Speaking before the United Nations General Assembly, the president called for renewed efforts to enforce the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a striking point of emphasis for a leader who's widely accused of violating human rights in waging war against terrorism. Bush didn't mention the U.S. prisons in Afghanistan or at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. practice of holding detainees for years without legal charges or access to lawyers, or the CIA's "rendition" kidnappings of suspects abroad, all issues of concern to human rights activists around the world. "At first read, it's little more than an exercise in hypocrisy. His words about human rights ring hollow because his credibility is nonexistent," said Curt Goering, the deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA. "The gap between the rhetoric and the actual record is stunning. I can't help but believe many people in the audience were thinking, 'What was this man thinking?' "
Bush didn't mention the U.S. prisons in Afghanistan or at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. practice of holding detainees for years without legal charges or access to lawyers, or the CIA's "rendition" kidnappings of suspects abroad, all issues of concern to human rights activists around the world.
"At first read, it's little more than an exercise in hypocrisy. His words about human rights ring hollow because his credibility is nonexistent," said Curt Goering, the deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA. "The gap between the rhetoric and the actual record is stunning. I can't help but believe many people in the audience were thinking, 'What was this man thinking?' "
For contrast, here's how the New York Times covered that speech. You'll note that, unlike the McClatchy piece, the supposed "paper of record" quotes only White House officials, says nothing of the obvious credibility gap the speech once again demonstrated, says nothing of the cold reception the American President received, and ends by playing up a Bush-supported bill tightening sanctions on Iran. Basic stenography.
Note that McClatchy is a chain of newspapers in such flaming lefty metro areas like Boise, Idaho, Wichita Kansas, Anchorage, AK or Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas. Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
More classic journalism such as what you presented in the NY Times tries to maintain strong objectivity and present facts only. It allows the reader to reason through facts and draw their own conclusion. In the case you presented the issue of Bush's actions would be a sidebar or analysis separate from the article. Or you would find it as an op-ed piece.
More current journalism that we all see takes a definite point of view and uses the facts to make that point and at times in a provocative or sensational manner in order to capture attention. With the Internet and blogging, journalism has shifted to this form, but most classically trained journalists are unaccustomed to this.
So the only issue I have is that both are forms of "real" journalism. The latter is what is used more and more being spearheaded by bloggers.
The McClatchy journalist is providing a full picture (the backdrop of US human rights abuses is relevant in this regard), and presenting both sides of the issue (the Amnesty International quote).
If Brezhnev were to have given a similar speech to the UN at about the time of the invasion of Afghanistan and those Soviet cluster mines in the form of toys were being strewn accross the Afghan countryside like was happening back then, I somewhat doubt the NY Times would have deadpanned the treatment of this speech in this way. They would not have limited their commentary to just the speech - I'm rather certain a reference to that invasion would have crept into the article. And further, I rather doubt they'd rely solely on Kremlin officials to provide color on the speech itself - they more than likely would have asked US State for a statement and ignored those Soviet apparatchiks entirely.
Assuming, of course, that they actually covered the speech in the first place.
Nope, that NY Times article is yellow through and through. Note the way they set up the Kyl-Lieberman amendment at the end. What does this have to do with human rights in Burma and Zimbabwe? The ideoloogical bias is obvious, and the stenography, which they would not have engaged in if, say, they were recounting Hugo Chavez' brilliant sulphur speech, is flagrant. Good journalism is not just presenting selected facts, as the process of selecting those facts provides the basis for a very extreme slant, as this Times article demonstrates.
Unfortunately, they suck like this on such a regular basis it gets tiring to even care. Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
First off, it is clear that there are different kinds of new articles, and that the criteria will vary according to these. For instance, the McClatchy piece you pointed to and the gargantuan investigative piece by Paul Salopek that poemless points to below, while both obviously being journalism, are birds of a very different feather. (You also call the New York Times article about Belgium that spawned this discussion a "survey", implying that this type of article has its own particular criteria that other types of articles do not.)
Having said that, there are some standards which hopefully can be expected across the board. Dan Gillmor identified four:
- relevance (or pertinence)
For example, while applying the thoroughness or fairness criterion, a journalist may consider mentioning -- in this McClatchy piece -- Ahmadinejad's comments about gays in Iran. However, when one applies the relevance criterion, mentioning those remarks would be overextending the piece, whose topic is Bush's remarks, and it would be a very subjective (although in the current context of U.S.-Iranian confrontation very understandable) conflation of two speeches that have no a priori relation to one another.
Similarly, by the relevance criterion, the following sentence is worth including in the article (though perhaps not obviously so), because it (may) shed some light on how the targets of Bush's speech immediately reacted to it:
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sat in the U.N. chamber, often checking his watch, during Bush's remarks. Cuban officials walked out during Bush's 20-minute speech.
Looking at the criticism of the article about Belgium that set off this diary, there were attacks based on the article's violation of thoroughness, fairness, accuracy, and relevance.
The article was attacked based on relevance because it mentions Vlaams Belang at all --
what is more worrying is that the Vlaams Belang is being given credibility in the eyes of the NYT readership.
-- as well as based on fairness because not only does it mention Vlaams Belang but also
puts the Vlaams Belang at the top of their article and all the counterbalancing evidence and nuance at the bottom of the piece with no mention at all of the Cordon Sanitaire.
In a comment in that diary, you call out the article on accuracy:
For one thing, and this is important in a survey like this, Belgium wasn't created as a buffer state to contain France - an enlarged and unified Netherlands including the southern, Austrian parts, was. Well before 1830. Belgium is the result of, in fact, a backlash against this Dutch-speaking and Protestant buffer state on the part of its Catholics (both Flemisch and French).
Belgium is the result of, in fact, a backlash against this Dutch-speaking and Protestant buffer state on the part of its Catholics (both Flemisch and French).
-- which should be easy enough to verify, as well as on thoroughness:
The NYT journalist does not seem to trouble herself with the details of this, which might open up some insights (ie, Catholic identity is increaslingly less relevant, thus perhaps too Belgium's raison d'etre?
In another comment, Jerome offers a "reality-based article" which I have yet to read. It will be interesting to do so while thinking about these criteria of "good journalism". Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
Immediate difficulty becomes apparent when doing so: in order to evaluate an article based on these criteria, the reader must already be an expert on the article's topic, or at least have more information about the topic than is covered in the article.
The burden then is on the self-styled expert to articulate specifically what is wrong with the content of the article. That is what a proper criticism of an article involves. Ad hominem criticisms against the author or the publication, etc. -- e.g. "controlled by corporations", "uneducated", "spoiled rich kids", etc. -- might be helpful in their proper place. But on their own they are at best unpersuasive, irrelevant, and tiresome -- in a word, useless -- as criticisms of a news article. Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
