For some time now we have been hearing about how unjustly the traditional news media is being treated. Cruelly undermined by a new media that is indifferent to the high standards of sourcing and quality writing that outlets such as the NY Times have upheld for generations. Of course that is nothing more than self-serving claptrap on the part of the NY Times.
As an example we have this snippet from a story about an impending meeting between Iran and the group of six.
Mr. Ban met with Mr. Mottaki on Tuesday, just four days after a similar session with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Mr. Ban again told the Iranians that Security Council resolutions required the disclosure of any new nuclear plant when construction began, he told reporters afterward.
“If you were a normal country, you would declare it all beforehand,” a senior United Nations official said Mr. Ban had told Mr. Mottaki. “That is why you have Security Council resolutions against you, because you try to hide stuff.”
There are several problems with the rather confusing excerpt. First of all we are linking together a statement directly attributed to UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon (he told reporters afterward) in the first paragraph with a statement attributed to an unnamed “senior United Nations official” in the second. If you don’t closely read the two paragraphs you could easily conclude that the quoted statements are actually Mr. Ban’s. Which leads us to the primary problem, placing statements in quote-marks in a misleading way.
An initial reading of this statement leads the reader to think that Mr. Ban met with an Iranian official and then in a subsequent press conference said, presumably paraphrasing himself; “If you were a normal country, you would declare it all beforehand, . . . That is why you have Security Council resolutions against you, because you try to hide stuff.”
However this is not the case. At best the quote is from a UN official paraphrasing the words of Mr. Ban. It is second-hand and probably should not be treated as anything more than hearsay. If nothing else it seems unlikely that the UN Secretary-General would be telling Iranian diplomats to not “hide stuff.”
Perhaps the reporter used this “quote” because he wanted something pithy and informal that sounded a little tougher than we are used to hearing from the UN. Although the reporter has earlier quoted Mr. Ban he still feels it necessary to quote someone else repeating what they claim to be Mr. Ban’s words. The “quote” creates a somewhat different impression to that given by Mr. Ban’s words at the press conference. The reporter’s creativity is further underlined when he writes that “Mr. Ban said that he had also complained to Mr. Ahmadinejad about human rights violations.”
It is not clear when Mr. Ban made this statement that he had “complained” to the Iranian President but the structure of the article implies that Mr. Ban made this statement on Tuesday. However it certainly was not in the press conference of September 29th. Indeed the only references to human-rights issues in that press conference were to a issue raised by the Iranians and concerns over the situation in Sri Lanka.
If this report is the sort of thing that the NY Times thinks represent its strengths in reporting and analysis it is not all that surprising that the paper is rapidly declining. The article is nothing more than a jumbled pastiche of misleading “quotes’” and untraceable statements embellished by editorializing by the author. In this day and age, when a reader can much more easily get hold of copies of source material like official statements or press conference transcipts you might expect newspapers to try harder to ensure that their quotes a relevant and accurate and that they don’t misrepresent the tenor or content of statements. Apparently I am expecting too much.
In my experience “new media,” particularly high-quality blogs are doing the newspapers jobs much more effectively. And that is why old media is dying.
PS: I have noticed this for a long time now and had hoped that it would change at some point, but again, I appear to have been expecting too much. Why is it that when the online versions of newspapers and other old media run stories that refer to press conferences, or the release of official documents, or even interesting reports or analyses by non-profits or think-tanks, they neglect to include links to the relevant source material either in the body of the article or at least in a sidebar. Is it really asking so much? This is pretty unforgivable in 2009. All it really does is make them less useful as a source of information and highlight their inability to adapt.
