Fox News Being Accused To Assist ISIS, Embeds Jordanian Pilot Death Video on Website

Fox news is now the only American media organisation to embed the video of ISIS burning a captured Jordanian pilot to death on its website. The video is extremely graphic but in pursuit of the truth, it is often necessary to view graphic material. When FOX news does it though, it’s most likely just for the shock value and part of their war against their enemy’s agenda.

The video shows the death of Muadh al-Kasasbeh, the captured Jordanian pilot mentioned earlier.

In a statement Fox said: “After careful consideration, we decided that giving readers of FoxNews.com the option to see for themselves the barbarity of ISIS outweighed legitimate concerns about the graphic nature of the video. Online users can choose to view or not view this disturbing content.” Like I said before, they wanted to elicit an emotional response, rather than a logical one. Emotional= moar bombs. Logical= stop funding Syrian rebels who often ally with ISIS if you don’t understand what the heck is going on there.

It seems this awesome display of journalistic integrity had, as usual, some unintended side-effects: Twitter accounts belonging to ISIS supporters are sharing the video around, linking directly to Fox. One such account tweeted boastfully that “Whoever is looking for the al-Furqan version [of the video], here it is and it cannot be deleted because it is on an American network.” Al-Furqan is ISIS’ media outlet. Awesome, Fox finally gets the viewers it has always been craving….. Young, very very religious and not averse to burning a few people alive.

It seems YouTube and Facebook are not putting up with any of Fox’s shenanigans. YouTube had removed at least one link to the video and a spokesperson for Facebook had told the Guardian that it would remove any link to the video.

Most mainstream news organisations chose to only use still images, while “terrorism analysts” roundly criticized Fox.

The executive director of the “Terror Asymmetrics Project on Strategy” (quite the mouthful), Malcolm Nance is part of a “Tactics and Radical Ideology” think-tank (that’s a lot of err… credentials… for someone that is about to state the obvious) and serves as an expert on counter-terrorism and radical extremism told the Guardian that by posting the video Fox News was propagating “exactly what ISIS wants to propagate”.

“The whole value of terror is using the media to spread terror,” he said.

A senior associate in homeland security and terrorism at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Rick Nelson, said that posting the video actually strengthens ISIS. Nope, not   obvious at all.

“They’re a terror organisation,” he said. “They seek to strike terror in the hearts and minds of people globally, and by perpetuating these videos and putting them out there into the internet, it certainly expands the audience and potential effects.”

“These groups need a platform, and this gives them a platform,” he added.

Nance told the Guardian that showing the video would also further endanger other hostages, including the 26-year-old American aid worker currently held by the militant group.

“[Fox News] are literally – literally – working for al-Qaida and ISIS’s media arm,” he added.

“They might as well start sending them royalty checks.”

So, in conclusion, Fox has joined the ranks of terror organisations. I KNEW it!

In all seriousness though, I believe that videos like this should be examined thoroughly by people who can stomach it in order to ensure that our media organisations don’t just make up stuff and feed it to us. Remember Iraq? On the other hand, one should never play into the hands of the terrorist organisations of ISIS and Fox by feeling the fear that they so desperately want to play.