The Spin Zone: posts about "media spin"

[rinselberg]

Caution: It's Bill O'Reilly's coffee mug. But "Bill-O" isn't here.


This has the potential for a long running discussion: one of those "regular" forum topics. First up: A story about Saudi Arabia. On November 27, CNN TV's Glenn Beck took an ugly stick to the world's largest oil producer:

Saudi Arabia, friend or foe? The kingdom releases 1,500 al Qaeda members from prison as long as they - wait for this - promise not to conduct jihad in the "hood" [neighborhood]. Yes. That should work.

Beck mockingly reassured his TV audience:

I don't want to give you the wrong idea. They didn't just release them. They did make them promise that they wouldn't wage jihad on the Arabian Peninsula.

You can see where Beck was going. It's a simple matter of geography:

By the way, I'm not a geographer, but I am a thinker. And I'm pretty sure I remember reading somewhere that the United States is not part of the Arabian Peninsula, which leads me to "The Point".

And "The Point" ..?

Saudi Arabia ... is not our friend.

On the same day, in the New York Sun, staff reporter Eli Lake opened with the same indirect accusation:

On the eve of the Annapolis summit on the Middle East conflict, the Saudi royal family released 1,500 members of Al Qaeda from prison, requiring them only to promise to refrain from jihad within the Arabian Peninsula ...

Fox News, crediting the New York Sun, followed suit with this:

All it took was a promise not to wage jihad on the Arabian Peninsula for the Saudi royal family to free 1,500 imprisoned Al Qaeda members, declaring they had been "reformed."

The bottom line: The Saudi government just released 1,500 "Al Qaeda members" (Fox News also used the phrase "Al Qaeda terrorists") on their promise not to cause trouble on the Arabian Peninsula. Leaving us with at least the suggestion that for the rest of the world, beyond the Arabian Peninsula, it's "open season". In other words, these newly released prisoners could well be headed for happier hunting grounds, like the U.S. Or even more likely, Iraq, which is Saudi Arabia's closest neighbor to the north.

Except - that's not the bottom line.

The story, which first appeared in an Arabic language (Saudi) newspaper, was translated and posted on the Arab News website. A condensed version was posted on United Press International (UPI). The prisoners are referred to as "Taqfir", which the Saudis use as a general term for any and all kinds of Islamic extremists.

Using the Arab News and UPI reports, I came up with this:

Saudi Arabia has released 1,500 detainees whom authorities say have renounced their ideology of Taqfir, or Islamic extremism.

... a member of a special committee set up by the Interior Ministry to rehabilitate those jailed in Saudi Arabia's crackdown on al-Qaida and its sympathizers ... said the prisoners had undergone lengthy counseling prior to their renunciation of Taqfir, an ideology that brands as an apostate (infidel) any Muslim who disagrees with their extremist interpretation of Islam.

The committee's work is jointly overseen by the ministries of the Interior and Islamic Affairs ... and it includes 100 religious scholars, preachers, specialists in religious doctrine and law, psychologists and social workers ... The committee has met around 5,000 times to offer counseling to 3,200 suspects, who were accused of embracing the Taqfir ideology ... The committee has successfully completed reforming 1,500 of these detainees.

The suspects were largely confused about the meaning of jihad, which they misinterpreted as caliing for violence. They believed that the established national governments in the Middle East, current Islamic scholars and the general public are by and large, infidels. The suspects were (erroneously) committed to the establishment of a single Islamic "super state".

It's clear from the next paragraph that more was required of the suspects than a mere promise to refrain from violence within the geographic confines of the Arabian Peninsula.

"After several graded sessions with the committee ... the suspects renounced their erroneous ideologies, including the concept of driving all infidels from the Arabian Peninsula."


Was Glenn Beck's "Point" mistaken: That Saudi Arabia is not our friend? That's certainly arguable, but one thing is clear: The way that Beck reported the story presented his viewers with a picture that was sketchy at best - like a hand-drawn, crayon reproduction of a high quality photograph.

That's "media spin".


As always, The Spin Zone welcomes your comments.



[PONG]

Come on in. The waterboarding is fine.

[/PONG]Tightlipped terror suspects get no slack from OptiBoarders: Check the latest poll numbers and analysis ...

[chip anderson]

Actually I heard that these "reformed" people were released to make room in the prisons for women who had done some sort of high social crime such as not wear a veil, or some equally dispicable act.

Chip

[braheem24]

Actually I heard that these "reformed" people were released to make room in the prisons for women who had done some sort of high social crime such as not wear a veil, or some equally dispicable act.

Chip

You make this stuff up as you go along? or you have a link?

[chip anderson]

Link to Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage or Sean Hannitty. None of which I admire particularly but they are the source.

Chip

[rinselberg]

THE Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.



Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a "living war machine". The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created.

That was the lead-in of a report published on December 20, 2005 in the U.K. newspaper Scotsman under the title Stalin's half-man, half-ape super-warriors and credited to reporters Chris Stephen and Allan Hall. And who among us wouldn't believe it? According to the Scotsman, it had been researched using the Moscow archives and then published in certain (presumably reputable) Moscow newspapers. After all, there were Communists in charge of Russia in the 1920s. And what Communist was ever more lunatic than the perversely paranoid and massively homicidal dictator Josef Stalin?

Like most media fabrications, there was a kernel of truth. In fact, more than just a kernel of truth: about half of the report was factual. In 1926, the Russian scientist Ilya Ivanov was busily engaged in the dubious project of trying to cross-breed humans and primates. And the project was funded by the Soviet regime. But it had precious little to do with the dictator Josef Stalin, and nothing at all in relation to plans (if there ever were any) for a new Red Army of "half-man, half-ape super-warriors".

It was just another case of the print media "connecting the dots" with blarney.

It started eight days earlier on December 12, 2005, with an article in the New York Times. An American scientist, Clive Wynne, in a report that was published on the Op-Ed page, told the story of the Ivanov experiments.

Even without any fictional embellishment, it was a remarkable story. The experiments, starting in 1926, proceeded without any of the more recent advances in the life sciences such as in-vitro fertilization, automated DNA analyzers, gene splicing, genetic cloning or the like. You can imagine the crudity (and the depravity) of the experiments. And if you can't, you can read some of the details online in Wynne's column.

It made good copy. Copy that was picked up by some newspapers in Moscow. And that's where fiction began to creep in.

What Clive Wynne had reported, based on a reading of some of Ivanov's papers, was that the motivation for these experiments arose in the tension between the new Communist mindset and the old Russian Orthodox Christian faith. Ivanov, who was a faithful servant of the new Communist regime, thought that if he could produce a human-ape hybrid, it would bolster the Darwinian theory of evolution -- and diminish the influence of the old Russian Christian tradition, which (for the most part) was highly skeptical of Darwin's theory that humans were the evolutionary descendants of primates.

In short, Ivanov's experiments were conceived as a way to scientifically discredit the legitimacy of religious faith, which Communist pioneer Karl Marx had famously denigrated as "the opiate of the masses".

Some Moscow newspapers picked up the story and added the rather colorful idea that the project was initiated upon the authority of Stalin, with the objective of creating a new "Planet of the Apes-style" Soviet war machine. That was credited to certain "documents in the archives", but unless my research has come up short, those documents were either imaginary or grossly misinterpreted.



Credit: Moscow News; December 2005.


At the level of the Politburo, Ivanov was just another Russian scientist with credentials that justified the doling out of some grant money. There is no evidence to substantiate the idea that Stalin knew anything in particular about the nature of these experiments. And there is credible reason to believe that Stalin would have been one of the last persons in authority to look with favor upon an attempt to manipulate the human gene pool via breeding experiments.

The Scotsman, in the time honored journalistic tradition of "monkey read, monkey print", followed the lead of the Moscow newspapers, publishing an account that was similarly embellished with the imaginative but unsupportable idea that the experiments were part of a plan by Stalin to develop an army of invincible ape-soldiers.

Completing the media "spin cycle" (or circle), at least one Moscow newspaper (Moscow News) regurgitated the report essentially verbatim from the Scotsman. And from there, it has spread to other places on the Internet, where it has been used in an overtly political context:

Communism involves a certain mass uniformity and an assassination of the notion of "I", and the latest documents found in Russia [substantiate] this doctrine even further.

That's the first sentence of a report on line at Softpedia, under the title "Human-Apes in the Soviet Army: Stalin wanted invincible warriors", accompanied by the inevitable photo alluding to the movie "Planet of the Apes".



The story of Ivanov's experiments and their recent embellishment in the print media has been recounted on The History Channel's MonsterQuest episode Stalin's Ape Man, which opens with a tantalizing computer-generated animation of "ape soldiers" marching en masse in front of the Kremlin.

You may be able to download this MonsterQuest episode in BitTorrent format from this web page.

I've got BitRocket crunching on it now, although whether it will complete the download successfully remains to be seen. I've only tried this two times before, and it only worked perfectly one of those times.

For some quick reading on the topic of cross-bred primate species, see Hybrid Primates on The Messybeast website, which provides some additional details on the Ivanov experiments as well as some other accounts involving the idea of humanized apes (or ape-ified humans).

[chip anderson]

Hasn't the ninth circut rulled that sort of experimentation legal, at least in California? At least as long as the methods remain as crude as you leave to our immagination? It's only getting Federal Subsidy for cloneing and using human embryos that illegal.

In fact, I thought they had entire cults that practiced this sort of thing.

Chip