I also think that the news media has to retain some semblance of accuracy, and reliability, or they'll lose all faith.

[...]

I also question the notion that "unbiased objective" reporting is possible, or even desirable. — Wosret

I think that there is a sort of scale. Say, from Fox News to BBC News. I also think that there is a responsibility to do what it says on the tin, or at least earnestly try. If your slogan is "Fair and Balanced", but you're far from it, and don't even seem to be trying, then something's not right.

I was also sent a link to the drafted chapter I think you're referring to, but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. The Establishment by Owen Jones has a chapter called "Mediaocracy" which might be of relevance. It's been a while since I read it, and I've forgotten most of it. Maybe I'll refresh my memory.

I didn't read it all, just enough to be bored with it, the first couple of pages, lol.

Having to assert that you're being fair or balanced is rather just rhetorical. It will seem fair and balanced to those that hold similar political, religious, and moral sentiments to the presenter though, and won't to those that don't. Being generally smarter, or maybe just more cynical, a left wing presenter is much more likely to say the same thing ironically. They tell you how they're biased, and such, but this is meant as an ironic statement, declaring more self-awareness, and objectivity by implication. Saying that they're biased is suggesting themselves to be more fair and less biased than someone that would claim that they're fair and unbiased for being so self-aware. It is also a rhetorical move, in order to inspire confidence.

I, being a cynical leftist am much more prone to ironically asserting my credibility as well -- and further recognizing this upgrades my credibility yet a step further!

Point being is that some people are going to consider the Fox stuff perfectly fair and balanced, and be more open to certain kinds of rhetorical appeals, and I'm going to consider like minded presenters far more fair and balanced, and be much more conducive to their bullshit -- and when we look at each other's favored sources, we're going to think the complete opposite, and be far more immune to their more shallow opinion-swaying maneuvers.

A few steps down the rabbit hole, but hopefully still sensible.

There are three parts to "Media". Which part are you talking about?

1. The first part are the businesses of publishing and broadcasting (including digital platforms). The business sell entertainment, music, and information in various formats. One hopes that the entertainment divisions are not running the news content divisions -- but it's hard to tell, sometimes, that they are not.

2. The second part are the advertisers who buy time and space from media companies to promote their products and services. They have no formal connection to media businesses, but they share a great deal of... "harmonic convergence" shall we say?

3. The third (sometimes last and/or least, depending) are media professionals. These are the people who majored in journalism in college, learned how to write, illustrate, produce, edit, interview, etc. They are the content producers. They are not necessarily employed by your favorite newspaper, television, radio station, or web site, but somebody employs them to produce THE NEWS -- the content.

We can carp and bitch about all three, but really, our bitching and carping should be differentiated.

As a commie pinko faggot, I disapprove of the raison d'être, motives, and methods of the media businesses and advertisers. The people I find a lot of fault with are the journalists--not because they work for money-grubbing capitalists, but because they can be so obtuse, at times.

All the great journalists of the past who produced the gold standards of their field worked for money grubbing capitalists who were at least as philistine as contemporary capitalists are. Sometimes the companies are the same. The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) used to be called "tiffany network". The reference was to the distinguished high quality products of the Tiffany jewelry and furnishings business. They may not be up to Tiffany standards today, but it is the same company.

Good question, my lack of nuance shows my lack of much knowledge or insight into the subject, but that never stopped me from thinking I'm the most right about something before!

The book was about the news media, it seems to me. I know that I conflated the issue some in mentioning studies about entertainment media sources, but I thought them still relevant, or evidence of my opinion that people's values are not too easily swayed by such influences.

So, the news media, and the idea in the book was about how they're basically all owned by the same people, and manipulate and control what people know and believe about world events, politics, and the like. I more or less think it's basically all entertainment. Whether it's accurate, true, complete bullshit, or whatever doesn't ultimately matter as long as it's captivating, and people are willing to watch (read it/listen to) it and take it seriously. So that it really depends on your faith in the viewer to decide the quality of the news, in my view.

I suggested studies that showed that people's values are not significantly altered by media exposure. — Wosret

Last year, the advertising industry had revenues of 180 billion dollars. I don't believe that companies would be making these huge outlays if they could not see a relationship between consumer behavior and advertising. It works on me -- highly intelligent, anti-consumerist commie pinko faggot -- why wouldn't it work on everybody else?

I suspect the evidence is the usual 'middling' sort of stuff -- it's hard to nail down exactly what caused someone to have or alter a particular opinion. There is some evidence (so I have read, but not just recently) that individuals who watch the most local news on television (like, Eyewitness News at Six and Ten) tend to believe that the world is much more dangerous than it is. Why? Because of the tendency for news editors to go with action stories -- if it bleeds, it leads. People who watch a lot of local TV news thus develop a skewed view of their world. Journalists could do better.

But then, there is the intersection of the business and the journalist: "Joe," the producer says, "We're dying out there. Ratings show people are bored to death of your sociology reports on the 6 pm segment. You'd better come up with better material fast, or you will be dead meat yourself."

The News can't be too boring to sit through--even if you're telling the absolute truth.

Chicago has seen something like...600+ shootings this year, of which 135 were fatal--and this isn't the worst year so far. A 60 year old woman living on the 80th Floor of the Hancock Tower in Chicago who watches the local news every night might well conclude that she should never leave the building, or at least go no more than a block or two away.

Of course: people make sense of their experiences, and their experiences are more real than news stories or advertising. But... what guides our interpretation of experience? Well, other experiences, of course. Experiences like seeing news stories; experiences like seeing advertisements; experiences like seeing political debates.

Steve Jobs said that people don't know what they want until you show it to them. When it comes to plenty of products, I think that it has a lot to do with brand recognition, and advertisers themselves are shooting in the dark. When some product comes out with a successful ad, which really drives sales, they don't know why that happened. Did it make people happy, did it make them sad, was it funny, gripping, was it the music, or setting? There is tons of guess work involved. This is all I mean by the necessity of appeal. They have to figure out how to appeal to people's values, and dispositions. They can't just tell you to do things, believe things, and like things. I'm sure they wish they could. This is what generates advertising trends. Someone does something successful, and then everyone tries to copy it based on their perception about what it was precisely that made it successful. Attractive people tend to be a pretty big stable. So, it's, I think, a combination of product recognition, and presentation. People can't buy things if they don't know that they exist. So the first step is just getting it out there, so that people know about it, and the second is doing it in a way that appeals to them, and makes them pay attention to it, and want it.

I'm not convinced that only since the advent of local news have people thought that the world is more scary and dangerous than it is, and others are more frightening and dangerous than they are. Other people than the ones we know have always been weird demonic sub-humans that don't share our higher values, sophistication, or intellect. People want to see train wrecks, and not train building. That's why the former will be all over the news, and the latter will get a small blurb.

We are definitely all parrots of things we've read, and watched, but that isn't so much in my view that we've changed our values, as much as we think they formed our sentiments in a better, more persuasive way than we could, and they're authoritative. People's opinions definitely change, but no so much their values We can all be lied to, and believe things that aren't true, but appeals to strongly held values and opinions are a little different. It takes some world shattering sky-opening up revelations to change those.

Whether it's accurate, true, complete bullshit, or whatever doesn't ultimately matter as long as it's captivating, and people are willing to watch it and take it seriously. So that it really depends on your faith in the viewer to decide the quality of the news, in my view. — Wosret

You, obviously, have no faith in the viewer who is only interesting in watching captivating content, whether it is totally non-sensical farce or not.

Now, I am a cynical believer in H. L. Mencken's view that "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the average American's intelligence." He thought we were mostly a nation of rather stupid rubes. (He covered the Scopes Trial in Tennessee in 1925. That's the famous "Monkey Trial" -- should evolution be taught in schools case.) But... if we really believe that people are hopelessly duped into believing whatever crap they see, then we have nothing to discuss here. All is lost for 80% of the people.

But I don't think that. People do want to watch entertainment -- so do I. My entertainment is a lot more highbrow than the dreck that is on in the early evening, (much of the time, unless I'm slumming) but we want the same thing: Pleasant escape. I think most people, at least, can tell the difference between bullshit and sensible content. But maybe my perceptions have been very skewed by too much highbrow entertainment.

Everybody has to perform reality tests, every day, all the time. You're walking your white self down the street at 1:00 in the afternoon. A black guy is approaching you. Is he a threat to you or can you safely pass him by without getting shot or stabbed? If you live in Chicago (about a third of the population is black) you'll probably make a quick scan and decide he's not doing anything you need to be worried about. That's going to be right about 999 times out of a thousand. (I'm assuming you are not wearing very expensive clothing while walking down the street on the South Side of Chicago at midnight. If you are, then you maybe aren't testing reality very well.)

Most of the time when I am talking about others, I'm just talking about myself, and projecting it. I'm just really really honest. Not entirely though, I'm squeamish and have no interest in watching real life violence and death, or even if it's too realistic in fiction. I do though, know that it captivates, even me in the right formats, and media.

I don't really underestimate the average viewer, that's why I said that news can't be too full of shit, or it will lose people's faith -- a war of the world radio broadcast will never work like that again, because it changed everyone. Just like the first propaganda campaigns changed everyone. I think that it has to appeal, and lots of people disagree about lots of things, but it has to be representative of what a significant portion of viewers think and feel, or no one will watch it, and certainly won't believe it just because it's on tv. So I do most assuredly think that the news has to maintain some semblance of accuracy, and reliability, or they'll lose our faith. This is my major objection to the notion that large conspiring rich people can just manipulate us all through the news media into believing and feeling whatever they want us to (which seemed to be the thesis of the book).

Funny thing about that... I'm white trash, so when I lived in cities it was always the worst parts of town. I lived in a street in Halifax were people smoked crack on the sidewalk, and were knifed all the time. I spent a lot of time at friends houses in the projects too, which were pretty rough areas. I was never too worried though, people don't actually do random violence unless you're really weak looking in my experience. There is plenty of violence, sure, but it's always over some dispute. I used to get drunk in the bars down by the water front and then go walking the streets in the middle of the night trying to buy drugs of sketchy looking people. I'd walk around the projects in the middle of the night too. Once I was going to meet a friend of mine, though this was completely during the day, and I saw someone in the distance that I thought was him, so I started flipping him off for a good couple of minutes, before I got close enough to notice that it was actually a huge black guy, and not the huge white guy I thought it was... so I crossed the street, and pretending like nothing happened, but when he got close to me he approached me and I was kind of worried, but then he just asked me if I had a dollar, so I gave me two.

And I moved to a better part of town, I found the white college students in groups of ten were a lot mouthy drunks than I experienced in the shitty parts of town, though I never wore expensive cloths, I'll admit.

Another thing that super awkward, is when you scare people walking around at night. I walk pretty fast, so I usually overtake people, and sometimes lone people in the middle of the night would get noticeably uncomfortable and worried about you coming up behind them, which always made things super awkward... like what do I do? Slow down? Can't do that, it would probably make things worse... usually I just gave them a wide birth if they seemed worried.

So, what you said in your two posts above indicates that you are a fairly good reality tester. You had learned that you were on reasonably safe ground in the bad parts of town -- probably because your clothes, behavior, general appearance identified you as "belonging" and "not a risk" to everybody else. I've had some of those experiences too -- where, when you look like you belong, you do, more or less, and people don't bother you.

The trouble with the conspiracy theories about the media is that the ruling cliques that supposedly are in charge of the conspiracies would have to be extremely and unbelievably knowledgeable to have enough insight to know how to manipulate 300 million people in the right way (for their advantage). They would have to know how millions and millions of people would react to a given story, and know the upsides and downsides of all their media manipulations. They would have to be unnaturally imaginative, insightful, ingenious, clever, inventive -- all the time, for decades on end.

99.999% of the population, including the wealthiest people, just aren't that clever. wise, smart, ingenious, insightful, inventive, or anything else. Besides, we know there are simpler ways of controlling people. Like the police, like bread and circuses, like debt, and so on. Privileged people, and this certainly applies to wealthy parasites, do not seem to have their heads screwed on very well.

Having said all that, the way stories are shaped into narratives does affect the way people think. It isn't so much the content of the story as the form of the narrative. For instance, the stories about shootings I hear follow the "crazy behavior" narrative. We hear on the news, for example (and this is an actual example) that some guys drove by a corner in the black ghetto and opened fire at a group of children. "Crazy. Bizarre. Irrational. Stupid. But that's what happens down there. They are insane."

Well, it is kind of insane, but there was probably more to the actual story. We only heard the narrative about crazy black youths shooting children as they drove by. Another situation here in Mpls: Someone had gotten into a fight at a party and had gotten hurt. The police were called; an ambulance and police arrived. While the EMRs were dealing with the injury and loading the injured into the ambulance, some guy from the party was doing something (never made clear) to interfere with the medics, and was shot. Dead.

Big uproar. Black Lives Matter has been shutting down freeways, the airport, subways, bridges, etc.

Nobody knows (or isn't saying) what this guy actually was doing. All we hear on the news is the narrative of the irrational, "Crazy black guy was interfering with ambulance and was shot." It may very well be the case that the guy was crazy. Don't know. But nobody in the media has been able, or willing, to go out there and question people and try to develop a rational narrative of what happened.

All news stories are not like this. A lot of the stories follow a narrative form where "real problems lead to unfortunate results". Like, a building owner cut corners on fire safety and the building burnt down. Or a house was set on fire in order to collect insurance. Or the gas company had been negligent and a gas leak had caused the house to explode. Cause and effect. They don't just say, "Terrible, a building exploded on Third Street this evening." or "A car came out of nowhere and crashed into the store." No, buildings explode for a reason, and cars don't just appear out of nowhere and crash into store windows. There are causes, and these are usually detailed. It's a difference in narrative.

Much different than the ghetto drive by shooting. Oh hum, another crazy drug dealer/gang banger/... whatever flipping out. Next!

While I'm talking about crazy narratives, a lot of what I hear about the Middle East follows a pretty shallow narrative. "Moslems in X country are blowing up women and children in markets, parks, etc." It's all religious bigotry. They're all crazy." (They don't say they are all crazy -- one infers that.) Take Assad in Syria. They never tell us why people are against Assad. Why is Assad doing what he is doing? These people are not (possibly) all crazy. Presumably there is more at stake than just petty religious bigotry.

It is difficult for people to make sense of what they hear when news stories about real events are structured in such a way that the active agents involved don't seem to have apparent and rational reasons for behaving the way they do.

You got me with the middle east thing. I forgot how selective I am about that. As I matter of course I always tell people that I don't believe pretty much anything I hear about the middle east, and consider it mostly war propaganda. I work with a guy from Iraq, got to see him today, in fact. His name is Osama, but he of course has gone by Sam now for years. Moved her in the early nineties I think, but has an accent. I also once worked with a tiny Iranian guy, that spent time in Russia before Canada. When I was working with him, he went to visit his Parents in Iran, and on the flight back there were an layover in NYC, and they deported his wife for not having Canadian citizenship, and split up his twins. I knew a Muslim girl in Halifax too, though she married a muslim and was a white Canadian. I got her to show me her hair, lol.

Maybe there are a lot of evil terrorists over there, and lots of terrible shit, but we don't seem to be doing anything about it, and the way the news, and mainstream media portrays things, even making them our new go to movie villains, when the Nazis or Russians aren't available, neither of which you can really tell by looking at them that they aren't from here. All I know is that it makes people racist, and I don't like it. I have no interest in hearing anything about the middle east, or middle easterners unless it's about them being normal fucking people. That's all I've seen in my life.

While I'm talking about crazy narratives, a lot of what I hear about the Middle East follows a pretty shallow narrative. "Moslems in X country are blowing up women and children in markets, parks, etc." It's all religious bigotry. They're all crazy." (They don't say they are all crazy -- one infers that.) Take Assad in Syria. They never tell us why people are against Assad. Why is Assad doing what he is doing? These people are not (possibly) all crazy. Presumably there is more at stake than just petty religious bigotry.

It is difficult for people to make sense of what they hear when news stories about real events are structured in such a way that the active agents involved don't seem to have apparent and rational reasons for behaving the way they do. — Bitter Crank

One of the very common alternative narratives has the same effect, structures real events in the same way, and is equally shallow. The idea is that the acts of ISIS, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Palestinian terrorists are the rage of the oppressed, that the West (and its allies) has made them crazy. It ignores the logic of Islamism and how it fits historically in the specific circumstances of the Middle East.

Well maybe you consider it shallow because you don't understand the specific circumstances in the Middle East. If you actually read the scholarship on the relation between Western intervention and the Islamic Terrorist groups (respected scholars like William Polk, Robert Pape, and Scott Attran for instance, along with many others) you wouldn't think that the so-called alternative narratives are shallow at all but backed by significant empirical evidence and analysis, and their analysis is not ideological but scientific in essence.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/10/u-s-war-on-terror-has-increased-terrorism.html

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/11/17/falling-into-the-isis-trap/

like at all — Saphsin

Speak English boy.

Otherwise, those links don't contradict what I said, and I've been very impressed with Scott Atran's analysis in particular.

Hmm? Maybe I misunderstood the intentions of your words then (if so, I apologize for coming to rash assumptions) or the way your words were constructed were misleading (before you clarify yourself, this is what appears to me).

Since you argued that the alternative narratives to the mainstream media were equally shallow seemed to me to suggest that much of terrorism has its roots in Islam more or as deeply than as an outraged reaction to Western invasion & occupation. I think this is empirically false. The willingness of peasants in remote villages who formerly refused to join terrorist groups to partake in terrorism only after Drone Attacks lead to casualties in their families and communities (over 90% of the casualties Drone Attacks consist of killing innocent civilians that are not even the designated targets) is one illustration of such a case. For these people I think it's true. It has little to nothing to do with Islam but Western Oppression that has made them participate in Terrorist Organizations. Even if Islam tends to fit in somehow, how is such a narrative "equally shallow"

Again I might have misunderstood your intentions or you may be wrong, so I'll just wait for your explanation.

If you read that research more carefully you'll see that what it shows is that recent Western intervention has opened up space for the spread of terrorist activities that have a special character owing to the historical development of Islamic culture and ideology. Throwing gay people off the top of buildings, destroying pre-Islamic cultural heritage, trying to wipe out non-conformist sects, or executing boys for listening to pop music, are not ordinary, general, knee-jerk reactions to destructive foreign inerference. Indeed they are not primarily attacks on the West at all, except insofar as it is seen to represent modernity and pluralism.

And your story about peasants rising up against the West by joining terrorists is too simplistic to be a useful general characterization of what has been happening.

Since you argued that the alternative narratives to the mainstream media were equally shallow — Saphsin

I did not argue that. Although I would argue that many of the competing narratives are equally shallow, I specifically described the particular narrative I was criticizing.

Oh I wouldn't go far to completely deny that, I thought you were talking mostly about the incentives that initially drove the proliferation of terrorist organizations and attacks on Western cities, to which the mainstream media highly distorts the truth of. The alternative narrative to the truth behind that is not equally shallow in my opinion.

I think it was because I didn't make sure what you meant by "acts" of the terrorist organizations.

the incentives that initially drove the proliferation of terrorist organizations and attacks on Western cities — Saphsin

Do you mean the incentives of the people who did it? Again, if you look at the history of al Qaeda and ISIS you'll see that the incentive was not centrally to resist Western military interference.

I said the incentives that drove the proliferation of the terrorist organizations and surge in terrorist attacks. If we're talking the incentives of the organizations, Jason Burke convincingly goes through the research that Islamic militancy in organizations like Al-Qaeda is not centrally controlled, except that one organized attack by Osama Bin Laden. It was never more than a collaboration of twenty or thirty militants that were indirectly associated to each other with many of the terrorist acts attributed to them.

Yes, I've been readng Burke's excellent New Threat from Islamic Militancy, and I don't have any serious issues with what he says.

What I'm trying to say is probably not that far from what you believe (and what you're trying to say to me) I'm probably just having a hard time communicating what I mean by incentives and reactions as a result of Western Imperialism and who they belong to. I'm not saying that the emotions and rationales that occupy their minds are in the narrative that you criticize.

Even if I don't think Islamic terrorism can be seen as anti-Imperialist resistance, the West is crucial to the Islamist narrative. In that narrative, Islam has been humiliated (militarily) and overtaken (in terms of success, wealth and power) by a morally degraded culture.

Funny how the second most used language to look up gay porn is Arabic. Making something taboo, the stronger the powers that be attempt to enforce an unreasonable restraint the more interesting it will become. The reason areas like Japan don't have as progressive LGBT rights is arguably because it was never opposed as strongly as it was in the west. There are 1.3 billion Muslims, to paint this as "Islamic" is obviously highly simplistic, and promotes the racism and terrorism many middle easterners experience everyday, just trying to live there lives, and not even suicide bomb anyone at all.

There are, granted, more thoughtful appraisals of world events than what one sees on ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, Fox, PBS, New York Times, et al. However, I don't really think government-university publications count as "part of the media". Not being "part of the media" doesn't place them on Mount Olympus; the tanks of policy wonks have their own virtues and vices apart from "the media" which is another good topic.

If you read that research more carefully you'll see that what it shows is that recent Western intervention has opened up space for the spread of terrorist activities that have a special character owing to the historical development of Islamic culture and ideology. — jamalrob

One of the very common alternative narratives has the same effect, structures real events in the same way, and is equally shallow. The idea is that the acts of ISIS, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Palestinian terrorists are the rage of the oppressed, that the West (and its allies) has made them crazy. It ignores the logic of Islamism and how it fits historically in the specific circumstances of the Middle East. — jamalrob

It seems to me that the average peasant in the Middle East would be hard pressed to decide whether Western imperialism and colonialism (with its attendant flaws) had oppressed them less, about the same, or more than their home-grown, traditional, usual, and customary oppressive tyrants and corrupt, rotten, deadbeat regimes.

Some ME governments are better than others, of course, but a good many of them are a malignant burden on their populations. Obviously this is not unique to the Middle East. Corrupt, incompetent, and oppressive regimes exist on all continents. And clearly, ISIS, al Qaeda, et al are not liberation movements inspired by ideas of freedom, liberty, equality, democracy, enlightened values, or any of "that crap that the West keeps trying to force down their throats" (as one narrative would have it).

Speaking of terrible news no one seems to be talking about, you know that a transgender person is murdered in the world, one every about 27 hours? Almost fifty in the first month of 2016 in brazil alone -- and these are probably low numbers. Complete systematic misgendering of trans people in reported crimes prevents clear accurate numbers. The numbers have been seemingly skyrocketing in the last few years, but it is more likely that misgendering has just been less prevalent by police and in the media over the last couple of years.

Funny how the second most used language to look up gay porn is Arabic. Making something taboo, the stronger the powers that be attempt to enforce an unreasonable restraint the more interesting it will become. The reason areas like Japan don't have as progressive LGBT rights is arguably because it was never opposed as strongly as it was in the west. There are 1.3 billion Muslims, to paint this as "Islamic" is obviously highly simplistic, and promotes the racism and terrorism many middle easterners experience everyday, just trying to live there lives, and not even suicide bomb anyone at all. — Wosret

As far as I can make sense of this it looks like you might be responding to my use of the term "Islamic terrorism". On that assumption...

If I talk about Christian fundamentalists, will you tell me that there are billions of Christians who are not fundamentalists? If I talk about Hindu terrorists, i.e., those who terrorize Muslims and Sikhs in the name of Hinduism and precisely because they are not Hindus, will you tell me that it's got nothing to do with Hinduism? Or more generally, if I talk about, say, a Ugandan dictator, will you tell me that most Ugandans believe in democracy and that I'm encouraging anti-Ugandan prejudice?

I think you've forgotten how language works. ISIS and al Qaeda are religious fundamentalist organizations (or loose affiliations if you prefer) committed to the use of terror to enforce a strict version of Islam, thus it's Islamic terrorism. There's nothing Islamophobic about saying so. The charge of Islamophobia is often effectively now an attempt to stifle debate. Some of the those who are currently being most vocally accused of Islamophobia are Muslims and ex-Muslims who are speaking up against Islamic conservatism and extremism, like Raheel Raza and Maajid Nawaz.

If one thinks that the terrorists are going by a questionable interpretation of Islam--as today's Popes think about much of what the Spanish Inquisition did--then it is of no help in promoting a peaceful interpretation to deny that the extremist interpretation is an interpretation at all, i.e., to deny it has anything to do with Islam.

On the other hand I do agree that the American media generalizes far too much, and encourages a fear and suspicion of Muslims in general, and can be very propagandist in nature.

Yes, I would tell you that. Some people are assholes, and often about the very same issues, from entirely different foundations. One wishes to simplify the issue, and find the source of superstition and tribalism in a scapegoat, and preferably a scapegoat that they feel no affiliation with, and don't mind slaughtering. It is naive, and distancing. Religion isn't the cause of prejudice, tribalism, violence, and hatred. Pretty sure that religions actually don't come from extra human sources, people made that shit up out of their own pre-existing prejudices, and in contextual response to things and people they deemed disgusting, enemies, or too different.

Carl Sagan makes a good case for why religion has little of anything to do with superstition and tribalism in Demon Haunted World.

You must have misunderstood, because what you are saying is absurd. Using an adjective to qualify a noun in no way implies that other nouns correctly qualified by that adjective are also associated with that noun. To say "Swedish knife" does not imply that all Swedish things are knives.

This is the problem with political correctness. People are not thought to be able to understand or use language properly, or the risks are thought to be too great in letting them do it freely, so all ambiguity is pre-emptively removed.

The problem you're concerned about--and I would have thought this was obvious--is the idea that all or most Muslims are terrorists or are sympathetic to terrorism. Focussing on a usefully descriptive term like "Islamic terrorism" is silly.

But let me ask: if it were shown that sympathy for ISIS and Islamic ultra-conservativism were significantly higher among Muslims than among other people, would you want to suppress this fact for fear it would cause bigotry?