When in doubt, make stuff up

Minor flaw with the "shocker" hed from the Fair 'n' Balanced Network: It isn't true. It's, um, false. It's made up. It's bogus. If you're wondering why you haven't seen that claim in grownup coverage of today's events, that could have something to do with it.

Here's the relevant bit from today's address (give Fox credit for posting the text, which shows the hed to be an out-and-out lie):

The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.
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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.

Running short of polite hints

Mind if we make a policy suggestion for the nice folks at Eighth and Elm? How about: From now on, any obituary that mentions the decedent's military service will include a note from the reporter affirming that the dates of any battles and wars mentioned have been checked with a reliable (for beginners, that means "non-Internet") source and compared with the decedent's birth date and any service dates mentioned. Violations will result in the loss of a letter grade on first offense and failure of the course for the second offense.

A policy appears to be in order because sweet reason ain't working, viz. and e.g.: He served in the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and because of his military career, he traveled all around the world.

Ahem. According to the birth date in the second graf, he was 12 years old when the Korean War ended. (HEADSUP-L is not particularly interested in contentions that the armistice of 1953 didn't end the "war" and will start by referring whingers to the timeline at the Army's own 50th anniversary site: The United States, North Korea and China sign an armistice, which ends the war but fails to bring about a permanent peace.) And as it did last week, when it invaded Okinawa two years ahead of schedule, the paper looks dumb.

Which is, of course, the writer's doing. But it's also another missed chance for a copy editor to drift back toward the wall, time the leap just right, and pluck the ball out of the stands. In the box score, it's an F-9 like any F-9; there's no mark to distinguish "routine story" from "editor saves lazy reporter from public embarrassment." But what we care about is whether the game goes in the win column, not who goes on the postgame show. Right?

In charge of the asylum

So you figured the foil-helmet nature of news from the Fair 'n' Balanced Network was going to die down a little after the election? Well ... sorry. It looks like we could be in for a long couple of years.

Our topic of interest* is the second item here, "GOP Rep. claims Obama wants 'Nazi'-like security force." It's from the AP, which unfortunately has sort of a professional obligation to report on the doings of our elected officials with more or less a straight face. The embellishments are Fox's, though:

Republican Congressman Warns of Obama Dictatorship
A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

WASHINGTON -- A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

"It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he's the one who proposed this national security force," Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. "I'm just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may -- may not, I hope not -- but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism."

Here's where the AP needs to step in and contextualize a bit. Alas, it fails:

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

Partly true: There is a July speech (July 2), and it has "circulated on the Internet" -- at least, a 16-second clip has. People like Joseph Farah, the bull goose loony over at the generally hilarious WorldNetDaily, have been sounding the tocsin for months now about this "rather shocking (and chilling) pledge." The usual suspects have taken up the call, and it got another push right before the election. AP doesn't help matters by taking Rep. Broun's summary at face value, rather than bothering to figure out what the Obama speech might actually have meant. (Memo to Ron Fournier and the gang at AP Washn: If you still want to "reward the truth-tellers" and "expose the liars," this would have been a really, really good place to start.)

It probably helps to know that, among grownups who study security issues, there's been a debate for quite some time about how to extend "security" beyond the traditional state-border-military domain without -- to borrow Stephen Walt's pointed image -- turning day care into a national security matter. Thus, when a candidate suggests that public education, energy policy, and an active foreign service ought to be considered along with armed force as components of security, you can be forgiven for guessing that the candidate actually knows what he's talking about -- quite a pleasant change from the hacks and neocons who have had the run of "national security" of late.

If you watch the whole speech (it's almost half an hour, but start around the 16:00 mark and you'll have enough context to make sense of the scare quote when it shows up a minute later), that's sort of the idea you get: a broad conception of what constitutes service and "security" and how those ends can be served without necessarily blowing people up. You could say the guy's trying to start a personal Gestapo,** and you might be able to slip it past a couple of especially stupid fifth-graders, but don't push your luck. Sometime they're smarter than they let on.

I guess we shouldn't be too surprised that word of the armistice hasn't reached the Fox trenches, and WorldNetDaily readers will probably be turning up in caves on desert islands 40 years from now no matter what the rest of the world does. But it'd be nice if AP stopped enabling this sort of openly mendacious nonsense -- and if newspapers running wire stories just as they appear would turn off the autopilot and add a line indicating that Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., probably shouldn't be allowed to dress himself alone, let alone vote or play with scissors or drive in Washington traffic.

Working journalists who field calls from the bottom-feeders demanding the head of whatever Kremlin*** plant suppressed that story are justified in responding:
1) Nope. Not a story. Go watch the video.
2) Please don't be seen in public reading our newspaper, all right?

* Gov. Palin's speculations about the almighty are only of interest when He speculates back.
** The rhetor might mean something more like Sturmabteilung, but -- hey, whatever.
*** Or OkH. Apparently commies and Nazis are interchangeable again.

Corrections are hard. Let's go shopping!

Because of an editing error, a story in Saturday's Sports section incorrectly described how difficult it is to be a quarterback in the NFL for young players. It is not easy.

Can't find anything in the original to indicate how an "editing error" might have brought this about. Can any interested readers fill in the blanks on that?

There is, as always, a special prize for correcting the corrections!

A correction in Saturday's Observer about closings for the Christmas holiday gave incorrect information about Charlotte city government.

And somehow, we still seem to be waiting for corrections on the misidentification of the Confederate battle flag and on the moving of the 1949 armistice lines to 1967. Errors must be less wrong if they're made in Washington or something.

Editing: Ur doin it wrong

In the wake of the Times's decision to sue for armistice in the War on Editing, the above presentation from the Washington Post's Friday afternoon e-newsletter is worth a moment's reflection.

Granted,* a straight-up-the-middle fact check of the Orange Peril's random babbling on Thursday about the Paris climate accord is a laudable journalistic mission, even if it overlooks the really entertaining stuff. For instance, the Orange Peril's decision to begin his remarks by addressing a terrorist attack that even his pet news outlet doesn't think is a terrorist attack:

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. (Applause.) Thank you. I would like to begin by addressing the terrorist attack in Manila. We’re closely monitoring the situation, and I will continue to give updates if anything happens during this period of time. But it is really very sad as to what’s going on throughout the world with terror. Our thoughts and our prayers are with all of those affected.

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Be afraid ... wait, don't

We love a little good old-fashioned watchdogging by the perpetually alert sentinel that is the American press -- particularly when it comes to challenging national-security claims by the powers that be. Why, then, do we have this barest trace of suspicion about the top story on the WashTimes frontpage today?

The online hed is a bit more to-the-point than the print one. Here it is, with the lede of the Times's 1A story:

Critics: Obama admin hyping
terrorist nuclear risk

The Obama administration is warning that the danger of a terrorist attack with nuclear weapons is increasing, but U.S. officials say the claim is not based on new intelligence and questioned whether the threat is being overstated.

Nice to see the Times holding a security assertion up to expert scrutiny, but ... wait, what's that from Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor-at-large?

Is the world more dangerous today than it was at the height of the Cold War? Anyone who is still anyone in the field of nuclear arms control has weighed in with a resounding yes. North Korea's second nuclear test, followed by a renunciation of the 1953 armistice agreements, and more missile firings, is the latest red flag on a dark nuclear horizon. Nuclear terrorism, unthinkable during the Cold War, has become the most immediate fear of the experts.

The Times isn't actually retreating; it's just -- attacking in a different direction? After all, things were different back in June, weren't they?

Evidently they were, so let's detour for a second into the land of securitization. (Naturally, all the cool kids will want to be the first to get the hott new securitization book before the movie* comes out.) When you try to push an issue out of the realm of normal political give-and-take and into the shadow realm of Mordor existential threats that call for extraordinary measures to preserve our way of life, you're "securitizing" it -- at least, you're trying to. The success of your "securitizing move" is contingent on what your audience feels as well as on what it knows, and that audience includes the media as well as the public. If you succeed, you get a role in saying what sorts of extraordinary measures are needed and for how long ("until I say you're safe" is often the goal).

Now, you might be in the camp that says securitization is fine as long as we categorize the right things as existential threats (say, nuclear annihilation or climate change, rather than ee-legal aliens and the War on Christmas). Or you might think that what we ought to be doing is "desecuritizing": moving stuff out of the shadows and back into the realm of political debate. But either way, if you want to be credible (which is one of the ways you convince your audience to buy into your understanding of security), you generally want to ensure that it's the issue, rather than the colored Kenyan Muslim socialist source, that's getting your attention.

If your earlier 1A masterpieces, then, have looked like this:

Henry Sokolski, director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, said the danger of nuclear terrorism is growing and the NEST teams are limited in dealing with the threat. (June 2008)

"This action comes at a time when experts warn that the threat of nuclear terrorism is growing," the report said. (May 2008)

Or, to move inside the A section, this, from another familiar writer from the Times stable:

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III yesterday said that it was only a matter of time and economics before terrorists will be able to purchase nuclear weapons and that the world's law-enforcement community must unite to prevent it. (June 2007)

And, to hold down on the tedium, yes -- let's go back to May 2002 and call it good:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday raised the potential of nuclear attack in America, saying terrorist-sponsoring countries "inevitably" would acquire weapons of mass destruction and "would not hesitate one minute in using them."

Those are news stories, and they shouldn't detract from the Times's occasional habit of running commentaries by people like Graham Allison and Brian Jenkins that actually help put issues of nuclear terrorism into perspective. But they do make fairly clear that the Times's view of what constitutes an existential threat has more to do with the political camp that's constructing the threat than with the nature of the threat itself. And -- nice as it is to see someone calling out a security claim on the front page -- that's not a productive way to do either journalism or security.

* "The Eternal Triangle," with Ingrid Bergman as hypotenuse.