Eye-rack
Given that I now have satellite radio in my car, and knowing what I think of U.S. media coverage of the war in Iraq, I decided last week to switch to listening to the BBC. Here are two things I discovered:
1. On the BBC, the Iraqi president’s name is pronounced “Ma-leekie.” The quote unquote president of the United States, and seemingly all of our media coverage, pronounce it “Mal-ik-eye.” There is certainly a correct way to pronounce this man’s name, and one way to find out would be to ask him. Given that the two major coalition nations cannot agree on a pronunciation, I have to wonder what else they can’t agree on. And given that there is in essence a factual disagreement here, one of these two powers is wrong. This doesn’t breed confidence.
2. Here, our media commentary seems to be torn between “pull out” or “prop it (the Ma-leekie / Mal-ik-eye government) up.” On the BBC, the commentary often includes: let the minority (Ma-leekie / Mal-ik-eye government) collapse, and let the majority tribe rule, because isn’t that after all democracy?
For a detailed commentary (whether you agree or not) on Mr. Bush’s speech the other night, which I found maddening in its logical gaps, click here for a point-by-point gloss running on the New York Times’ site.
And I promise you I’m returning to issues of writing soon. This little Iraq thing has been getting a bit of press and such lately.
January 15th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
For another input try listening to C-SPAN. I happened to catch a large portion of the testimony to the various House and Senate committees after Bush’s speech, as well as testimony to the Brit’s defense committee about the same and Iraq in general.
The delta between the representatives & senators’ statements, the questions and responding testimony and the resulting media coverage was striking and illustrative of the typical filtering, sensationalism and skew.
As well, the statements, questions and testimony of the Brits was also an excellent example of your observation that there are many different opinions about everything, including Iraq, US foreign policy, the EU, etc.