The Dubai Deal: The Vaguely Written Story That Started It All
Sixteen days out, it’s easy to see how what is described at Noel Sheppard’s NewsBusters post yesterday as the first story February 11 on the Dubai Deal got people so excited, and to suspect that it was written to do just that.
A few curiosities about the piece:
- Done on a Saturday (unusual for a piece of this nature), perhaps calculated to ensure maximum attention and minimal ability to follow-up.
- The opening sentence (”A company in the United Arab Emirates is poised to take over significant operations at six American ports as part of a corporate sale, leaving a country with ties to the Sept. 11 hijackers with influence over a maritime industry considered vulnerable to terrorism.”) is very clever, saying a lot while saying nothing. “Significant operations” is a pretty vague term. “Loading and unloand at terminals,” which is how it’s described at this National Review Media Blog post, is quite a bit different.
- Sticking with just the first sentence, “A country with ties to the Sept. 11 hijackers” is also nicely vague, designed to get the reader to think that the government funds terrorism, when it appears that the only “ties” to the country were same “ties” that most of us have to the USA: We live here.
There are many other examples of curious wording throughout the article that appear to make the deal seem bigger and more threatening than it is turning out to be.
Even Mr. Sheppard doesn’t blame the entire firestorm on one item, noting that Mainstream Media digging into the details has been week from the get-go, but it appears fair to say that the wording and timing of Ted Bidris’s AP piece weren’t designed to fully inform readers. Sheppard’s post also points out that Salon’s Walter Shapiro made the same point on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” yesterday.
If there’s a lesson in this, it would be “Dig first. Shout later.”
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UPDATE: Rush just after the 1PM ET hour said that the first article about the DPW deal was back in late October in The Wall Street Journal in a routinely written, just-the-facts piece about what was then a planned deal. He then found a Feb. 15, 2006 article that he said was the earliest one that led to the controversy, but he’s incorrect about that, given the above. Nevertheless, the big points are that the planned deal wasn’t a secret, the opposition has been ginned up, and that a lot of us (initially) fell for it.
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