'Confirms'

Q: Hey, kids! How do you say "we got spanked repeatedly by the grownup media on relevant international stories because we were camping out at national landmarks hoping for more SlimFast stories" without admitting it?

A: "Fox News confirms"!

US Navy SEALs have conducted a raid of the Al Shabaab militant group in Somalia, killing at least one militant, Fox News confirms.

A Libyan Al Qaeda leader, wanted for his role in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa, has been captured in Tripoli by U.S. forces, Fox News confirms.

Let's bear in mind here, of course, that the Nation's Newspaper of Record is not allowed to make things up just because it's, you know, the Nation's Newspaper of Record:

But at a moment when President Obama’s popularity is flagging under the weight of his standoff with Congressional Republicans and his leadership criticized for his reversal in Syria, the simultaneous attacks are bound to fuel accusations that the administration was eager for a showy victory. 

As we discussed yesterday, if there's any evidence that some political figure or another's popularity is "flagging under the weight" of the SlimFast, you need to show it, not proclaim it. If you don't, we're entitled to infer that you're more interested in finding an ideologically appropriate narrative than in finding out what went on and reporting about it.

That's one reason the American press -- there's no reason to exclude the Times -- is appropriately described as a "realism-free zone." Realists wouldn't rule out the idea that there's some sinister domestic motive involved, but they'd give equal, if not preferred, weight, to the Clint Eastwood reading: We're a superpower, and we woke up today and decided to kill or capture some people who annoy us. Got a problem with that?

If the Times doesn't get the idea that national interest and domestic campaigns are basically separate creatures, it's still the same paper that lapped up Judith Miller's bogus reporting in 2002, only with fewer copy editors. And that's not a good pattern to repeat.

Forget flood. Interview Mammon.

A senior clergyman resigned Monday over St. Paul Cathedral's handling of anti-capitalist protesters camped outside the iconic church, the second cleric lost in a tense standoff involving God, mammon and their earthly representatives.

Maybe the LAT doesn't mind spending a few extra lines on the overheated prose, given that it's investing 570 words in the story. But when the provincial press chops things down to the 200-plus range, the morality play in the lede should have been the first thing to go.

The broader point is that newspapers should be careful about taking sides. That's true in empirical disputes and even more so in nonempirical ones. We don't get to proclaim who's on the side of the angels and who's a minion of Basement Cat. We don't rule on which scriptures are divinely revealed, and we don't declare that one set of mortals or another is doing God's work. Period.
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No use crying over split milk

We taught them a lesson in 1918, and they've hardly bothered us since then! But now those pesky Germans have done it:

Two years before the Berlin Wall opened, paving the way for the end of the Cold War, President Ronald Reagan famously called on then-Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 to "tear down this wall," in a speech he delivered at the Brandenburg Gate, which was then part of the East-West border.

Well, we all summon spirits from the vasty deep sometimes. Would there be an actual "delayed lede" around here somewhere?

But Reagan's role in bringing down the Iron Curtain and breaking the back of communism has touched off a national debate in Germany, where conservatives want to rename a street or square after him while liberals still hold a grudge over the Gipper's deployment of nuclear missiles on West German soil.
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Fog on Bay; world cut off

How odd those far-away places with strange-sounding names look when you point the small end of the telescope at 'em!

Let it be noted, of course, that the hed is entirely true. It just picked the wrong sort of thing to be true about. Changes of power in the (rather large) "Arab world" aren't unheard of. As with those pesky changes of power in Europe, though, they're country- and mode-specific. An election in the UK isn't a sign of what the hot-blooded Europeans in the "European world" are up to; it's how the UK changes governments. A military coup in Norway wouldn't be frontpage news because it heralded a change of power in Europe* but because Norway doesn't do coups.

Same deal here (and frankly, you'd expect Richmond, having become the capital of a foreign country 150 years ago this spring, to be a little bit more sensitive on the matter). Changes of power in Syria or Jordan or the KSA would be important for different reasons; this is about something that happened in Tunisia. And, though the sort of thing that tends to become known** as a "Twitter revolution" has happened nearby, it hadn't yet forced an Arab autocrat into exile (uneasy lies the head and all that).

Both are more interesting than the sort of freeze-dried Orientalism that lumps "the Arabs" into a single journalistic mixing bowl. Let's work on that one a bit.

* Come to that, it's hard to imagine most changes of power in Europe being frontpage news in US journalism anymore.
** For better or for worse; I'm not in love with this shorthand, but it seems to be the one that people use (or rail at others for using).

The sorcerer's apprentice

Stop me if this sounds too much like an edgy new BBC sci-fi/noir drama: A zombie, a robot and a Time Agent are sharing a hip 1920s bungalow off East Boulevard while working at a Major Metropolitan Daily, and one of them has to cover the holiday shift on the wire desk, and ...

Wonder why Zardari's election is a big deal here? (That's the teaser from the top of the online "print edition" section at bottom and the story itself at top.*) Especially since it isn't mentioned in the story, the rest of the news world seems to have missed it entirely, and Zardari was elected in September 2008? Good question. It certainly doesn't bode well for the idea that we can just let the rest of the world run itself while we concentrate on football, Mission Possible and the United Way.

* As of this writing, the story is fixed, but the teaser remains a wide-open rift to another part of space-time.

On missing the ball and why it matters

This hed on a Clinton precede misses by just a bit, but it's just enough of a bit to knock things askew. And that underscores the importance of questioning everything: not just the story you're given and the material that went into it, but your own assumptions. If we don't pay attention, we muddy up the stream for everybody.

"Democracy," like "terrorism," is the sort of concept that's often based on whether we like somebody, rather than where that somebody might fall on some tested continuum. That doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't use it, but it does mean we should take some pains to be open and consistent in our judgments. If you wanted to calibrate heds like this one, you might want to bookmark the nice folks at Freedom House, whose business is data on stuff like political rights, civil liberties and press freedom. By their tally, only two of Clinton's seven destinations meet the "free" qualification.

That doesn't mean the trip can't be "aimed at 'supporting strong and sustainable democratic governments'" (though one can be forgiven for wondering how many "State Department officials" actually chorused those last six words together*). It doesn't mean the trip isn't important, or that weak Africa coverage isn't better than no Africa coverage at all. It does suggest that an editor is clouding the mirror a bit. Our already imperfect picture of what's going on is dumbed down even farther.

If you don't think that matters, have a look back at the hometown paper's coverage of the "Triangle Terror Takedown."** Time was, a paper of the N&O's repute would actually have someone on staff who remembered when the Soviets left Afghanistan and would compare that to the alleged travel dates. Owing to that, the paper might have actually put some substantive questions to the US attorney's office on the first day -- as in, "Why does your indictment assert that this dude started fighting the Soviets three years after they left the country?"*** Or "Hmm. Defendant 'did travel to Gaza and attempted to enter Palestine,' huh? Did anybody involved in bringing these charges have the faintest freaking clue what 'Palestine' and 'Gaza' might mean?"

That's the whole point, really, of having a process for producing news, rather than surrendering outright to the happy new world of instant, unmediated information. People look at stuff, and they compare it to what's known, and when things don't match, the discrepancy is noted. When we fail at that, we get a dumber population. Worse, we let the powers-that-be know that they can tell the public the moon is made of green cheese if they want; no one's going to check.

* Or how the writer determined that South Africa was "the continent's most powerful nation," or why some editor thought the writer's opinion was worth sharing. That iteration of the McClatchy Superlative appears in the longer version.
** I don't make this up, you know.
*** The N&O finally took note of this howler five days on, a day after the AP had helpfully done the math. I'm not holding out hope for a correction.

Annals of attribution: Afwan!

Some strange lands will always look a bit stranger than others through the lens of Your National Media, won't they? Here we have a USA Today blog called "The Oval" (Tracking the Obama Presidency), providing a pretty ho-hum transcript of today's presidential visit to the current head of the Al Saud -- ho-hum, at least, until you get to the update, in which the nation's largest daily calls in a Berlitz teacher to affirm that "shukran" indeed means "thank you."

Wouldn't it be nice if one of the few fishwraps that can make a claim to being a national newspaper had, oh, an Arabic dictionary around the office? Or maybe just a guidebook? Well, take heart! USA Today is quite capable of translating Arabic all by its lonesome:

On that day, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa (death sentence) against Rushdie for having written his novel The Satanic Verses. (1/18/1996)

Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini placed a "fatwa," or death sentence, on the author. (7/18/2000)

Fundamentalist Muslims called it blasphemous, and the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa (death sentence) on Rushdie. (4/9/2007)

See? All you have to do is have the right Arabic word!

There is one slight problem. "Fatwa" doesn't mean "death sentence."* It means an answer to a question of religious law: a "formal legal opinion," as the Wehr & Cowan dictionary puts it.** There are fatwas and fatwas; the famously antediluvian Abdelaziz bin Baz issued a fatwa after the first US-Iraq war declaring that women shouldn't drive, but a few years later he came out with one affirming that it was perfectly all right to make peace with Israel.

So how did "fatwa" get to be the sort of noun USA Today can translate without help (or clues)? Khomeini's repellent decree about the Rushdie novel*** is the cornerstone, but it couldn't have happened if "fatwa" didn't make cultural sense as a way of describing Those People. It's the flip side of having a kazillion words for "snow": a single word for "religious death sentence." Pullum, thou shouldst be hanging around at this hour.

Given that it didn't get the longed-for presidential genuflection out of this Obama-Abdullah meeting, it's strange that the Fair 'n' Balanced Network hasn't glommed on to Obama's adventures in Basic Friendly Arabic yet. But the trip is young.

(The USAT blog was first flagged by Wonkette, to which/whom thanks)

* It doesn't have an "h" on the end either; that's hyperforeignizing.
** If the Supreme Court declines to hear your last-minute appeal, that formal opinion might spell curtains for you, but it doesn't make Times v. Sullivan into a "death sentence."
*** There's still substantial debate about whether Khomeini's statement was actually a fatwa, which you can look up on your own for extra credit.

Going off the tracks

Eventually, when you cut the staff and squeeze out the world news and cut the staff again and buy out all the pesky old coots who used to process news, all your heds are going to end up looking something like this:

High-profile bombings
skew truth about Iraq
Which is genuinely awful on a couple of levels. First, as a matter of elementary craftsmanship, compare it to the version on the Web:

Commander: High-profile bombings skew truth about Iraq
Not real subtle when you see 'em together, is it? The attribution changes everything; the first hed asserts a condition about Iraq, and the second asserts a condition about something somebody said. It's one of the most basic things a copy editor can know. It makes its most salient difference in cop reporting, and if you can't tell the difference between the assertions of fact in
Smith hits Jones upside head with stick
and
Police report says Smith hit Jones upside head with stick
you're in for a nasty, brutish and long day on the witness stand, and you deserve every minute of it.

A lot of what journalism does, for better or worse, is report stuff that might on its own be painful or defamatory or stupid but needs to be in the public domain because of the circumstances under which it's said. If school board candidates think dinosaurs cavorted with baby cavepersons, we're obliged to talk about it -- but to do so in a way that the opinions are inextricably pinned to the people who utter them. If you can't do that, you're really in the wrong sport, unless you're writing for the editorial page (where opinions, even genuinely stupid ones, are encouraged).

But there's a scarier point to this hed. It isn't just lacking attribution; it misrepresents the content in a fundamental (and -- not to be overlooked -- a deeply ideological) way. Here's the AP lede beneath the hed:

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Attacks fell in November to their lowest monthly level since the Iraq war began in 2003, despite recent high-profile bombings aimed at shaking public confidence, a top U.S. commander said Wednesday.

Lt. Gen. Lloyd Austin, the No. 2 U.S. commander in Baghdad, blamed Al Qaeda in Iraq for a spate of bombings that has killed nearly 50 people in Baghdad and elsewhere since Monday. The explosions took place despite an 80% drop in attacks in Iraq since March, Austin said.

Despite not quite getting what "despite" means, the AP has a reasonably interesting tale here: Highly public violence is getting a lot of attention, while things that don't happen are getting correspondingly less. How does our three-star characterize it?

"What you've seen in the last several days is an attempt by Al Qaeda and others to conduct high-profile attempts that are really aimed at intimidating the civilian population" and drawing attention from the news media, Austin said.

"Their intent is to erode the confidence of civilians and Iraqi security forces to create a picture that things are not going in the right direction."

Notice what he's doing? He's basically defining "terrorism": Do something violent and dramatic, draw attention, intimidate the civilians, show that things aren't going in the right direction. Notice what he isn't doing? Trying to define the "truth" of Iraq (or, if he is, the AP didn't see fit to tell us). He's suggesting the picture is complex, but he isn't saying that blowing up a few dozen people isn't part of the "truth." That's the work of the copy editor.

Ultimately, that's scarier than a little ineptitude with attribution. Not knowing the difference between "X" and "Police say X" crops up all the time in journalism classes, where it's fairly easy to deal with. Assuming that there's a single "truth" about a war, especially if that truth leaves out the intent and skills of people who practice substate political violence, is evidence of a deeper category of stupid. It isn't just a journalist who hasn't learned to distinguish news from opinion; it's a sign of not knowing opinions from reality.

Leave the rooster! That's human interest!

What do you do when that pesky news breaks out on the eve of a holiday? Let's see how three papers in Florida (longtime wheelhoss of American journalism fads) handled the Mumbai attacks.

At left is Fort Lauderdale ("look, honey! Superman has his own newspaper"), which apparently decided to ignore the things altogether.

At center, Orlando put the attacks above the nameplate -- at least, that's a pretty reasonable guess. The hed combines an actual news event with the hints of warnings of speculation about talk of a possible Qaida plot to think about attacking the New York subway, so it's kind of hard to figure out the priorities. But the color levels in the photo leave it looking sort of like a painting, and thus uncomfortably like the First Thanksgiving art in the centerpiece ("Save room for our quiz").

Tampa, at right, plays Short Attention Span Theater with everything in sight. The attacks get a mention next to the nameplate -- in the brave new world, there is no more "above the flag," and the shopping flowchart just sort of envelops everything in its capitalist glow.

Not a stellar performance there, Florida. Shopping doesn't really need context. International political violence, on the other hand, often does.

[Other than that, the central office is now going into holiday* mode. Language Czarina is pruning the adverbs. Woodchuck is enjoying America's Baddest Thanksgiving Parade.** Bernie is sulking because he doesn't have a major thoroughfare named after him. And Santa is getting the keys to the city from a WSU J-grad.]

* International visitors, please join us in some flavorless poultry and sloth!

** Macy's doesn't have the Contours singing "Santa Claus is Coming to Town."

Rogue story: Shoot on sight

If this story shows up in your paper tomorrow, someone has done a very very bad thing. Take it away, McClatchy Washington Bureau:

A majority of Americans think the United States isn't winning the war on terrorism, a perception that could undermine a key Republican strength just as John McCain and Barack Obama head into their first debate Friday night, a clash over foreign policy and national security. [Whose opinion is "undermine a key Republican strength," and is it based on anything real and measurable?]

A new Ipsos/McClatchy online poll finds a solid majority of 57 percent thinking that the country can win the war on terrorism but a similar majority of 54 percent saying that the country is NOT winning it. [Hmm. So any second now, we'll not only find out what makes a majority "solid" in this poll, but how Ipsos/McClatchy defined "war on terrorism" so as to assure us that respondents were talking about more or less the same thing?]

Skip a few grafs of debate-related setup for this:

... If Americans are turning more pessimistic about the so-called war on terrorism, it could present a challenge for McCain. [All of a sudden, it's become the "so-called war on terrorism"? That's an interesting and important change -- but I doubt it reflects the question you asked, and that underscores why you need to say what you mean by it.] Voters traditionally trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle terrorism and national security, but a loss of confidence in the results of the fighting so far could erode that edge. [One fiction, one guess. There is a body of stuff out there suggesting that, at least in the modern polling era, voters trust Republicans more on defense; it's the "issue ownership" concept. But it doesn't extend to terrorism, because there is no "tradition" of handling terrorism in US politics. And asserting that Americans are "turning more pessimistic," or that there's a "loss of confidence in the fighting so far," would require, at the least, one earlier poll that actually measured pessimism and "confidence in the fighting so far."]

... The survey also found that Americans think by 57-43 percent that Afghanistan is now a more important front in combating terrorists than Iraq is.

Why the "now"? Where's the comparable poll to support the relevance of this distinction? Does McClatchy think Iraq has always been part of the "war on terrorism"? How is the question phrased? And how about some numbers so we can tell a little more about those majorities the writer is flinging around?

...The poll has no statistical margin of error [news flash: That's the only kind there is] because the online sample isn't a random one that mirrors the population within a statistical probability ratio, although Ipsos weights the sample to resemble U.S. demographics.

Are you saying that it's a convenience sample? Because if it is, all the conclusions are bogus. You can't say anything about what "a majority of Americans" think. If Ipsos has a way of explaining how its "online panel" (which, a later blurb declares, "isn't a random sample") is chosen that might mitigate this otherwise pretty obvious conclusion, we need to hear it. Otherwise, just go down to the mall and ask a few dozen people what they think; it's as good as any other convenience sample.

Broken record time again. The McClatchy Washburo (specifically, the pre-merger Knight-Ridder side of it) won a lot of well-deserved praise for its prewar skepticism and its critical coverage of the Iraq runup. That ought to be a proud tradition. Why give it away by running made-up conclusions about bogus data?

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.