Friday, June 27, 2003

News or PR? There has been a battle going on between Downing Street and the BBC. A reporter for the latter had accused the former of having "sexed up" the government's dossier describing the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. This report was based on information from a single unnamed source, and the government refuted the claim and demanded an apology. Now the BBC is accusing Downing Street of a personal vendetta. All well and good, I suppose. But in its latest online story, the BBC reporter wrote: "In it, he gave a point-by-point rebuttal of the spin doctor's attack against the BBC - which was made on Wednesday." What sort of journalism is this supposed to be? The language chosen by either the reporter or the editor - certainly passing muster with the latter - is downright inflammatory and crosses the border into an editorial. It is difficult for a news organization to report on itself, true, but then either do it right or don't make the attempt. If nothing else, that sort of tactic would make someone like me be more ready to believe the government. 3:57:12 PM    comment []

I Dare Call It Lying Ann Coulter claims in her latest online column, "I Dare Call It Treason." that the "myth of 'McCarthyism' is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times." She goes on to claim that it's all a liberal lie, that McCarthy was not a demagogue destroying innocent lives. Instead, she further claims, that the liberals made this up to avoid getting caught. I use the word claim deliberately, because reading through the piece reveals some deft use of rhetorical chicanery to support her desire to indiscriminately attack. She does make the correct point that there were Soviet spies in the US government, pointing to the evidence of cables released in 1995. Well, big surprise there - it would see so lopsided if we had been the only ones spying. But it is true that concern for national security was not ill-founded. However, she then makes the leap without any support of saying that the entire Democratic Party was in bed with the Soviets and that it hoped to redeem the party by rewriting history and blackening reputations. That ignores the many documented cases of people who had never conspired against their country but whose reputations were ruined and careers put on hold, if not destroyed. It ignores the - yes, documented - laundry lists that McCarthy would wave about. (It also ignores that McCarthy first ran for the Senate with the backing of the Wisconsin Communist Party, but why be a stickler here?) She makes the unsupportable jump from there being some spies in the government to assuming that McCarthy was blameless, which would mean that no one was railroaded; ergo, all people accused would have to be guilty. Beyond my own past interest in the history of the period, my parents lived through it as observers. They had never been charged with anything, and were fairly religious and moderate to conservative people. But they saw great evil, that would condemn people for even thinking something out of the norm, no matter that someone's conduct had been blameless. As it was an act that tried to regulate the thought and beliefs of people, it was in utter violation of the principles of the Constitution and, as such, completely un-American. My parents also taught me that any time you say something when you know better, you are lying. Now either Ms. Coulter really doesn't understand her chain of argument - hard to believe given that she is a lawyer - or she is lying. I don't hold with the convention started in the Nixon administration of calling lies and mistakes "misspeaking." The more I see of Ms. Coulter's work, the less I admire it and her. Dares call it treason? There is a sad irony in that. 3:43:57 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 Erik Sherman.