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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
Amerigo
Published Letters: 2050 Editor's Choice: 76
it is not as bad as it seems.
Never having watched American Idol, I decided to see what it was all about, and took 10 minutes out of my life to see Sanjaya performing on YouTube.
OK, he can't sing at all, but he has nice teeth and would appeal to young girls. When Beatlemania was at its zenith in England in the early sixties of the last century, girls would go to the shows and scream continuously, and wet their pants, so they definitely were not listening to the singing.
So there is no mystery, he is just getting the votes from young girls and their grandmothers.
I think what the author meant was that the sailors looked suprisingly well-dressed, seeing that Iran is not known as a producer of business suits or as a country where this style of dress prevails.
It is notoriously difficult to get a good fit in business suits unless they are made-to-measure, so the Iranians must have gone to some trouble to get the British naval "team" kitted out. Possibly this was helped by the fact that the hostages were all in good shape.
All-in-all the Iranians have come out of this escapade in pretty good shape, making a stark contrast to those barbaric nations that torture their captives. Considering that this seems to have started with the Iranian gunboats making a piratical incursion into Iraqi waters, this is a remarkable outcome.
I don't know what you mean by "illuminating". Although this guy's title is "Senior Vice President of ABC News" his resume actually suggests that he is a PR flack and not a journalist.
If the story turns out to be wrong, will he accept responsibility and resign? I thought not.
I am sure that ABC News has well-qualified reporters with unimpeachable integrity, but the same can be said of the BBC or Al Jazeera, and they don't necessarily always get the story right.
The fact that the journalist behind the story got an award means nothing. Was this a Nobel Prize for Journalism open to all the journalists in the world and adjudicated by an international panel, or was it some kind of incestuous, in-house domestic award?
Thanks for replying to my point about Schneider being a PR flack.
I understand what you are saying, and you are quite right, but surely he represents the corporate party line rather than the point of view of on-the-ground reporters. While this certainly does illuminate ABC News' lack of public accountability, it does nothing to illuminate why their top brass considered that this story was accurate, or indeed whether they did truly believe it was accurate. That point is just as obscure as ever. And that is my point. The job of a PR flack is to obscure, not to illuminate.
As another writer says:
Is a source at least a "high-ranking Administration official*? A knowledgeabe NGO investigator on the ground in Iran**? A military or intelligence staffer on the hill or at the Pentagon or CIA?*** Heck, do they have an actual source, someone who works in the Iranian nuclear program, has a relationship with someone who does, or can actually see and is able to interpret appropriate satellite and other intelligence on this subject?
Right on. These are the questions I would want to put to the ABC News press officer.
People in different countries probably have different interpretations of what trusting the media means.
To give one simple example, when I lived in Bermuda many blacks trusted the TV News,which had black presenters much more than the local newspaper, which was white owed, had predominantly white journalists, and even an editor called White.
What we, the public, see persistently on US TV news and current affairs programs, presidential press conferences, Meet The Press etc. is journalists persistently failing to ask the obvious and necessary questions that we would want to ask.
For example when Cheyney said that he knew the Iraqis had WMD and he knew where they were, journalists should have been jumping up and down demanding to know why this information was not given to the UN weapons inspectors. Or holding Bush's feet to the fire over his campaign promise in the 2nd presidential debate vs Gore:
"Maybe I'm missing something here. I mean, we're going to have kind of a nation building core from America? Absolutely not."
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The Maine fight was supposed to be the dress rehearsal for repealing California's Prop. 8 -- but gay marriage lost
Once one obtains Seriousness credentials in the Washington media, they are irrevocable no matter one's conduct.
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