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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (22377)	3/27/2002 11:18:30 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Perhaps an excessively obvious question, but if you don't like the NYT, why read it? There are plenty of other sources. By now, out of habit and for certain columnists. The NY Times used to be the paper of record, but these days I get the feeling I'm getting better reporting out of the Mideast from Tom Friedman's columns than from the so-called news pages. It is also occasionally the source of important and influential stories, like the story it ran the other day on the PLO-Iran links. A story that looked very out-of-place next to the rest of the Time's Mideast coverage, btw.

To: Dayuhan who wrote (22377)	3/28/2002 5:23:12 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

NYT, why read it? One reason to read it Steven, is to see how they "play" stories. Here is an analysis of the way they are played in the NYT, condensed from an article by Robert Tracinski: <For decades, reporters have loved to pen headlines like the following, from a Feb 17 New York Times report on Palestinian terrorism: "Day of Violence kills 5 in Gaza and West Bank." What is the subject of this sentence? According to this headline, the killing was done by a "day of Violence." This is implicit passive construction. Most reporters have been trained not to use the passive voice, not to say, for example, "people were killed" without revealing who killed them. But attributing the killing to a "day of Violence"- and "actor" that could not possibly produce this action- is a way of constructing an implicitly passive construction. It avoids assigning responsibility for the killings. The reader who continues beyond the headline discovers that one of these deaths- and about a dozen injuries- was caused by a suicide bomber who targeted "the outdoor food court of shopping mall in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank," a favorite hangout for local teens. As for the other deaths, "Israeli soldiers in Gaza killed three Palestinians in gun battles today, and a leader of the Islamic group Hamas in the West Bank city of Jenin died in a mysterious explosion that Palestinians call an Israeli assassination." In other words, the "violence" actually consisted of two distinct kinds of actions: a Palestinian suicide bomber tried to wipe out a mall full of Israeli teenagers-and Israeli soldiers killed armed Palestianian militants and a terrorist leader. This suggests the real story of the day's news: Palestinian terrorists continued to wage war on innocent civilians, while Israeli soldiers fought back against the killers. The story's headline is meant to wash away such distinctions. Its implicit message is that "violence" as such is responsible for the events, and thus that both sides are equally responsible. This is pacifism expressed in the grammar of a sentence. What is the purpose of these techniques? They have the effect of shifting our attention from specific individuals who are responsible for initiating a reign of terror. This language is inspired by the attitude of the international diplomatist, who believe that every problem can and must be solved by discussion, negotiation, concessions, and appeasement. Such measures are impossible if we are required to judge a terrorist as evil. Yet it would be too brazen to refuse to report his evil actions. The solution is to use a choice of words and a grammatical structure that distances the terrorist as far as possible from the evident of his evil action. A corollary of the notion that an evil won't exist if we refuse to name it, is the idea that an evil won't be too important if we bury it in a subordinate clause. This example is merely a small sample of the actual truth: the power of grammar to convey a whole world view. It is a power that can be used for good or for evil-or to evade the distinction between the two.>