Once in a while you get an opportunity to make yourself heard, and make a real difference in the world. Today is one of those days.

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably sick and tired of hearing nothing but bad news about Muslims and Islam… practically every day. If it’s not a terrorist destroying the message, meaning, spirit and image of Islam, it’s a media that can’t seem to get enough of making innocent, believing, peace-making Muslims like you and me, look like the bad guys.

Well, today you have a rare opportunity to change that, for good:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/cameron_tame_the_murdoch_mafia/?cYauVcb

Why The Media Gives Muslims A Hard Time (And How They Get Away With It)

You see, if 1 man owns all of the media in the UK, or even just a majority of it, only bad things can happen. Democracy dies. Your voice never gets heard because it’s drowned out by the much louder, much more influential voice of the man who owns the media. As you probably already know, that man is Rupert Murdoch. And today, for the first time, you have an opportunity to challenge his power.

When one person, or a very small group of people own the media, they need to sell news, and they do this by creating narratives. A narrative is a story or message that the news hints towards, but to the most part doesn’t outright say. The dominant narrative that exists today is “Muslims are bad guys and terrorists”.

Intelligent people who read between the lines can see that this is not true. It’s just a story. The world doesn’t actually work that way. Good guys and bad guys do not exist in well-defined boxes. Terrorists and bad guys come in all shapes, sizes, religions and ideologies. But, as we know from psychology, even intelligent people will start to believe a message that’s repeated enough times and loudly enough.

An alternative, more true narrative would be “Despite the abhorrent actions of a numerically insignificant few insane criminals, Islam is a religion of Peace, a Muslim is a peace-maker by definition, and the extent to which Muslims follow the teachings of their religion is the extent to which they bring more Peace into the world.” But that’s not the narrative you’ll ever hear in the main-stream media, as long it’s owned by a handful of ‘media-mafia’.

How You Can Change The Way The World Sees Islam…

On Thursday last week, the long-awaited Leveson report into the phone hacking scandals endorsed what many have been campaigning for all year: place limits on media ownership so no one man can ever grow big enough again to bully police and politicians and break laws with impunity. But today this win is under threat…

Rupert Murdoch’s puppet, the Prime Minister, went into spin mode to crush its recommendations. But this time, everyone’s on our side — from Leveson to Labour to the Lib Dems, there’s broad agreement that we need ownership limits to make sure no media mafia ever rises again. MPs will be debating how to fix our press in parliament today, so let’s make sure Cameron sees massive public support for what’s really needed to fix our democracy.

Sign the Avaaz petition now calling for a rule that no one can own more than a fifth of our media and send to ten friends…

http://www.avaaz.org/en/cameron_tame_the_murdoch_mafia/?cYauVcb
This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to fix our media from one that spies on us to one that serves us. The report into the phone hacking scandals, known as the Leveson Report, is stronger than many people expected. In addition to calling for a new regulator backed by law to rein in press misdeeds, the report also emphasizes the critical need for media plurality and an equally tough regime to enforce it.

Cameron and some in his party are opposing strong reforms, claiming that any regulation of the press inhibits free speech. But that’s the beauty of media ownership limits — they don’t regulate the content of speech at all; instead, they foster free speech by ensuring there’s always a broad range of voices speaking and no one person can dominate the flow of information. That’s why all sides should be able to endorse it.

Sign the petition now and send it to ten friends. Let’s let the three major party leaders hear us loud and clear: media ownership caps need to be part of any deal:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/cameron_tame_the_murdoch_mafia/?cYauVcb

Click the link above and the decision makers who count will see that the public wants the media to be free, open, and democratic.