Weekend Question 2: How About Some Truth in Packaging in Compromised News Reports?
That phrase explains why I believe dispatches from less-than-free countries would almost seem to need a qualifier. Allah explained on Wednesday, as he expressed exasperaton over Reuters’ reporting from the Holocaust-denier conference in Tehran:
None of these places grant true press freedom. Reuters’ reporters toe the tyrants’ line, either because they’re working for the tyrant or are under the tyrant’s heel. Reuters’ Western editors have to be aware of this, yet they do nothing about it. They publish the work of local stringers that amounts to official government (or insurgent, or Hezbollah) propaganda. We read such journalism coming from Iraq every day. When we challenge it, they sniff at us. But not at the crap their local stringers and scribes are doling out.
A prescription drug doesn’t come without instructions for proper use. Why shouldn’t news from less-than-free locations be handled similarly?
Would it be too difficult to point out, when it’s the case, in reports from a given country that “Country X places severe restrictions on press freedoms and Reuters dispatches from there must be viewed in that light”? Or “Reuters reporters covering the terrorist insurgency were escorted the entire time they were present, and operated under severe restrictions relating to what they could report”? I believe it’s irresponsible NOT to. If Country X or the terrorists doesn’t like that qualifier, fine; Reuters leaves Country X or cuts off contact with the terrorists. How difficult is that?
Of course (!), I’m not proposing this as a requirement. But because viewers, listeners, and readers have been conditioned for decades to believe that news reports, even from totalitarian countries, are objective if delivered by a “mainstream source,” I AM saying that to disabuse news users of that presumptive belief, professionally honest reports from such countries or in terrorists would routinely include such disclaimers.
They don’t. Why not? In the case of the Middle East, this is probably one reason.
