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There's Slanting a Story, Then There's This Doozy.

jimmiebjr | September 21, 2007 | 10 Replies

How is this story considered journalism?

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – Nelson Mandela is still very much alive despite an embarrassing gaffe by U.S. President George W. Bush, who alluded to the former South African leader’s death in an attempt to explain sectarian violence in Iraq.
“It’s out there. All we can do is reassure people, especially South Africans, that President Mandela is alive,” Achmat Dangor, chief executive officer of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, said as Bush’s comments received worldwide coverage.

Uhhh…no. That’s not what happened. There are only two ways you could have possibly read the Presidents comments that way: 1) you want to purposefully slant them to make him look dumb, or 2) you have the English language comprehension skills of a wallaby. I’m going to go with the former, considering that The Washington Post, which not only carried the stock Reuters tripe but also its very own special story from Dana Milbank, isn’t the only one reporting that the President declared Mandela dead as a headline. There can’t be that many rock-dumb reporters and editors in the world. Journalism still requires, last I checked, at least a moderate reading and writing ability. Figner-painting in your own poo will only get you a job as an Associated Press stringer in Iraq or a special columnist with The New Republic, not anywhere else that I know of.

Here’s what the President said, in an answer to a reporter about Iraq.

You know, part of the reason why there is not this instant democracy in Iraq is because people are still recovering from Saddam Hussein’s brutal rule.
I thought an interesting comment was made – somebody said to me, I heard somebody say, ‘Now, where’s Mandela?’ Well, Mandela’s dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas. He was a brutal tyrant that divided people up and split families.
And people are recovering from this

Now what part of that would lead any moderately intelligent person to believe that George Bush was saying that Nelson Mandela – the actual Mandela – was dead? The only way you could get an “embrassing gaffe” out of that is if you ignored the two sentences before it and the sentence after it. In other words, if you grabbed only that phrase and ran with that as the headline, you could make it seem like the President didn’t know that Nelson Mandela is still alive. You’d have to slant the story so badly that Spiderman couldn’t climb it and hide your journalistic pride in a very deep desk drawer behind your scruples and honesty.

Shame on the AP and shame on the Washington Post for reprinting and advancing yet another slur against the President. I suggest the get their integrities out of the desk, blow the dust off of them, and write a couple apologetic retractions.

UPDATE: James Taranto comes to pretty much the same conclusion as I.