I usually don't criticize the Star Tribune, our local Minneapolis paper, for the same reason I don't criticize oatmeal. It is what it is, and basically it does its job pretty well. There's something slimy about second-guessing the people who do the day to day, necessary work, on deadline, reliably. This morning though, the Strib let me down. On an inside page in the A section was a story about a billboard in Cuba criticizing U.S. treatment of prisoners. There was a picture showing that a swastika was involved but showing nothing of substance about the billboard. In the same paper, there's an account of Jamal al Harith's testimony before a Council of Europe panel about his two years of systematic abuse in Guantanamo. Just to say it again: this guy was kept for two years, without access to a lawyer, and then released because the government couldn't make a case against him in honest court.
Connect the dots: if the Strib finds claims of prisoner abuse credible enough to report them repeatedly as news, it must in consistency find that the message of the Cuban billboard is a legitimate statement that has a place in moral discourse of this planet. If this is a legitimate statement, the people of Minnesota deserve to see a decent image of it. The little blurry picture they printed is the kind the tabloids do for monkey-children and Elvis statues on Mars. If the blurry picture was all they could get, that should have been explained.
Why fuss? The Cubans are on to something. In a world in which the superpowers and mega-corporations hold lots of cards, the bullied and abused retain the power to shame. It's about the only legitimate power they have, short term. And that power can only be exercised when the media make responsible decisions about who has a claim to be heard, and who is just running off at the mouth. One can document over years, using exclusively the Strib's own pages, the case for a moral analogy between American bullying and Nazi bullying. That mural has a place on the front page of the Strib, in living color.
I agree with you that the swastika story could have been given some context maybe. I'd like to think that we always get the whole story from our news sources, and that sensationalism doesn't trump truth. But I know better.
But I would also like to say that I think it's good when a story on one page isn't 100% consistent with another story on the next page. Seems to me that just shows that the reporters have a degree of autonomy from the editors. Not every story has to correspond with a consistent ideology.
Posted by: Jim at December 18, 2004 11:05 AM