Pierre, il est moi

Escalation of hostilities by the New York Times

They’re this close to full-out, no-holds-barred war with me.

First, some copy editor screws up in captioning a picture of American students studying in Prague that accompanied an article about study abroad as a new “credential for global fluency.”

Sure, if you look at the caption now, you won’t see anything to arouse suspicion. That’s because the Times corrected the error in the original caption, which identified the country in question as “Czechoslovakia” — a country that hasn’t officially existed for almost fifteen years. Of course, I take full credit for the mistake’s correction, since I pointed out the error in a letter to the editor:

Laura Pappano (“The Foreign Legions,” Nov. 4) claims study abroad has become de rigeur for “globally fluent students” today. Pity that the credential is evidently not needed of New York Times copy editors.

A caption in an accompanying photo described American students “enrolled in a college just for them in Czechoslovakia,” a country the Times’ copy editor would do well to know has not formally existed since Jan. 1, 1993, the day its “Velvet Divorce” took effect and gave way to the successor Czech and Slovak republics.

Or maybe this is just a sign that “global fluency” isn’t really all that fluent. It’s routine for Americans to equate the Czech Republic with Czechoslovakia, or, as happened to President Bush, to mix up Slovakia and Slovenia. Americans may think the differences trifling. Czechs and Slovaks (and no doubt Slovenes), I assure you, have a less dismissive view of them.

Nice, helpful, with an appropriate level of snarkiness. Still, the Times didn’t publish my letter. Nor did they at least acknowledge their mistake, as of yet, on their corrections page. Not to mention they give no indication in the updated story that anything changed. Bastards.

Granted, I felt moderately vindicated when the error was finally corrected in the caption when I checked again this morning, a good two days after I brought it to their attention.

But then, when I returned to the Times’ home page, I saw a tease for an article mentioning Prague in 1967. Following the link, I saw it was a review of the New York premiere of Tom Stoppard’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

I read about the play some time ago, after it originally debuted on stage in London and made a brief run in Prague. It’s about a Czech student in England, who returns to his home country of Czechoslovakia after the Warsaw Pact armies invade in August 1968, his love of rock music, and how Jan’s attachment to the underground psychedelic Czech rock band the Plastic People of the Universe winds up getting him in trouble in the 1970s (that could well be an illusion to former Czech dissident-cum-president Václav Havel, a friend of Stoppard). The play — as noted in descriptions from London’s Royal Court Theatre, Radio Prague, New York’s Jacobs Theater, the Associated Press or even Wikipedia — thus spans the years from the Soviet invasion in 1968 until the Velvet Revolution and demise of communism at the end of the 1980s.

Unless, of course, you believe the Times.

“A protégé of Max (Brian Cox), a growling lion of a professor at Cambridge,” writes Times theater critic Ben Brantley, “Jan leaves England for Prague when the city is occupied by Soviet tanks in 1967.”

Oops.

It’s a pity the critic couldn’t be arsed to, I don’t know, read the plot synopsis in the theater’s program, or check Wikipedia, or use any number of sources to get that seemingly trifling detail correct. And, because the reporter screwed up, the copy editor’s followed his lead, giving the review the equally erroneous headline: “Going to Prague in 1967, but Not Without His Vinyl.”

So, I took the liberty of sending the Times another letter:

Writers often taken certain liberties with history in crafting scripts for stage or screen, but the same license ought not to be granted to journalists. Thus, I suggest Ben Brantley (“Going to Prague in 1967, but Not Without His Vinyl, Nov. 5) pay closer attention to both history, and the script (or at least the official program) for his next review.

Brantley’s review of the New York premiere of Tom Stoppard’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll” describes how the play’s story begins with the protagonist, Jan, returning home to Prague “when the city is occupied by Soviet tanks in 1967.”

The problem is, Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. Tom Stoppard knows this. (His play sets the dramatic event in its historically accurate year of 1968.) The online programs for productions of “Rock ‘n’ Roll” in both London and New York record it correctly. Even Wikipedia gets the year right. But, sadly, Brantley, writing for the “newspaper of record,” can’t quite get this little fact straight.

Naturally, I don’t expect the Times to run it, or to acknowledge my due diligence in pointing out their mistakes. They should, though.

Back before I washed out of journalism school, I learned about the dreaded “Medill F.” Any story written for a class that contained a single factual error received an automatic failing grade from the instructor. It was a severe policy, one professors explained to students with a certain sinister glee, but it hammered home an important point: an article, a reporter, a newspaper are only as good as the accuracy of their information. Flub the facts and you lose some credibility.

Maybe these sorts of errors seem trifling to the Times. After all, who but a history Ph.D. student writing a dissertation on Czech-Slovak relations in the 1960s would even notice a little miscue like giving the wrong year for the Soviet invasion, or committing the all-too-common American faux pas of referring to “Czechoslovakia” in the present tense?

But facts are facts, and the Times has a particularly poor record of getting the facts right when it comes to the former Czechoslovakia these days. Not that they aren’t without ample company among major news organizations.

Still, the Times’ repeated failures to get details correct in cases where they might not matter much makes we wonder if they’re making similar or even worse mistakes in other cases, cases where I might not have the expertise to spot errors, cases where the mistakes in question have a much greater impact on how readers understand events and the world.

In other words, botching a year here and a name there has me questioning the Times’ credibility that much more than usual, which is often the first step down a slippery slope.

Dumb, American Style

One great thing about the current U.S. president is his complete and utter lack of irony. Or rather, it’s the fact that he does and says things without being the least bit cognizant that they drip with irony.

Take, for instance, the speech Shrub is planning to deliver at the State Department concerning the current political situation in Cuba. Story from the New York Times. Snarky annotations from me.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 — President Bush is planning to issue a stern warning Wednesday that the United States will not accept a political transition in Cuba in which power changes from one Castro brother to another, rather than to the Cuban people. [If only Cuba has issued its own stern warning when the House of Bush regained the American crown from the House of Clinton, we might not be in such a mess today.]

As described by an official in a background briefing to reporters on Tuesday evening, Mr. Bush’s remarks will amount to the most detailed response — mainly an unbending one — to the political changes that began in Cuba more than a year ago, when Fidel Castro fell ill and handed power to his brother Raúl. [Since, you know, it wouldn’t have been more forceful to have made such a pronouncement back when this temporarily-cum-long-term transition was being made.]

The speech, scheduled to be given at the State Department before invited Cuban dissidents, will introduce the relatives of four Cuban prisoners being held for political crimes. A senior administration official said the president wanted to “put a human face,” on Cuba’s “assault on freedom.” [Unlike our normal strategy when it comes to “assaulting freedom” in Cuba, which involves NOT allowing human faces to be seen.]

In effect, the speech will be a call for Cubans to continue to resist, a particularly strong line coming from an American president. [Especially since that worked so well the last time an American president encouraged Cubans to resist.]He is expected to say to the Cuban military and police, “There is a place for you in a new Cuba.” [I hear Gitmo’s nice….]

The official said Mr. Bush would make the case that for dissidents and others pursuing democracy in Cuba, little has changed at all, and that the country has suffered economically as well as in other ways as a result of the Castro rule. [Much like little changed in the reign of Bush XLIII versus that of Bush XLI, except for War in Iraq and Economic Downturn: Part Deux! being even longer and more calamitous than the original.]

He will say that while much of the rest of Latin America has moved from dictatorship to democracy, Cuba continues to use repression and terror to control its people. [And could probably learn a thing or two from the way America uses repression and terror to control its people held in Cuba at Guantánamo.] And, the administration official said, Mr. Bush will direct another part of his speech to the Cuban people, telling them they “have the power to shape their destiny and bring about change.” [Ditto the American people.]

The administration official said Mr. Bush was expected to tell Cuban viewers that “soon they will have to make a choice between freedom and the force used by a dying regime.” [Is it the regime dying in Cuba or the one killing America?]

Some of the sharpest parts of the speech, however, will be aimed directly at Raúl Castro. Mr. Bush is expected to make clear that the United States will oppose an old system controlled by new faces. [That’s actually a change in policy, now isn’t it? Previously, the United States has been quite content with using cosmetic changes in leadership to mask the fact that the same key players are pulling the strings from behind the curtain.] The senior administration official said that nothing in Raúl Castro’s past gives Washington reason to expect democratic reforms soon. [Nor would anything in Washington’s recent past give us reason to expect democratic reforms here. (Hello, Electoral College!)] And he said the United States would uphold its tough economic policies against the island. [Canadian purveyors of Cuban cigars and rum were reported to rejoice at the news.]

Mr. Bush would hold out the possibility of incentives for change, if Cuba demonstrated an openness to such exchanges, the official said. [That’s funny, I always thought the reason we didn’t have such exchanges with Cuba was because the U.S. Treasury Department essentially made it illegal.] Those steps might include expanding cultural and information exchanges with Cuba and allowing religious organizations and other nonprofits to send computers to Cuba and to award scholarships.

However, he is expected to reiterate the administration’s long-standing demands for free and transparent elections, and the release of political prisoners. [Just not from the part of Cuba the administration actually controls and operates as an extraterritorial prison camp where standard U.S. human rights law supposedly doesn’t apply.]

John Kavulich, senior policy adviser at the U.S.-Cuba Trade andEconomic Council, said those demands would likely be non-starters for Cuba. [Duh.] He said the technology and educational opportunities Mr. Bush intends to offer are being provided to Cuba by Venezuela and China.

He suggested that the real constituency for Mr. Bush’s speech was the politically-powerful exile community in Miami. [I hear there’s some nice bayfront property in Cuba that might interest those Miami exiles.]

Phil Peters, an expert on Cuba at the non-partisan Lexington Institute, said he saw Mr. Bush’s speech as an attempt to reorient a policy that had fallen behind the times. American policy, he said, had been centered around the idea that the Communist government would fall once Mr. Castro left power, and that Mr. Castro, 81, would be forced out of power only by death. Instead, Mr. Peters said, Raúl Castro’s rise caught the administration off guard. [Evidently the administration hadn’t been paying attention, since Fidel announced years before he became ill that he intended Raúl to succeed them. This surprises whom exactly?]

President Bush has remained largely silent, Mr. Peters said, while Raúl Castro consolidated his control over Cuban institutions by establishing his own relationships with world leaders, and opening unprecedented dialogue with the Cuban people about their visions for their own country. [Hmm, that actually sounds vaguely encouraging, like it just might augur well for future change.] Meanwhile, all the doomsday scenarios predicted for Cuba once Fidel Castro left power — a violent uprising by dissidents and a huge exodus of Cuban refugees — never materialized. [Also, a second CIA-backed invasion never materialized. Maybe the Mafia was busy that weekend.]

“The administration realized they had missed the boat,” Mr. Peters said. [Rimshot.] “Succession has already happened. They can no longer have a policy that keeps them waiting for Castro to die when the rest of the world has moved on.” [That policy has worked so well for, oh, about forty-nine years. I see no reason not to stay the course.]