Hello everybody,
I am a Journalism graduate student looking to exercise my bullsh*t
detector on this discussion group. Stay tuned for a bi-weekly attempt
at deconstructing
bad news.
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MINIMIZING IMPACT AT THE NEW YORK TIMES
11/19/2003-11/20/2003
There is obviously an invisible force in the newsroom of the New York
Times that is forcing their re****ters to skew the reality of what is
happening in London yesterday and today. Yesterday in the NYT, Richard
W. Stevenson wrote a re****t titled "Bush in London With a Message for
Critics." Oh really? That is one way of putting it. Another way his
title could have been written was "Londoners planning to give Bush a
message upon arrival." That was the day before.
On November 20th, 2003, the actual day of the London protest in
Trafalgar Square, by reading the New York Times you would never know
that approximately 100,000 people gathered to protest Bush and/or his
policies.
Lizette Alvarez, a NYT re****ter wrote:
"Tens of thousands of demonstrators in Trafalgar Square cheered and
whistled today as a papier-mâché effigy of President Bush, painted
gold to resemble the toppled statue of Saddam Hussein, was yanked to
the ground at a peaceful rally."
Excuse me? "Tens of thousands"? Try 10 x 10,000. Reuters a
london-based newswire agency described the protest as containing
"almost 100,000" protesters.
What Lizette did reminds me of how business owners price products.
Something that costs 1 dollar get priced at 99 cents, a little trick
that works on many a human being, even when they are aware of the
strategy and the neligible difference of a penny. It just looks really
good and pleasing to the eye. In the same spirit, 10's of thousands
is an excellent way to understate a figure like 100,000. While she did
qualify the figure later in the article to between 70,000-150,000
(talk about a huge discrepancy between police accounts and organizer
accounts) it is still sad to see her grossly minimizing the protest
number in the lead paragraph, which usually the only paragraph
newspaper readers see.
Lizette was obviously on a mission to minimize the impact of the
London protest.
The fact that she went through the pain of describing the textile
composition of the Bush effigy as being made out of "papier-mache"
makes it sound like a couple of people pulled together a half-assed
kindergarten art project. Maybe Lizette was hoping nobody would get
the chance to see a picture of the effigy. It was a large-scale and
impressive display of political theatre. Why is the most im****tant
fact about it that it was made out of papier mache? Clearly someone
trying to convey the grandiosity of the drama would not employ such
language.
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