No wonder the bloggers are winning
These gutless papers explain why more people are Googling
than turning pages
By Robert Fisk
07/21/07 "The
Independent" --- - I despise the internet.
It's irresponsible and, often, a net of hate. And I don't
have time for Blogopops. But here's a tale of two gutless
newspapers which explains why more and more people are
Googling rather than turning pages.
First the Los Angeles Times. Last year, reporter Mark Arax
was assigned a routine story on the 1915 genocide of one and
a half million Armenians by the Ottoman Turkish authorities.
Arax's report focused on divisions within the local Jewish
community over whether to call the genocide a genocide.
It's an old argument. The Turks insist - against all the
facts and documents and eyewitness accounts, and against
history - that the Armenians were victims of a civil war.
The Israeli government and its new, Nobel prize-winning
president, Shimon Peres - anxious to keep cosy relations
with modern Turkey - have preferred to adopt Istanbul's
mendacious version of events. However, many Jews, both
inside and outside Israel, have bravely insisted that they
do constitute a genocide, indeed the very precursor to the
later Nazi Holocaust of six million Jews.
But Arax's genocide report was killed on the orders of
managing editor Douglas Frantz because the reporter had a
"position on the issue" and "a conflict of interest".
Readers will already have guessed that Arax is an
Armenian-American. His sin, it seems, was that way back in
2005, he and five other writers wrote a formal memo to LA
Times editors reminding them that the paper's style rules
meant that the Armenian genocide was to be called just that
- not "alleged genocide". Frantz, however, described the old
memo as a "petition" and apparently accused Arax of landing
the assignment by dealing with a Washington editor who was
also an Armenian.
The story was reassigned to Washington reporter Rich Simon,
who concentrated on Turkey's attempt to block Congress from
recognising the Armenian slaughter -- and whose story ran
under the headline "Genocide Resolution Still Far From
Certain".
LA Times executives then went all coy, declining interviews,
although Frantz admitted in a blog (of course) that he had
"put a hold" on Arax's story because of concerns that the
reporter "had expressed personal views about the topic in a
public (sic) manner...". Ho ho.
Truth can be dangerous for the LA Times. Even more so, it
seems, when the managing editor himself - Frantz, no less -
once worked for The New York Times, where he referred to the
Armenian massacres as, yes, an "alleged" genocide. Frantz,
it turns out, joined the LA Times as its Istanbul
correspondent.
Well, Arax has since left the LA Times after a settlement
which forestalled a lawsuit against the paper for defamation
and discrimination. His employers heaped praise upon his
work while Frantz has just left the paper to become Middle
East correspondent of the Wall Street Journal based in - of
course, you guessed it - Istanbul.
But now let's go north of the border, to the Toronto Globe
and Mail, which assigned columnist Jan Wong to investigate a
college murder in Montreal last September. Wong is not a
greatly loved reporter. A third-generation Canadian, she
moved to China during Mao's "cultural revolution" and, in
her own words, "snitched on class enemies and did my best to
be a good little Maoist."
She later wrote a "Lunch With" series for the Globe in which
she acted all sympathetic to interviewee guests to catch
them out. "When they relax, that's when their guard is
down," she told a college newspaper. "It's a trick, but it's
legit." Yuk!
Wong's take on the Montreal Dawson College shooting,
however, was more serious. She compared the killer to a
half-Algerian Muslim who murdered 14 women in another
Montreal college shooting in 1989 and to a Russian immigrant
who killed four university colleagues in Montreal in 1992.
"In all three cases," she wrote, "the perpetrator was not
'pure laine', the argot for a 'pure' francophone. Elsewhere,
to talk of racial purity is repugnant. Not in Quebec."
Painfully true, I'm afraid. Parisians, who speak real
French, would never use such an expression - pure laine
translates literally as "pure wool" but means "authentic" -
but some Montrealers do. Wong, however, had touched a red
hot electric wire in "multicultural" Canada. Prime Minister
Stephen Harper complained. "Grossly irresponsible," said the
man who enthusiastically continued the policy of sending
Canadian troops on their suicidal mission to Afghanistan.
The French-Canadian newspaper Le Devoir - can you imagine a
British paper selling a single copy if it called itself
"Duty"? - published a cartoon of Wong with exaggerated
Chinese slanted eyes. Definitely not pure laine for Le
Devoir. The hate mail was even more to the point. Some
contained excrement.
But then the Globe and Mail ran for cover. Its
editor-in-chief, Edward Greenspon, wrote a cowardly column
in which he claimed that the offending paragraphs "should
have been removed" from her story. "We regret that we
allowed these words to get into a reported (sic) article,"
he sniffled. There had been a breakdown in what he
hilariously called "the editorial quality control process".
Now I happen to know a bit about the Globe's "quality
control process". Some time ago, I discovered that the paper
had reprinted an article of mine from The Independent about
the Armenian genocide. But they had tampered with it,
altering my word "genocide" to read "tragedy".
The Independent's subscribers promise to make no changes to
our reports. But when our syndication folk contacted the
Globe, they discovered that the Canadian paper had simply
stolen the article. They were made to pay a penalty fee. But
as for the censorship of the word "genocide", a female
executive explained to The Independent that nothing could be
done because the editor responsible had "since left the
Globe and Mail".
It's the same old story, isn't it? Censor then whinge, then
cut and run. No wonder the bloggers are winning.
© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited
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