When a CBS News segment featuring a focus group of American Muslims aired Friday, it highlighted their relationship to terrorism, with a particular fixation on how much responsibility they felt to condemn terrorist attacks.
But in interviews with The Intercept, two Muslim Americans who took part in the group complained that CBS edited out parts of the discussion where they raised their own concerns — including critiques of U.S. militarism, surveillance, and entrapment.
They also said that Frank Luntz, the right-wing pollster who led the focus group, silenced members of the group when they criticized discriminatory U.S. government policies.
Sarah Harvard, a New York City journalist who was in the group, wrote a lengthy Facebook (Here) post after the airing of the CBS segment where she noted that the total time spent filming was around an hour — and that the most telling exchanges were cut out.
Harvard wrote that several participants expressed criticisms of U.S. government policy toward Muslims, such as “entrapment cases and surveillance programs” as well as institutional racism. None of that made it into the segment.
Luntz told CBS news anchors after the segment aired that the focus group had expressed “very deep frustration that nobody’s listening to them … that they are the focus of all sorts of conversations, many of them negative, and that they don’t have a voice. That they’re being attacked by the leading presidential candidate [sic] and no one is hearing a response. They were so grateful to be gathered in that room, to have a chance to speak out.” Cont. (Video)
In 2010 Luntz was given the 'Lie Of The Year Award' by PolitiFact for the phrase 'government takeover' to refer to healthcare reform.
Story from - The Intercept
Image from - Wikimedia Commons
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