Saturday, August 18, 2012

Fair and Balanced

In some quarters of the media balanced reporting means that if you discuss some awful behavior perpetrated by one side you must also condemn the other side whether they merit it or not. For example, consider this recent report at Yahoo News on the latest threats by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:
Ahmadinejad told an annual anti-Israel protest in Tehran on Friday that the Jewish state was a "cancerous tumour" that will soon be excised....

"The nations of the region will soon finish off the usurper Zionists in the Palestinian land.... A new Middle East will definitely be formed. With the grace of God and help of the nations, in the new Middle East there will be no trace of the Americans and Zionists," he said.

So the Iranians have been threatening Israel with death and destruction, essentially another holocaust, for at least a decade now. The Israelis, reasonably enough, believe they mean it and have compared the threat, also quite reasonably, to that posed by the Nazis. They've tried to call the world's attention to the fact that the Iranians are threatening them with extinction, which, of course, they are. So how does Yahoo News close their article on the Iranian rhetoric?

Israel has been employing its own invective against Iran and its leaders, invoking the image of Hitler and the Nazis on the eve of World War II and accusing Tehran of being bent on Israeli genocide.
Invective? It's invective to state the obvious? Imagine a man assaulted in the street by a mugger who holds a knife to his throat. The victim calls out to passersby that the mugger is trying to kill him. In the minds of the folks at Yahoo that would be "invective."

I wonder if it's significant that this irresponsible and utterly perverse attempt to draw some sort of equivalency between those threatening death and those calling attention to the threats was penned by a man named Mohammed Davari.