NY Times Faux Pas
Story on Iranian Crackdown on Dissidents
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June 25, 2007 |Yesterday, in the prestigious NY Times, a photograph with a bogus caption was published that added a good bit of hype to a story about an Iranian crackdown on dissidents. The Times has since published a correction - an "editor's note" appended - that, while it corrects the error, it is pure milk toast of a retraction. They don't own up to the mistake without trotting the reader through diatribe that seeks to illustrate and justify the overall reasoning behind the story and it's relative importance without regard to the error.

The milk toast editor's note concludes,

  • "The current repression has made reporting in Iran difficult. In this case, The Times relied on an interview with a researcher for a nongovernment agency that no longer operates within Iran who said the photograph was evidence of a more visible police role in public crackdowns on what the authorities consider immoral behavior. The reporter then wrongly interpreted what the researcher said as applying to a crackdown on dress, and incorporated the erroneous interpretation into the body of the article, without giving any indication of the source for it."

    "These errors could have been avoided with more rigorous editing. The article should not have said that young men had been paraded through the streets for wearing un-Islamic dress, and the headline over it should not have said that dissenters were being paraded as part of the crackdown."

A "more rigorous editing" might have actually attributed why the man who was photographed was publically abused and made to suck a container used for personal hygene. Maybe the caption should have read as shown below.


One of more than 100 people arrested recently in Iran on charges of being part of a gang that had committed rapes, robberies, forgeries and other crimes.

While punishments in Iran are harsh by western standards, maybe in the case of this photograph, they are on to something.

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6.25.2007

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