PressEthic

For better or worse, I seem to be stuck with that magnifying glass and a penchant for intense scrutiny that was developed during the period leading up to our 'Bias' assignment. And those are the tools that alerted me to a piece I would have included in our assignment, had we still to submit stuff..

The New York Times today ran a story about Harold Pinter's nobel lecture that was broadcast yesterday. I had actually read the transcript of the lecture before I read the Times article. So, I was surprised to read this lead:

The playwright Harold Pinter turned his Nobel Prize acceptance speech on Wednesday into a furious howl of outrage against American foreign policy, saying that the United States had not only lied to justify waging war against Iraq but had also "supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship" in the last 50 years.

"A furious howl of outrage"? Ummm....ok. Having read the transcript, I couldn't imagine any part of it being described as a "howl of outrage." It was, indeed, a scathing indictment of US foreign policy. But, as this article from the Guardian reports, the address was delivered in a very controlled manner:

One columnist predicted, before the event, that we were due for a Pinter rant. But this was not a rant in the sense of a bombastic declaration. This was a man delivering an attack on American foreign policy, and Britain's subscription to it, with a controlled anger and a deadly irony.

And someone who is controlled is hardly howling with outrage. What annoyed me about the Times article is that, while the rest of the piece is reported without any obvious bias, that first paragraph sets the tone with which the reader is going to continue reading. So, a reader's first impression is that Pinter is this blustering guy, snarling with rage and spitting at America. Ok, perhaps he is kinda thumbing his nose at the US, but his speech reads like a well-crafted essay, not like a crazy man's rants.

I know it seems like a small thing, but just that one phrase completely changed the way I read the article. And, as we're always saying, bias is often really subtle. I'm sure the American press didn't care much for Pinter's blanket disapproval of the US, but that shouldn't have affected the way they reported it (after all, they are pretty scornful of the government most of the time).