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Monday, June 05, 2006

News Unfit to Print?

A little while ago, I wondered if blog reports of unrest in Iran were incorrectly giving the impression of real instability:

Given that our press has been horrible in reporting on any unrest in Iran, I don't know whether this listing of incidents inside Iran lately is a recent surge or just me noticing what is common.

Is the lack of MSM reports reflective of sound judment of no real news value? Or is the failure to report on events in Iran based on some bias that does not want to paint Iran as anything but another kite-flying paradise or something?

Belmont Club asks the same thing:

Rutgers University Professor Judith Apter Klinghoffer claims that major newspapers are systematically playing down unrest in Iran. She says, "Do me a favor try to find MSM information about the ongoing unrest in Iran. You will fail. There is no dearth of articles on Iran but they do not include any mention of the ongoing unrest there. Just view the results of a Google search of the terms: Iran, unrest." The search string in question, done against the Google News search engine "http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=iran+unrest" actually returns a different result each day it is run, but the point is taken. At the time of this writing, most the links returned were from The Pakistan Daily Times, British Ahwazi Friendship Society, Gulf News, Caucaz.com -- though there was one from the Christian Science Monitor and another from the Chicago Tribune. But all that proves is that there isn't any unrest in Iran, right? Otherwise the BBC, the Washington Post and the NYT would be all over it.


So is there unrest in Iran or not? I mean, in this day and age, a famine couldn't be deliberately engineered in the Ukraine without the world finding out, could it?

In an age of 24/7 news, isn't this a pretty sad question to even be asking?