And a shameless huckster shall lead them*

Terry Jones, the extremist pastor in Florida who threatened to burn Qurans on September 11, says he will not burn the books after all. Instead will fly to New York City on Saturday to talk with Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf about a proposal to move Rauf's planned Islamic center, known as Park51, farther away from Ground Zero.

Imam Muhammad Musri of Central Florida brokered the deal.

I guess this means that Pastor Jones, who thinks "Islam is the Devil," now represents all those politicos (Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, et al) who called for the community center to be moved. 

Also, news organizations will no longer have to deal with the discomfort of figuring out how to cover the Quran burnings.

*Update: The "deal" here seems less certain as the hours pass. Wouldn't be surprised if the Quran-burning stunt was rescheduled.

How to cover a book burning

Whatever ridiculous forces put a fringe Florida pastor on our front pages and TV screens, and into the mouths of our president and top Pentagon officials, there's little doubt that Terry Jones' planned Quran burning on Sept. 11 will be covered. Indeed, the story has already taken root in the Muslim world, and the reverberations are very real.

So how should a news organization cover this publicity stunt?

The Associated Press has a memo outlining its intentions, including a policy that the news service "will not distribute images or audio that specifically show Qurans being burned, and will not provide detailed text descriptions of the burning."

 Poynter ethics leader Kelly McBride offers her take here, noting that even ugly events like this demand coverage: "[P]art of our job as journalists is to document events. When we ignore acts of hate, no one has the opportunity to react, to condemn them or to proclaim a different belief system."