by Jeff Huber
I’m running behind as a result of meeting a pressing deadline. Here’s a preview of the essay I’ll have posted tomorrow (Wednesday) morning.
An interview experience with a segment of the foreign media brought home to me why the peace movement has completely lost whatever traction it had.
The call came: could I talk to them about the recent atrocity in Afghanistan. Which one? I said. Wait, we’ll send you the story, they replied.
So I got a link in the email and clicked and up popped a story at the web site of the UK’s Daily Mail.
The phone rang again. Yes, I got the link and found the story. No, I just started reading it. Well, could I be ready to tape the interview in five minutes? No, I needed at least half an hour to read the story and see what else has been written about the incident before I care to go on record with any sort of opinion about it. The person at the other end seemed disappointed by that, but okay, she’d call back in a half hour.
“U.S. bombing wipes out Afghan village from map,” read the headline. If you’re thinking something sounds not quite right about that statement, you’re correct. Whether you’re speaking American or English English, bombings wipe out villages or they wipe them from the map, but they needn’t do both in the same sentence. If they do, one has reason to suspect there’s something not quite right about the journalism “professionals” who wrote the sentence and published it in an international venue.
Wikipedia says the Daily Mail was Britain’s first daily newspaper aimed at the “lower-middle-class market.” According to a December 2004 survey, Wikipedia tells us, 53% of Daily Mail readers voted for the Conservative Party, compared to 21% for Labour and 17% for the Liberal Democrats. Wikipedia also informs us that Science writer Ben Goldacre of The Guardian has described the Daily Mail as "the home of the scare story."
So we can tentatively surmise that the Daily Mail is at best as credible as FOX News. A lot of people say as much about Wikipedia, but a lot of the people who say that aren’t happy with what Wikipedia says about them. Moreover, authors of Wikipedia articles tend to cite their sources—the article on the Daily Mail has 73 footnotes, the vast majority of them hyperlinked.
The author of the Daily Mirror story, Lewis Bazwell, cite zero sources.
More on Wednesday…
