Deliberate misreporting or do they miss the gorilla?

The Torch laments western journalists' propensity to propagate Taliban propaganda:

I'm tired of our journalists willfully ignoring the fact that they're not just observing the war, they're affecting it with their reporting. I'm bone-tired of them refusing to take steps to ensure their powerful voice isn't used against the very system of government that allows them such unfettered speech in the first place.

Amen to that!

But is their bias against western civilization keeping them from seeing the gorilla? Check out this interesting tidbit from the ridiculous Richard Dawkins' latest book. Mike Potemra writes over at The Corner:

I was just reading Richard Dawkins’s forthcoming book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution and found something quite inspiring. Dawkins describes an experiment conducted by Professor Daniel J. Simons at the University of Illinois:

Half a dozen young people standing in a circle were filmed for 25 seconds tossing a pair of basketballs to each other. . . . Before being shown the film, we are told that we have a task to perform, to test our powers of observation. We have to count the total number of times balls are passed from person to person. . . . After showing the film and collecting the counts, the experimenter drops his bombshell. “And how many of you saw the gorilla?" The majority of the audience looks baffled: blank. The experimenter then replays the film, but this time tells the audience to watch in a relaxed fashion without trying to count anything. Amazingly, nine seconds into the film a man in a gorilla suit strolls nonchalantly to the centre of the circle of players, pauses to face the camera, thumps his chest . . . and then strolls off. . . . He is there in full view for nine whole seconds – more than one third of the film — and yet the majority of the witnesses never see him.

There is an important epistemological point to be made here, to the effect that crude empiricism can, by limiting the questions we ask, dull our overall intellectual perceptiveness. (This is not, of course, the immediate lesson Dawkins draws.)

Of course Dawkins wouldn't see God in the universe, eh?

But back to the journalists, in a postmodern world where there is no objective truth, where one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and evil is only subjective, of course there is no impetus to get beyond the lies, as long as they tend to support your anti-western bias.