23 September 2007 @ 8:59AM >> Some folks at Reuters need to go back to school to learn what a metaphor is.

In a press conference, President Bush used a metaphor to explain why civilian leaders in the style of Nelson Mandela have not yet emerged from Iraqi society:

Part of the reason why there is not this instant democracy in Iraq is because people are still recovering from Saddam Hussein’s brutal rule. I thought an interesting comment was made when somebody said to me, I heard somebody say, where’s Mandela? Well, Mandela is dead, because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas.

Here’s how Reuters characterized that statement:

Nelson Mandela is still very much alive despite an embarrassing gaffe by U.S. President George W. Bush, who alluded to the former South African leader’s death in an attempt to explain sectarian violence in Iraq.

[...]

“I heard somebody say, Where’s Mandela?’ Well, Mandela’s dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas,” Bush, who has a reputation for verbal faux pas, said in a press conference in Washington on Thursday.

James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal website OpinionJournal.com theorizes on how such an obvious mischaracterization of President Bush’s statement could make it past the layers of editors that supposedly ensure quality control at Reuters:

Stupidity. The reporter was so bone-headedly literal-minded that he simply did not understand the rhetorical device Bush was employing.

Laziness. The reporter wasn’t actually at the press conference and didn’t bother to check the context of the quote.

Dishonesty. The reporter knew full well that Bush was speaking metaphorically and deliberately twisted his meaning in order to fit the stereotype that Bush “has a reputation for verbal faux pas.”

None of these possibilities are terribly flattering for Reuters. One might even venture to say that this piece is itself “an embarrassing gaffe”.

As a full-time employee of Reuters (I’m not on the editorial side; I write software), all I know is that this is the kind of underhanded reporting that makes me embarrassed to tell people where I work.

Update: By making the statement above, I may have violated corporate policy. And in retrospect, whatever opinion I may have of this editorial coverage, I am most decidedly not embarrassed to work at Reuters. The people with whom I work directly are top-notch, and I’m proud of the innovative work we’re doing. I just think that newsrooms can benefit from more intellectual diversity; it would help prevent errors like this from seeping into news coverage, and it would make news consumers less likely to perceive bias.

I decided to strike rather than delete the statement above because owning up to the transgression feels more honest than trying to send it down the memory hole.

8 May 2007 @ 8:35AM >> Media bias isn’t usually as obvious or explosive as, say, Dan Rather’s laughably bogus memos intended to torpedo a presidential campaign. Most often, slanted reporting is far more subtle. It takes the form of adjectives and adverbs that inject the reporter’s opinion, or in the form of sloppy errors that reflect erroneous beliefs held within certain ideological communities.

Let’s deal with the latter first. Reuters is an outlet that for some reason seems constitutionally incapable of accurately reporting the history of the Kyoto global warming treating. Here’s the latest example:

President George W. Bush pulled the United States out of Kyoto in 2001, arguing it would cost U.S. jobs and that it wrongly excluded 2012 goals for poorer nations such as China.

The only problem with that statement is that the Kyoto treaty was never ratified by the U.S., never signed by an American president, and never even submitted to the Senate for ratification. How can President Bush pull out of a treaty that the United States never approved? In fact, in 1997, the U.S. Senate unanimously voted against ratifying any treaty structured the way the Kyoto Protocol was, which may explain why then-President Clinton never signed the treaty or even bothered to submit it for ratification.

But in Reuters-land, the fact Kyoto was effectively rejected before President Bush took office doesn’t matter. In fact, Reuters’ record on this is so bad that the transgression is repeatedly caught by eagle-eyed readers who write in with corrections. The tepid explanation from editors was, “It appears our record on explaining this isn’t great.”

Yeah. It appears that way.

But maybe Reuters is just trying to keep up with rival AP, which has its own past problem getting this right.

Often, though, media bias takes forms not nearly as obvious as this blatant distortion of fact. Take, for example, this piece in the Washington Post:

In the heady opening weeks of the 110th Congress, the Democrats’ domestic agenda appeared to be flying through the Capitol: Homeland security upgrades, a higher minimum wage and student loan interest rate cuts all passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.

The word “upgrades” used above implies improvement, leading me to believe that the writers agree with the fact that the legislation passed by the newly-elected Democratic congress is in fact an improvement. I suspect that the people who voted against it did not necessarily see it as an upgrade. But if you’re a reader of that piece, you’re left with the impression that it is an uncontestable fact that the Democrats improved Homeland Security. The word “changes” would have worked just as well there, and it wouldn’t have attached the reporter’s opinion to the piece, either.

On rare occasions, media bias is outright: the newsman proclaims himself to support this or that cause. Sure, you sometimes see signs of a previous political prediliction. The titan of the Sunday morning talk shows, Tim Russert, worked for Mario Cuomo, the twelve-year governor of New York. Hardball talker Chris Matthews worked for Tip O’Neill, the former Speaker of the House, a man who spent nearly 40 years in Congress. And then there’s George Stephanopolous—now sitting in the chair once occupied by David Brinkley—who helped get Bill Clinton elected in 1992 and helped him weather many a scandal as well. The one common element among these giants of the establishment political media is that they all worked for Democrats.

Nothing wrong with that. In theory, adhering to the rules of strict objectivity should prevent any of those affiliations from making a difference. Assuming, of course, that the conscious mind alone is capable of shutting down the subsconscious mind in order to prevent a person’s own preferences from coloring the way they describe their view of the world to others.

Personally, I have a hard time believing that true objectivity is possible on a frequent enough basis that we shouldn’t consider junking the obsolete notion altogether. Instead of reporters pretending to be unbiased and only having that lie revealed in some subsequent scandal, why don’t they level with us and tell us where they stand? If anything, that would only make us more informed consumers of the product they’re selling.

If the ingredients of food we ingest should be listed so that we can be wise consumers, why shouldn’t the ideological components of the often opinion-tinged news also be listed? What’s wrong with us knowing the thought patterns of the people who string the words together and decide what images we see?

That’s why I applaud Brian Montopoli of CBS News for revealing his own beliefs. Montopoli was roundly criticized for sharing his personal view that the media should jump-start a national discussion on gun control. He laments the fact that “politicians who would prefer tighter laws, usually those on the left, don’t want to talk about the issue,” and hopes that Cho Sueng-Hui’s mass murder spree at Virginia Tech will give the media the proper “hook” to “focus on a huge issue”—gun control—”that isn’t going away any time soon.”

What Montopoli fails to realize is there is always a political debate raging about topics that still stir sharp divisions around the country. But when a national political consensus has been reached, it’s because people in both parties have recognized that the electorate clearly favors one position over another. Most Democrats who seek statewide or national office have given up on stricter gun penalties because they want to win elections.

So while I suspect that Montopoli’s true desire is to re-open a debate in the hopes of changing the outcome, I respect Montopoli for at least being up front about his beliefs. In the future, if I encounter Montopoli’s reporting on gun control, I’ll know a bit more about his motivation. And as news consumers, our ability to evaluate the product put out by the news media would be far superior if all reporters were as open about their views as Montopoli is.

Maybe the journalists of tomorrow recognize that exposing one’s own biases is the future of honest reporting:

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Robert S. Mueller was interrupted by protestors last night, during a speech at the Institute of Politics’ John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum.

Mueller, who was set to speak before a full crowd managed by tight security detail, had just begun his prepared remarks when the first protestor interrupted with screams from the second floor.

[...]

“We will never forget the role of the FBI in McCarthyism!” screamed Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky ‘07, who is also a Crimson editorial editor.

It should be noted that the Harvard Crimson is not an opinion paper. It’s the university’s daily student newspaper, and is a stepping-stone for the type of person who wants to move on to journalism school and eventually join the media elite.

So some day, Mr. Gould-Wartofsky may end up working at Reuters, or at CBS News.

And in all likelihood, he’d do very well there.

3 April 2007 >> A Reuters article entitled “Bush success vs. al Qaeda breeds long-term worries” starts out by saying:

Even as al Qaeda tries to rebuild operations in Pakistan, experts including current and former intelligence officials believe the group would have a hard time staging another September 11 because of U.S. success at killing or capturing senior members whose skills and experience have not been replaced.

And to illustrate this seemingly positive news, columnist David Morgan quotes a few experts, such as a guy who claims that al Qaeda is delighted to be on the receiving end of this “success”:

“If you’re looking at it from the cave, or wherever al Qaeda is hiding at the moment, you have to be pretty happy with the way the world is moving,” [former CIA agent Michael Scheuer] said.

Yes, the world rarely looks more sunny than from deep within a cave.

Morgan notes that although “Islamist groups have killed about 1,600 people in 53 attacks overseas since 2001,” the current trend is encouraging: “The number and lethality of the attacks have fallen off since 2004.”

So naturally, Morgan concludes the article on a positive note:

But IntelCenter chief executive Ben Venzke said the chance of an al Qaeda attack on U.S. soil has grown based on the militant network’s increasing references to the American homeland in public messages.

“Our leading thinking is that we are closer now to an attempt at a major attack in the United States than at any point since 9/11,” Venzke said.

As James Taranto points out:

There is no denying Venzke is right. If an al Qaeda attack is in the future, then it is closer now than at any point since 9/11. Venzke has stumbled onto something profound: the linear and sequential nature of time.

There are other disturbing implications as well. If you survived 9/11—and this is true no matter who you are—you are more than five years closer to death now than you were then.

1 February 2007 @ 7:07AM >> Yesterday, Reuters ran a story covering Fidel Castro’s health recovery under the title “Cubans relieved to see Castro on TV,” as though there are no Cubans wishing for an end to the Castro regime.

The article lauds Castro as a “firebrand” and quotes only pro-Castro citizens. Of course, on-the-record anti-Castro quotes may be hard to come by, considering that, throughout the decades, many tens of thousands of Castro critics have ended up imprisoned and executed. Yet this fact is conveniently omitted from the article; instead, the author tries to paint a picture of widespread respect for the dictator:

Whether they support his government or not, Cubans widely admire Castro, the only leader they have known since he took power in a 1959 revolution and turned Cuba into the Western Hemisphere’s only communist state.

The reporter provides no support for her assertion that “Cubans widely admire Castro” and does not mention of the fact that, far from admiring Castro, hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled his regime over the years, many of them risking death in rickety rafts just for a taste of freedom.

Not to be outdone in the blatant bias department, a competitor of Reuters published a piece whose opening sentence is so slanted that it requires no further comment. The Associated Press reports:

The House passed a $463.5 billion spending bill Wednesday that covers about one-sixth of the federal budget as Democrats cleared away the financial mess they inherited from Republicans.

(Hat tip: The Corner.)

18 October 2006 >> Several months after Reuters cameraman Adnan Hajj was caught doctoring photos to make an Israeli air strike look broader than it actually was, another Reuters cameraman has been arrested for apparently inciting Arab rioters to attack Israeli vehicles:

The cameraman, Imad Muhammad Intisar Boghnat, was arrested and charged as a result of violent riots in the Arab village of Bil’in, in the Modi’in region, on October 6, 2006. A videotape that the prosecution presented to the judge shows Boghnat encouraging and directing rioters in Bil’in to throw large chunks of rock at Israeli vehicles in such a way as to cause maximum damage. The accused is heard shouting, “Throw, throw!” and later, “Throw towards the little window!”

Boghnat is a resident of Bil’in, so it can be assumed that he either sympathized with the rioters or was attempting to stage the event for maximum visual impact, a tactic that isn’t a new phenomenon among the establishment media.

Either way, Reuters needs to take a serious look at the people it hires to cover events in the Middle East.

16 October 2006 @ 12:13PM >> When readers of this site hear that an old media company is embracing virtual reality, it might conjure up memories of Dan Rather and some not-quite-real documents. But in this case, one of the oldest media companies in the world is breaking new ground by dedicating a full-time reporter to covering the economic happenings within a virtual universe called Second Life:

In preparing to open a Reuters bureau on a bustling island, Adam Pasick has been introducing himself to residents and interviewing entrepreneurs. After finishing such interviews, Mr. Pasick often levitates for a moment, then flies over buildings.

Mr. Pasick, a Reuters technology reporter who was formerly earthbound with the news agency, is heading up Reuters’ first virtual news bureau inside the online role-playing game Second Life. While many independent journalists and bloggers have published inside such virtual worlds, Reuters is the first established news agency to dispatch a full-time reporter to do so.

[...]

“The fact that it’s in a virtual world doesn’t change things as much as you’d think,” said Mr. Pasick, 30, a Michigan native based in London. “It’s not any different than when Reuters opens up a bureau in a part of the world that has a fast-growing economy that we weren’t in before. The laws of supply and demand hold true, it has a currency exchange, people open businesses and get paid for goods and services.”

Scientific American has more:

Created by Linden Lab in San Francisco, Second Life is the closest thing to a parallel universe existing on the Internet. Akin to the original city-building game SimCity, Second Life is a virtual, three-dimensional world where users create and dress up characters, buy property and interact with other players.

More than 900,000 users have signed up to build homes, form neighborhoods and live out alternative versions of their lives in the 3D, computer-generated world. Players spend around US$350,000 a day on average, or a rate of $13 million a year. Usage is growing in rapid double-digit terms each month.

Players buy and sell goods and services using a virtual currency, known as Linden Dollars. An online marketplace allows users to convert the currency into real U.S. dollars, enabling users to earn real money from their activities.

Adam Pasick, a Reuters’ media correspondent based in London, will serve as the news organization’s first virtual bureau chief, using a personal avatar, or animated character, called “Adam Reuters,” in keeping with the game’s naming system.

“As strange as it might seem, it’s not that different from being a reporter in the real world,” Pasick said. “Once you get used to it — it becomes very much like the job I have been doing for years.”

Over the last month, I’ve been helping Reuters launch their presence in Second Life; I was brought in as an outside consultant and was responsible for much of the programming work. It’s been a fun gig, and has helped me fill the downtime while we work out distribution kinks with the upcoming film Indoctrinate U.

But what I found most intriguing is that an old-school company like Reuters would even consider embracing virtual reality, much less with this level of commitment. Ten years ago, such a move would likely have been met with derision by other establishment media companies. But covering online communities like Second Life makes sense: there’s real economic activity, and there are important issues to cover—such as how real-world laws will be applied to environments like Second Life.

It’s a sign of a changing world...both real and virtual.

9 August 2006 @ 5:59PM >> Reuters isn’t the only outfit publishing questionable photos that just so happen to benefit Hizbollah’s propaganda campaign.

One Lebanese woman is shown in two pictures from two different locations taken two weeks apart, but in each picture, she is said to be mourning the destruction of her home:

In the first photograph, taken by Reuters, a woman is seen in front of a bombed out building in Beirut. “A Lebanese woman wails after looking at the wreckage of her apartment, in a building, that was demolished by the Israeli attacks in southern Beirut,” Reuters said in its caption. The photo was dated July 22 2006.

A second photograph of a woman who looks exactly like the woman in the first Reuters image, even bearing the same scar on her left cheek, is then supplied by the Associated Press.

“A Lebanese woman reacts at the destruction after she came to inspect her house in the suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon,” the Associated Press caption claimed. The date accompanying the photograph is August 5 2006, and the scenes behind the woman are different to those of the July 22 photo.

The New York Times also got into the act with a different transgression—but quickly issued a correction after being found out. The correction reads:

A picture caption with an audio slide show on July 27 about an Israeli attack on a building in Tyre, Lebanon, imprecisely described the situation in the picture. The man pictured, who had been seen in previous images appearing to assist with the rescue effort, was injured during that rescue effort, not during the initial attack, and was not killed.

The correct description was this one, which appeared with that picture in the printed edition of The Times: After an Israeli airstrike destroyed a building in Tyre, Lebanon, yesterday, one man helped another who had fallen and was hurt.

I guess the Times figured out that there’s quite a difference between being killed and falling down.

Although the Times corrected this issue quickly, last Saturday, the paper ran a front-page above-the-fold photo from Adnan Hajj, the Reuters photographer busted (and fired) for passing along doctored pictures.

Reuters felt that Hajj’s work was questionable enough to remove all 920 photos he submitted from their catalog, but the Times still has not even mentioned the Reuters photo scandal or otherwise explained the paper’s use of his photos.

7 August 2006 @ 4:03PM >> Congratulations to Little Green Footballs and the blogosphere in general for once again exposing fraud in the establishment media.

Over the weekend, the Reuters news service—the one that wouldn’t allow the term terrorist to be used when describing the perpetrators of the September 11th attacks—was caught running a doctored photo that tried to make Israeli airstrikes on Hizbollah look broader and more devastating than they actually were.

In one picture, Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj used image manipulation software to make a plume of smoke look much larger. The fake smoke covered nearly the entire frame of the picture, making it appear as if a wider attack had taken place.

The obvious manipulation of that picture led bloggers to start checking other Reuters photos that carried Hajj’s byline. It turns out, this guy’s been busy. Another suspicious photo shows an Israeli military plane launching what are labeled as “missiles.” Three such missiles are shown, although evidence suggests that (1) they are simply flares designed to confuse Hizbollah’s anti-aircraft weaponry, and (2) there was only one such flare in the photograph, but it was replicated twice to make the image look more menacing.

The hyping of Israeli “atrocities” that aren’t seems to be a bit of a pattern in the media. Hizbollah’s propaganda machine is quite effective at getting its message out through the supposedly skeptical editors of the Western media. Hizbollah agents parade dead bodies in front of eager cameramen for the likes of Reuters, and the Western media laps it up and broadcasts it around the world without question.

It’s bad enough that an outfit like Reuters can’t even recognize terrorism for what it is, but it is shameful that Reuters allows itself to be used by terrorists as they try to win the propaganda war. I hope the Western media are simply dupes. To think that they are willing accomplices is simply too depressing.