Sweet Nothings: Lies my paper told me

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/6027

Sweet Nothings: Lies my paper told me
by Allan Uthman | Mar 12 2007

For all the complaining I do about deception in the media, I have to admit I get a giddy thrill out of reading it. As with any addiction, I’ve developed an increasing tolerance and require an ever purer dosage of insidious mendacity and appeals to conformity to get off. Now I have a special appreciation for the most extreme variety of corporate press dishonesty: pieces written solely to impugn reality.

There’s a pattern that articles seem to follow when some poor bootlicking journalist is tasked with refuting an objectionably true piece of information, despite having no coherent case against it. Usually, the majority of the piece will assess the offending claim and generally summarize the evolution of the controversy. This first 80% or so of the article will read like a regular, reasonably evenhanded piece of journalism, perhaps even containing sympathetic quotes from the suspect claim’s proponents. Then, having nearly filled their word-count and still at a loss for a decent argument, the author will make a wild u-turn and hurry through a brief, entirely subjective, incomplete and patently idiotic dismissal of whatever point they were just explaining, a tacked-on “there, there” to soothe their tender, easily rattled readers. It reeks of editorial interference, but what’s really remarkable is how clumsy and transparent the process is.

I recognized this pattern last year, when the New York Times addressed the fact that, despite having been quoted as saying “Israel must be wiped off the map” by every man, woman and child in the United States over the past year, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a frequent victim of deliberate mistranslation, never actually said that. A correct translation, according to many native Farsi speakers, goes something like, “The regime occupying Israel must vanish from the pages of history,” and was a direct quotation of Ayatollah Khomeini.

The article, by Times deputy foreign editor Ethan Bronner (“Just how far did they go, those words against Israel,” 6/11/06), is really something special. Of course, a regime—that is, a government—vanishing from the page of time doesn’t evoke the apocalyptic image that a nation wiped off the map does, and this specific misquotation has done probably more than any other piece of domestic psy-ops to vilify Iran. It’s an effective lie, so it must be saved, and it’s Bronner’s job to do it.

Despite Bronner’s obvious reluctance to go along, the facts practically drag him kicking and screaming toward the inexorable conclusion that, in fact, Juan Cole and the Guardian’s Jonathan Steele have it right; that Ahmadinejad didn’t even say the words “Israel,” “wipe” or “map.” Bronner sprinkles a generous portion of bullshit throughout the piece, stating that the verb translated as “wipe” is transitive when it is intransitive, and even arguing that the fact that the Iranian president actually said “the regime occupying Jerusalem” instead of “Israel” makes the statement worse, because Ahmadinejad “refuses even to utter the name Israel.” That is some amazing spin, I have to admit. But Bronner still cannot deny that “map” is wrong and significantly different in tone than “pages of history,” even offering weak excuses for the error, and at least acknowledges that Ahmadinejad referred to Israel’s government, not the whole of Israel. He really can’t avoid decimating the original misquotation, which was and still is so oft-repeated in the media.

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[NI4NI]

1. Its amazing how American media members

can translate Farsi so fluently.

It also must be very confusing to most Saudi Arabians since their geographical maps and textbooks are only being printed without any designation that an Israeli state actually exists.
(sarcasm)

Creating big bad boogie men and making up fictional enemies like Ahmadinejad and Chavez is a must; Who else has oil?

[intheflow]

2. K&R n/t