First, do no harm

Out there in the cold and cruel world, we're still trying to make the case that the lack of editing is a Bad Thing. (Naysayers would do well to check out The Ridger's sample of what goes wrong when an Actual Book sails past the detail-editing dock altogether.) Today's example is a bit different: when happens when editors set out to help and end up leaving the patient in far worse condition than when the ambulance arrived.

Behold a garden-variety Middle East tale -- nothing you'd call deathless prose, but the sort of day-to-day thing that a wire service does to earn its keep. Here's what the AP wrote:

The Palestinians insist they will not resume peace talks until Israel stops building settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem — lands it captured in the 1967 Middle East war and which the Palestinians want for their future state.

Read more »

Homer nods

Should we start a pool on how long it takes for the correction to appear?

I have worked in a half-dozen countries since the late 1990s, including Lebanon, Gaza in Israel, Pakistan, Turkey and Russia. In none of these places was I dragged off and raped, but I have encountered abuse in many of them. The assaults usually took place in crowds, where I was pinned in place by men.

The intended reference may have been to Israel and Gaza, or to Gaza, but I doubt it was to "Gaza in Israel," because there is no such place. And if we can't rely on our rare bastions of original international reporting (of which I'd put the Times at the top among US dailies) to keep basic distinctions like that straight, where are we supposed to look?

If I were guessing, I'd say this one was inserted by an editor; it isn't the sort of mistake people who go back and forth between those entities are likely to make. It's too bad, because it mars a sobering and relevant piece of reportage that helps give the lie to the "hurr hurr she ASKED for it" that's been circulating in some quarters. I'm not always fond of "Due to an editing error..." corrections, but if that's what happened here, let's have it.

Thanks, liberal media!

Quoth a hed in today's letters column at the Foremost Newspaper of the Carolinas:

Act now to prevent Iran from gaining more nuclear weapons

Slight problem. A precondition of getting "more" nuclear weapons is having some nuclear weapons in the first place. If the Obs (bastion of forward-looking Near East reporting that it is) has this one pinned down, we probably ought to be thinking about a 1A story -- not up there with the John Wall teaser or anything, but maybe somewhere nice and genteel below the fold.

Stop me if this is a surprise. People don't always read critically. They remember what they read or heard after they've forgotten where they read or heard it. They're often not very good at discriminating between evidence and assertions (and it's worth noting that the letter, at least as edited by the Obs, doesn't assert that Iran has nuclear weapons).

So anyway -- thanks, liberal media! If this is what the dictator-coddling weenies of the international left do, you have to wonder why we even need Fox.

We look forward to the correction.

Looks like journalism, but ...

Here's another of those what's-wrong-with-this-picture tests, brought to you by the Fair 'n' Balanced cousins:

Carter to Obama: Remove Hamas From Terror List
Former President Jimmy Carter says he will ask the Obama administration to remove the militant Palestinian group from the U.S.-designated terror list, just as Hamas says it foiled a bomb plot against Carter.

You can tell this is a big deal for Fox; at this writing, it's already generated more than 330 comments.* And it has the potential to be a big deal for grownups too, depending on what follows: "without preconditions," for one thing, or "in return for this ironclad agreement," or "at some future date, maybe, after some unspecified stuff has happened." So unless your sole need for international news is to remind you to stock up on ammo and bottled water, your next question is likely to be: How about some details?

There's the fun part, and there's where you can tell Fox from what most of us think of as "journalism." The "inverted pyramid" of news is built with broad general stuff on top, supported by details toward the bottom. Bigger details come first, so wherever you might have to cut for space, you get the big picture and (notionally) the most significant stuff that supports or explains it. All that material gets slotted in discursively, in a sort of Dialogue of the Five W's: Who's affected? What comes next? Why now? When does this take effect? What do the other actors in the story have to say? News stories look like news stories because that's what news does. "House fire" is the sort of default example you find in news textbooks, but it works just as well for earthquakes, elections, coups, royal abdications, playoff games.

This story's different, but not until you read it:

Former President Jimmy Carter will urge the Obama administration to remove Hamas from the terrorist list, FOX News has learned.

"Has learned" is there to remind you who's looking out for you. If you watched "His Girl Friday" on the teevees the other day, it's what Walter Burns meant when he asked "Doesn't the paper get any credit?" Attribution aside, though: We're cued up for details. Especially since the deck hed proclaims that Carter himself said this ... on to the evidence!

Carter, a chief defender of the U.S.-designated terror group, said Tuesday he will meet with officials in the Obama administration in two days to discuss his latest trip to the Middle East.

And?

Meanwhile, two Palestinian sources told FOX News that the group had discovered two roadside bombs planted near a crossing between Israel and Gaza on a path Carter's convoy took to meet with the group's leaders -- Hamas advisers, though, reportedly cast doubt on claims that extremists were trying to kill Carter.

Enough with "meanwhile": How does the treasonous old waffler explain himself?

Carter was granted special waivers by the U.S. Secret Service allowing him to enter Gaza. Employees of the U.S. executive branch are not allowed into the strip since a roadside bomb killed three U.S. security personnel in 2003.

And?

Carter was visiting with Hamas leaders to try to persuade them to accept the international community's conditions for ending its boycott of the Islamic militant group.

And? (You see a lot of secondary W's being answered, just as a news story would, but we're still waiting to hear from the White House, or Hamas, or the PM's office, or anyone who can elaborate on the main assertion.)

... Carter said he feels personally responsible that American weapons were used to fight in Gaza Strip last year, when Israeli Defense Forces entered the strip to stop the launch of rockets from there into Israel.

And?

... According to two eyewitnesses, including a 15-year-old boy, the bombs that were found were intended to hit Carter's vehicle as he exited Gaza. There is some suspicion that Hamas extremists linked to Al Qaeda may be behind the attempt.

And?

... But two Hamas advisers, in interviews with WorldNetDaily, denied reports that extremists were potentially behind such an alleged assassination attempt.

Now isn't that interesting? WorldNetDaily is run by and for certifiable loonies, but it often has interesting reports on Hamas because its Jerusalem writer often picks up the phone and calls Hamas! Just like journalism! And in this case, the writer also went Fox one better by asking Hamas about the Fox report:

Yousef responded to the online report telling WND he is not aware Carter will specifically make such a request.

He said, however, Carter communicated to Hamas that "one way or another" the Islamist group must do its best to meet the three conditions previously set out by the U.S. for the opening of dialogue.

Well, that'll put you right off your fresh-fried lobster. Here you've got yourself an exclusive about Barack Hussein Osama ruining the world again with the aid of the Only Worser President In History, and the only people who try to check it out are the ones who think the missing birth certificate is the story of the century, and they manage to knock a hole in your lede with one phone call.

What's genuinely interesting from the editor's perspective, again, is how much the thing looks like a news story -- until you go to the trouble of reading it. That sort of fraud** is really rare in American journalism (the British are a little more prone to it), because it's easy to get caught out at it, and if you get caught, you end up looking really amateurish, stupid and dishonest. Just another reminder that we need to avoid confusing Fox with people who actually want you to learn stuff about the world. You know, people who actually report so you can actually decide.

* Here's one that isn't obscene: "Yeah, one traitor to another..... "
** OK, granted, the lede could be true: Fox might well have "learned" this from a ouija board or something. But as to Carter's having said it, that appears to be a flat-out invention. Which won't matter to the Wills or Krauthammers who pick up the lede next week to riff on the End of the World.

'Accuracy' and accuracy

Tonight's trivia question: What do college football and the fractious Near East have in common? Raise your hand if you said "original convincing test cases for the 'hostile media' effect" -- the idea that partisans of opposing sides can look at the same piece of "neutral" reportage and conclude that it's biased against their side.

It's tempting to conclude from the "hostile media" effect, and from the normal run of complaints about Middle East coverage, that all complaints about "accuracy" are complaints about ideology. Calls for truthful and unbiased reporting do often boil down to calls for a different kind of bias in reporting. But it's worth bearing in mind that amid the political minefields, there are still concerns about straight-up, literal, binary accuracy. And the evidence from one of the local fishwraps is starting to pile up uncomfortably high.

Last month, the Freep desk managed to pull a complete 180 on some Gaza copy: turning a "Palestinian speaking Hebrew" into a "Palestinian-speaking Hebrew." That suggests the sort of genuine unfamiliarity with the basics that -- not to be jealous or anything, but it'd get the perpetrator laughed out of a sports department in very short order. Nor have things gotten better since the current Gaza conflict erupted.

The teaser hed on the Jan. 5 front page proclaimed "Troops go deep into Gaza City." As the teaser itself (and the inside story it referred to) noted, they were doing no such thing; they were going deep into the Gaza strip, but the effect was to cut the city itself off, not to enter it. Last Sunday, the lead hed on 4A declared "Hamas, Fatah rift tears Gaza" -- interesting if true, but since the story was about public opinion in the West Bank, an important topic on its own but quite distinct from public opinion in Gaza, pretty spectacularly off the mark.

If you've done much deadline editing, you've seen how the latter mistake happens: somebody gets the day's "Gaza story" (which happens to be about the West Bank, and is fairly prescient in the bargain) and, not knowing the West Bank from Hazel Park, figures the most important word to get into the hed is "Gaza." Today's blunder, though, is different. Here's the cutline from today's 4A:

An Israeli Arab fighter flashes a victory sign in Tel Aviv, Israel, during a demonstration against Israel's military operations in Gaza.

Some background while you scrape your jaw from the floor. Arabs (Muslim and Christian) comprise about 16% to 18% of Israel's citizens, and they do most of the things that citizens do (military service usually being the big exception). They can vote. They can run for parliament. And, as Israelis in general are often good at, they can demonstrate. Which, according to all versions of the cutline I've seen (including the one at the WashTimes), is what's going on here: An Israeli Arab flashes a victory sign during a demonstration against Israel's military operations in Gaza, in Tel Aviv,Israel, Saturday, Jan. 17, 2009.

True, it's been a while since I've watched a demonstration in Tel Aviv,* but I think it's safe to say that if "Arab fighters" were running loose in the streets during one, we would have heard about it. It looks as if some Freep desker figured that "fighter" must be the safe, neutral way to describe "scary-looking person with a keffiyeh over the face," rather than having the common sense to read the damn caption and the basic area knowledge to realize that it might be -- hold on -- just a "demonstrator."

If that reading is correct,** the "Israeli Arab fighter" cutline is just a remarkably stupid blunder, but it's the sort of blunder that's impossible to tell from bias, and that ought to sound a warning bell downtown. Not just for demographic reasons (the Freep used to take some pride in its awareness of the significant Arab population in these parts), but for fundamental questions about whether the paper can credibly claim to offer an accurate portrayal of things that are happening in the broader world.

The "one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter" argument has been with us for decades (the earliest specific reference I know of is from 1948). Reasonable people still wrestle with it because it's still a vexing impediment to attempts to define terrorism, and terrorism is worth defining because a calm, rational understanding of it gets us closer to the condition suggested by German legal scholar Christian Walter: A person committing certain criminal acts may (or even: must) be considered everyone’s terrorist even if he or she is someone’s freedom fighter or someone else’s law enforcement agent.

That's an ideal, and I can see why a newspaper would want to look neutral on the question of when a "fighter" is a terrorist and when he (or she***) isn't until that ideal is reached. But not distinguishing between types of substate violence is a whole world different from not being able to distinguish armed violence from civil protest. If the Freep can't tell those things apart, it's in far more serious trouble than a new home delivery schedule can fix.

* Or in Ramallah, for that matter.
** If anyone has a different account, by all means check in soonest at the comments.
*** The subtitle of Geula Cohen's autobiography, after all, is "Memoirs of a young terrorist." Worth reading if you keep up with this sort of thing.

Talking back to the stylebook

This quote from the front of yesterday's Freep landed oddly on the ear. It comes from the last story in a series about the sexual abuse of female inmates; it's "just another day in July," until the protagonist is taken aside by the warden:

"Gov. Jennifer Granholm," the warden said, "signed your commutation yesterday."

I wasn't there, and neither was the reporter, but -- really? Because that sounds a lot more like a stylebook talking than an actual human person. It's hard to imagine any of the people in that room (or, to be fair, anybody between here and the tunnel to Canada) producing a first reference to "Gov. Jennifer Granholm" in that sort of sentence. But it does follow the Freep stylebook, which specifies that style on title abbreviations is followed in quotes.* That suggests that the quote was reconstructed with an eye on style, rather than impact on the eye or ear, and I wonder if that isn't another "rule" we ought to think about scrapping, or at least toning down.

That's reinforced a little farther into the issue (it's Thursday, one of the editions that will survive the looming end of home delivery, so there's room for a scrap of international news):

“We are very much applauding the efforts of a number of states, particularly the effort that President" Hosni "Mubarak has undertaken on behalf of Egypt,” Rice said. “We’re supporting that initiative.”

Stumble a bit on "President" Hosni "Mubarak"?** That's Freep style too: Avoid parenthetical inserts in quotations, such as: "She (Salome) said it was in (her) best interest."*** Here's how the statement looks at the State Department Web site:

Of course, we are very much applauding the efforts of a number of states, particularly the effort that President Mubarak has undertaken on behalf of Egypt.

And in the AP, before the Freep got hold of it:
"We are very much applauding the efforts of a number of states, particularly the effort that President (Hosni) Mubarak has undertaken on behalf of Egypt," Rice said.

But here's how the IHT handled the AP story:
"We are very much applauding the efforts of a number of states, particularly the effort that President Mubarak has undertaken on behalf of Egypt," Rice said.

Wow. Some news organization out there figures that anyone who has paid 50 cents for a newspaper and gotten this far into a Near East story is going to know that the "President Mubarak" acting on behalf of Egypt is Hosni Mubarak, not his half brother Elvis Mubarak or Joe "The Plumber" Mubarak or Israeli Prime Minister J.D. "Lightning" Mubarak? I'm impressed.

I'm not suggesting we throw the stylebook out the window. I like stylebooks.**** But I also think it's time to acknowledge that following a rule into the ground is a stupid idea. I can't imagine anyone in the Freep's circulation area who couldn't have followed the inmate story without a first name for "Gov. Granholm," who's barely even a walk-on in this installment. And I'm at a loss to demonstrate what we've genuinely gained by inserting (Hosni) into the Rice comment -- much less so if we throw in the supreme distraction of the busted quote. If our goal is to prove that editors are central to the foundering enterprise we call "professional journalism," we can likely find a dozen better ways to prove it before tomorrow's A section is through.

* The stylebook also says: "If you are reconstructing dialogue, make it clear to the reader you are doing so." I deeply dislike reconstructed dialogue as it is, but if we're not going to bar it outright, at least we could send the requisite signals.
** And no, dear cousins who program the freep.com search engine, I did not mean to search for "President Hosanna Mubarak."
*** Which looks like a really poor choice of example for the rule. What's the second parenthetical doing there? Was the original supposed to be "She said it was in her best interest" or "She said it was in my best interest"? Is the rule supposed to be "don't clarify pronouns" or "don't replace pronouns"? When a stylebook is confusing, it's also likely to be ignored.
**** Everybody has a hobby.

Periodic diversity rant

Awful lot of people sort of dragging us back to the '60s at once, isn't it?

More recent work by Greenwald and colleagues shows that most people --between 75 and 80 percent -- have implicit, non-overt prejudices against blacks.

So at CNN, the world is divided into "people" and "blacks"? (And by the way, no: This study doesn't "harken back" to the Milgram study.)

The 20-year-old woman told police that she was walking to her vehicle when two Hispanic men forced her into a dark-colored, two-door vehicle, possibly a Honda Accord or Civic

And that's it for physical description at the Obs. Height or weight? Facial hair, hair hair, other identifying features? Eye patches, bandoliers, missing teeth? Mexican men, Nicaraguan men, Men of La Mancha? Hey, who cares?

U.S. backs Egyptian-French cease-fire
But Israelis, Arabs haven't accepted
You sort of wonder if the Freep has just run out of people who had heard about the Fractious Near East before last week. (Given the demographics of the area, that's potentially pretty embarrassing.) Since the Egyptians (a subset of "the Arabs") are suggesting the cease-fire, it maybe ought to be sort of obvious that the level of analysis in the deck should be, maybe, limited to the even smaller subset of "the Arabs" on the other side of this conflict. Otherwise, it's sort of like -- oh, like saying "the Hispanics" gave a speech last week celebrating the 50th anniversary of the revolution.

The main hed misses the head noun kinda dramatically too. The event at issue here isn't an Egyptian-French cease-fire (that's so 1956). It's an Egyptian-French proposal for other people to cease fire. There really is a difference.

Yes, there's a lot to pay attention to, and there are fewer editors every week to pay attention to it. But there is still sort of a bottom line here: Readers don't know what you meant. All they know is what you said.

Man eating tiger

If you're among those people who think copy editors are supercilious semi-pedants who don't even understand the rules they claim to venerate, hang on. Somebody downtown is about to hand you a fresh box of ammunition.

Bit of back story, on the off chance your newspaper doesn't keep you up to date on the Fractious Near East. Hamas is marking its 21st anniversary,* and the proceedings include a skit in which a guy plays a captive Israeli soldier pleading for his freedom. Here's the AP:

In the skit, Hamas paraded a Palestinian speaking Hebrew and dressed in an Israeli soldier's uniform -- a reference to Israeli Sgt. Gilad Schalit, captured by Hamas-allied militants in June 2006. "I miss my Mom and Dad," said the man playing the Israeli soldier, kneeling as he spoke.

Seems pretty clear, doesn't it? A Palestinian (speaking in Hebrew) is playing an Israeli soldier. Let's see how the Freep handles it:

In the skit, Hamas paraded a Palestinian-speaking Hebrew dressed in an Israeli soldier's uniform -- a reference to Israeli Sgt. Gilad Schalit, captured by Hamas-allied militants in June 2006.

One of my favorite Fowlerisms is the example for hyphenating noun-participle combinations: the need to distinguish "man eating tiger" from "man-eating tiger." That's the difference here. Rather than, oh, asking the AP why it's using a different transliteration of Shalit's family name and when he was promoted,** the Freep is changing the meaning of the sentence about as far as it can be changed: from "Hebrew-speaking Palestinian" to "Palestinian-speaking Hebrew."

There's a lot you have to not know to produce an edit like that -- whether it's appropriate to call people Hebrews, or whether Palestinian is a language -- over and above the ability to forget all the context in one paragraph before moving on to the next. If the Freep is intent on showing that the copy desk is little more than a dangerously inflamed appendix on the body journalistic, it's off to a good start.

* Interesting to think how different the world looked in December 1987, isn't it?
** I honestly don't know; AP has him a corporal as recently as May, and the Times has "Cpl. Gilad Shalit" (the spelling Ha'aretz's English edition uses) in a story from Dec. 4. If any Middle Eastern readers can shed light on the topic, please feel free.

Snakes on a plane Wal-Mart!

Today's discussion on risk perception and journalism comes to you courtesy of -- who else? -- Fox News.

What does the rest of your day look like if you're a resident of Fox World? Pretty bleak, as you'll note from the "Latest News"summary above(captured around 2 p.m. EDT). If you're home, you need to get out of the house right now. Indeed, if you're having lunch somewhere en route to the airport, the safest thing you can do is freeze in place, choke on your burger and hope a football player comes along in time to rescue you. Don't continue on to the airport; you'll either be mugged by your fellow passengers or killed in a gruesome collision. And whatever you do, don't go home. If your spouse doesn't kill you (two wives dead, one wounded, one missing), your uncles or your kids will (especially if they've been playing Beer Pong on their video consoles). Or you'll just die from drinking too much cold water.

Now let's consider the fourth-most-read story of the last 24 hours over at the McClatchy Washburo, "Wal-Mart customer bitten by rattlesnake hiding in plants." Note, in particular, the conclusion:

Wal-Mart said it contacted emergency services immediately after the shopper was bitten and is working with authorities in the investigation, said Daphne Moore, a spokeswoman with the company.

''This is clearly an isolated situation. Customer safety is always a priority,'' Moore said.

Well, clearly! I mean, we can't have people stampeding out of Wal-Marts across this great land of ours in fear of rattlesnakes under every potted plant in the entire building isolated cases of almost entirely harmless episodic accidents, can we?

Let's set the economic-determinist argument to rest for a moment. The quote isn't there because Wal-Mart is an advertiser (from a newspaper perspective, it generally isn't, with a few amusing exceptions). It's there because everybody goes shopping, and the Episodic Reptile Disaster narrative calls for an indication at this point that (a) you can relax and (b) the newspaper and Wal-Mart have things under control.* Even if, as the "full story" at the Miami Herald notes, there have been half a dozen or so such snake bites at nurseries in the area over the past decade.

Lots of time to spend on a pretty trivial story, right? Sure, even if it's still hanging in there at #4 on a national Web site. But think outside the paradigm** for a second. What if every story about the "war on terror" -- or more to the point, every story about defense appropriations or congressional campaigns -- included a paragraph putting your personal risk of terrorist mayhem in any particular decade into perspective? How does it compare with your chances of getting bitten by a rattlesnake at the Wal-Mart? (John Mueller's already gone into the comparative risk of drowning in your own toilet, so I won't go there.***)

As long as we're casting about for ways to save journalism from itself or the Internet or whatever, maybe we could give that one a try.

* For a slightly different perspective, see today's entertaining "Confirmed by Science" over to the Language Log.
** Or whatever Those Crazy Kids in newsroom management are saying these days.
*** Even though we have a cat who thinks it's cool to drink out of one.****
**** Woodchuck.

Hyperforeign spelling alert

If you see this McClatchyism headed for print, go remonstrate gently with your wire editors:

It's no irony that Palestinians refer to the establishment of Israel as "al naqba" — the catastrophe.

Aside from the complete lack of any relationship between "irony" and the subsequent concept, our writer has the wrong word here. "Q" and "K" are commonly used to represent two different consonants in Arabic, and -- surprise -- the words that result aren't interchangeable when it comes to meaning. The word for "catastrophe" is "nakba." If the 1976 edition of the Wehr-Cowan dictionary is a good guide,* "naqba" is something like excavation or perforation.

Why does this sort of thing happen? You have to admit, "q" looks a lot more bizarre than "k" -- especially in the middle, without a friendly "u" to help it out. It's sort of an orthographic version of hyperforeignization: spelling a word wrong to make sure that it looks strange enough. And this one's actually going in the wrong direction. Two decades ago, "nakba" was far and away the dominant spelling in AP texts. By the early 200s, things were reversed: "naqba" was about 10-1 over the more accurate "nakba."

In the great grand scheme of things, the q-for-k swap here isn't one to start the revolution over (not that originating editors are prone to appreciating, oh, technical arguments about consonants and meaning and stuff). It's far from the worst mistake of its kind -- not in spelling, certainly not in translation. But if we have to speak other people's languages, it'd be nice if we could sort of start trying to tone down the ambient fear level, one consonant at a time.

One more thing:
Even if Israel and the Palestinians do agree on their borders, few realists think that a deal would assuage extremists who refuse to accept the idea of a Jewish nation in the Middle East.

Let's not get our concepts confused. That's not a primary concern of realists. Realists care about whether extremists know who's on which side of a proposition like "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." Don't get realists confused with "pessimists."

* Long story short, this W&C doesn't list either "naqba" or "nakba," but "naqb" (excavation) and "nakb" (catastrophe) are the transliterations of the first nouns after the roundup of the respective verb forms.

AP: Sun rises in East

Sometimes you wonder which bodes worse for the future of American journalism: the growing tendency to run AP stories and suggested heds without editing, or the urge to amplify AP 's breathtaking naivete with one's own hed skills. Anyway, there's the hed, and here's AP's lede:

JERUSALEM -- In a bold defense of Israel, Vice President Dick Cheney said Saturday that the U.S. wants a new beginning for the Palestinian people but will never pressure Israel to take steps that would jeopardize its security.

Is it too much to suggest that, boldness-wise, what the vice president is doing is sort of like telling the inquisitors that here I stand, I can do no other, water does too run downhill? That "bold" might be something like ... oh, some one-term administration hinting that maybe U.S. underwriting for new-housing loans might be reduced by the amount spent on housing construction in the occupied territories? Really. What in the last few years, or few decades, could remotely lead anyone to believe that Cheney is stating anything but the most thoroughly self-evident status quo?

In terms of U.S. media discourse about the Middle East, this ... no, wait. Tell you what. Here are three statements by major U.S. political figures. Two are from actors whose expertise is unquestioned. One of them comes from a figure who, in the conventional wisdom of media accounts, has some serious hurdles to overcome regarding foreign-policy sophistication and experience. Can you figure out which one is from the naif?

"Al-Qaida is going back into Iran and is receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran."

"I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering, pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel, and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel."

"They've* declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people, some in the Middle East."

For bonus points, as you ponder cosmic questions like who should be answering the Great White Telephone at what ungodly hour of the morning for the next few years, identify the three speakers.

*"They" being "the Iranian government." Keep your pronoun issues to yourself; this is a content-editing question.

Be scared! No, scareder!

In case you missed any of those reminders today of how much safer you are thanks to the unpleas- antness in Meso- potamia, here's a Fox cen- terpiece to remind you of how close the danger is.

Things must be getting out of hand the world over, huh? Let's turn to the story we can find if we can bring ourselves to click on the photo:

The Vatican said Thursday that Usama bin Laden's accusation that Pope Benedict XVI had played a role in a worldwide campaign against Islam is "baseless," as the CIA said it was "confident" that the voice on the tape is in fact the terror leader's.

So this one's actually about the pope "blasting" (Fox's term) Bin Laden for the latter's comments on Wednesday. Yoo hoo! Where are you, Muslim rage?

It takes a bit of digging, because Fox apparently grabbed a pretty early version of this AP story; it doesn't even mention the recent republication of the cartoons. But several writethrus later, AP manages to work in this graf:

There have been renewed protests in the last month, though not as large or widespread. A few dozen university students waved banners and chanted slogans against Denmark on Thursday in Islamabad. The students said they had not seen the bin Laden message.

A few dozen, huh? Who didn't get the message in the first place? Threat-to-the-Republic-wise, it sounds like it falls somewhere between a pep rally and a Fred Phelps sermon.

Now, in all fairness, the photo Fox used was from an event today in Karachi (though the AP cutline notes that the guest of honor is a "representation" of the Danish flag). If the rally at which the alleged flag was torched was a big enough deal to warrant mention in any AP text coverage, I haven't been able to find it. At a quick glance, though, it wasn't on the scale of last week's demonstrations in Islamabad by scarily veiled women calling for ... erm, the restoration of the Supreme Court chief justice who was sacked by Musharraf last year. (Islam: Aflame for the separation of executive and judicial authority!)

So, to recap: Second-day story about a Bin Laden tape. Photo of a rally too dull to merit a reporter's attention. Couple dozen undergraduates who seem to have able to wipe the froth from 'round their lips long enough to talk about their news-watching habits. A + B + C = a billion people marching toward the ill-defended castle of Western Civ (pausing only at the New York Times building for some Gatorade and more torches).

Scared yet? Well, keep working on it. The election's just around the corner.

The mysterious East

Join the AP as it chronicles the president's "day of cultural diplomacy":

The president grinned and tapped his foot as a group of girls stepped rhythmically to Arabic music, [is this what my people call "dancing"?] their long hair swinging from shoulder to shoulder. The light rain that fell during Bush's arrival did not dampen the mood, as rain is considered here to be good luck during the visit of a foreign leader.

Uh, yeah. We can't testify personally to the existence or absence of this bit of folklore, but does it strike you as the sort of thing that might have been made up on the spot for the visiting experts of the press corps? Rain is a bit unusual in the Emirates; you have to wonder if the number of rainy days with visiting foreign leaders is big enough to even meet the assumptions of chi-square. But when the girls are stepping rhythmically to the mysterious music, well -- as Laura Martin put it 20-some years ago in explaining the birth of the Eskimo snow vocabulary story, These People are just so strange we'll believe almost anything about them.

Granted, rain-when-Great-White-Father-visits = good luck isn't of the magnitude of this one, spotted in the hinterlands by The Ridger at the weekend:
A Saudi Arabian man who allegedly admitted perusing child pornography is demanding a Quran and a prayer rug while behind bars.

... which certainly sounds like a barely veiled call to the lynch mob. But as long as we're doing cultural diplomacy, a brief sniff test for bizarre cultural generalizations might be a good place to start.

Why trust your correspondent, who admittedly has never seen it rain* in Dubai, rather than the AP, which after all was on the scene? Because the AP doesn't always remember to look out the window:

Bush was departing the Gulf region later in the day for meetings in Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. security ally and often the region's decision leader.

If nobody at the AP paused a bit to wonder how Saudi Arabia could be the "decision leader" of a region it isn't in, couldn't somebody at a member paper at least open the freakin' atlas? The Saudis have more gulf frontage than Iraq and Kuwait put together. Riyadh is closer to the gulf itself than either Baghdad or Tehran. Do we really want the default mode of world news coverage to be copy-and-paste from the AP to the medium of delivery?

* Depending on how you score free-beer-with-tapas night. Heh heh.

And you could look it up

If you're tired of this refrain, go ahead and skip to another channel, but: Sports departments would rightly be wary of any news agency that declared that Boston won the '67 World Series on a field goal in double overtime. Until news desks start insisting on a similar level of routine attention to what actually happened in the recent past, newspapers will forever be doomed to run stuff like this:

The starting points for defining the border between Israel and a Palestinian state are the June 4, 1967, armistice lines that were set after Israel won control of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai and the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War.

Hard to tell exactly where that went off the rails, but since it's lying on its side in a particular cornfield, we can take a few guesses. The writer wanted to say that the starting points are the June '67 borders (though Golan and Sinai have nothing and almost nothing, respectively, to do with Palestinian borders) but knows they were technically armistice lines, not formal "borders." Then he tacks on a definition that should have set off alarm bells, or at least caused some editor to flip open a World Almanac or similar reference (even Wikipedia gets the dates right). The June 4 lines can't have been set "after" the Six-Day War because the Six-Day War didn't start until June 5. The armistice lines are the ones set after the 1948-49 war.

That's an easy one to fix, as long as you're in the habit of looking stuff up. And until the desks at major news services get into that habit, newspapers would do well to cultivate it themselves. Even if it looks like less fun than the celebrity watch.

While we're here, a macro concern about the concepts that show up when the story is reduced to bullet points:

• SECURITY
Israelis are reluctant to accept a well-armed Palestinian nation next door.

True. But conceptualizing "security" as a concern for only one side in any struggle like this one is a good way to be perpetually surprised by the ordinary. That's not to suggest Israel's security concerns aren't real. They are. It is to suggest that if your readers are shocked to find that security is a Palestinian issue as well, part of the fault is yours.

You provide the pictures ...

... I'll provide the war with Eastasia. Or Southwestasia, as the case may be. Here's the hed from the morning fishwrap:

Belligerent Iran heats up
U.S. presidential politics
Some candidates hint at new war to end nuclear threat

Almost 30 years after the Iranian hostage crisis cost then-President Jimmy Carter a second term, the Islamic republic is back at the forefront of American politics, stirring the 2008 U.S. presidential race with its worrisome nuclear research and its role in Iraq.

Forgive yourself a bit of an eye-roll; it starts out like just another Gannett venture into the spectacularly foreign country of international issues. But as it turns out, with an exception or two, the story's fairly temperate about Iran; it's about the belligerence of the presidential candidates. Which is a worthy topic, and frankly a scary one, but it isn't well-served by the naive jingoism cooked up on the desk and served in the headline.*

At the same time, give some credit to the sidebar, from which the astute reader can learn that there are actually eight people, rather than three, seeking the Democratic nomination. And that several of them, you know, seem to think that the point of having a professional diplomatic corps is to use it. And that one of them (the one who actually has a substantial amount of international experience) thinks we might ought to acknowledge that being on Iraq's side in the grisly 1980-88 war wasn't such a great idea!

Contrast that with the two largest papers in North Carolina, which seem to think the salient feature of this race is that it includes a candidate who was born in the mythical state of "Carolinas." Not many things make the Freep's national coverage look comprehensive these days, but goofbag hyperprovincialism is a good way to start.

* Bear in mind that this paper is generally deemed the further left of the two in this particular JOA; given that it's the one that sent its edpage editor to a fan-the-flames-against-Iran rally earlier this fall, you can make of that what you will.