ardently and now represent, is deeply implicated in the sponsorship, funding, production, and initial distribution of “Innocence of Muslims,” and has direct responsibility for the consequent Muslim protests now raging around the world over this short film. Yet, so far as I know, nowhere in the media coverage of all this has anyone addressed these connections. […] The propaganda film “Innocence of Muslims” was entirely sponsored and produced by elements of the wingnut anti-Islamist evangelical Christian right in the U.S. By dint of their close association with their base, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan bear a considerable degree of responsibility for the conflagrations touched off by the film, including the one that took the life of Ambassador Christopher J. Stevens. Time to put them on the hook for that and watch them try to wriggle off. […] Did Romney bronze himself up? He definitely looks more tan in those screenshots than he does in images from the days before and after his Univision moment. And I’d put nothing past Romney and his posse. But here’s where the photo critic in me kicks in. Those images weren’t all made with the same combination of camera, lens, film and filter (or digital settings), under standardized or comparable lighting conditions. So I feel more inclined to chalk this up to the vagaries of TV makeup in combination with studio lighting than to either a desperate Romney campaign attempt to woo Hispanic voters or a malicious makeup artist’s subversion. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Lt. John Pike Goes Viral (8)
To the $1 million settlement in the UC Davis pepper-spray lawsuit add the $1,116,135 in actual monies paid out to manage this crisis, plus $1 million for other internal expenses and $1 million for diminished reputation. And let’s not forget the $240K Pike cost the university as settlement in a 2008 racial and sexual discrimination lawsuit resulting from his alleged homophobic slurs directed at an openly gay Asian-American fellow officer. Grand total so far: $4,356,135. That’s one pricey hire. […]