Park 51/ Mosque

Battle B

1.     Assume that the documentary, The Man Behind the Mosque, provided an accurate and research-based perspective on how the “Ground Zero Mosque” became a story. Based on what you saw there, what steps can you remember the cable-news media covering the story taking to investigate who was actually behind the Mosque in terms of mission, goals, and funding?
- Based on what I saw in the video, the media reached out to Sherif El-Gamal, Pamela Geller, and Imam Feisal Adbul Rauf, and covered both sides of the debate.

2.    

     Who brought the story of the “Ground Zero Mosque” to Fox News, the station that broke the story and led coverage of the story?
-Pamela Geller

3.  

       It can be argued that much of the cable news coverage of the story was just that – coverage of a “story,” and how people felt about this “story,” rather than actual reporting.  Explain how we can see this at work
-You can see this work by they interviewed people strongly involved in the controversy, for example the people who lost loved ones in 9/11, and the man behind the Park 51 project, which can lead to biased opinions rather than actual facts.

4.    

     The journalists of Frontline included coverage of and interviews with the staff of Park 51 (the NYU grad and a couple other part-timers).  Do these individuals appear ever to have been interviewed on cable-news?
-No

5.     

      What sources did Cable news appear to rely on for knowledge and expertise about Islam?  How credible did you find these sources?  Why?
They appeared in the video to rely on Sherif and Imam Muhammad Musri.

6.     How relevant is the ownership of a media source for understanding its goals and how its goals may shape bias in its coverage? 
-Cable news relied on mostly on somewhat credible historians, however they were a little biased on the interpretations of Park 51/ Mosque.

7.     

      Who was, at the time of the Ground Zero Mosque story, the second largest shareholder in the News Corp?
-Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, a nephew of the Saudi king

8.    

         If you bring up the topic of the Ground Zero mosque today, many people might say something like, “Oh yeah . . . What ever happened to that?”  Think about it:  Given the level of urgency that was attached to the story, why did cable news just stop covering the story of the Mosque at Ground Zero?
-Fox news stopped covering this maybe because the people became uninterested and they didn’t want to bore that audience or because they want attention on them due to the controversy with Al-Waleed.