September 22, 2004
Telling the truth... sort of
A quick clarification on my 9/20 posting in which I wrote that the South Korean government had declared no explosion to have occured in North Korea - this was quite literally only part of the story. My criticism of the ROK was misdirected and should have been aimed at moron journalists who butcher AP wire reports and then publish them.
The AP report I refered to in the previous post quoted South Korean Unification Minister Lee Bong-Jo as saying, "we believe that there was no explosion in the place where intelligence authorities had previously suspected that there were signs of an explosion." Having read this statement, and because the story was titled, "South Korea now says no explosion occured in North Korea," it's understandable how one might draw the conclusion that the South really believed that no explosion had occured at all. The account in the Washington Post only helps confirm this conclusion, reporting that "there was no blast at the suspected site," and citing Lee as saying that Seismic signals and strange cloud formations picked up last week were not from an explosion.
Contrast the above to this version of the AP report that appeared in the International Herald Tribune on the same day as the first AP report appeared in the Billings Gazette. This one is only slightly less misleadingly titled, "South Korea says there was no explosion in North Korean county." Here one finds the same quote by Lee about there being no explosion in the previously suspected place, but this is immediatly followed in the next paragraph by the clarification, "we believe that the explosion described by North Korea took place in Samsu County, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the originally suspected site..."
I don't know about the Billings Gazette (which printed the first AP story), but why the Washington Post would report in a manner that makes the headline writers at CNN.com look like amatuers is beyond me. Perhaps I didn't take the reporting literally enough, but the intentional exclusion of relevant information to an extent that the entire meaning of a story is changed is what I call journalism of the highest caliber... not.
The AP report I refered to in the previous post quoted South Korean Unification Minister Lee Bong-Jo as saying, "we believe that there was no explosion in the place where intelligence authorities had previously suspected that there were signs of an explosion." Having read this statement, and because the story was titled, "South Korea now says no explosion occured in North Korea," it's understandable how one might draw the conclusion that the South really believed that no explosion had occured at all. The account in the Washington Post only helps confirm this conclusion, reporting that "there was no blast at the suspected site," and citing Lee as saying that Seismic signals and strange cloud formations picked up last week were not from an explosion.
Contrast the above to this version of the AP report that appeared in the International Herald Tribune on the same day as the first AP report appeared in the Billings Gazette. This one is only slightly less misleadingly titled, "South Korea says there was no explosion in North Korean county." Here one finds the same quote by Lee about there being no explosion in the previously suspected place, but this is immediatly followed in the next paragraph by the clarification, "we believe that the explosion described by North Korea took place in Samsu County, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the originally suspected site..."
I don't know about the Billings Gazette (which printed the first AP story), but why the Washington Post would report in a manner that makes the headline writers at CNN.com look like amatuers is beyond me. Perhaps I didn't take the reporting literally enough, but the intentional exclusion of relevant information to an extent that the entire meaning of a story is changed is what I call journalism of the highest caliber... not.
# posted by Saru : 1:35 PM
