Brief Disclaimer:
I'm not trying to incite anyone to violence here, so please don't flame me to ashes on this, folks. I've been forewarned that the Israel/Palestine issue is a dangerous topic for a newbie to tackle here, but I'm citing a news story not as my main point, but as an example.
I'm finding a strange lack of consistency in the news these days. Why it took me this long to notice I cannot say, but it came into sharp focus a I watched snippets of the news at work. I watched intently at the brief updates on the Hamas sponsored children's show "Tomorrow's Pioneers" and the scandal its lead character, a Mickey mouse clone called Farfur, has caused.
The news story itself was odd and disquieting, but as I watched different broadcasts on different stations, I noticed inconsistencies. One channel ran a translation saying "We must annihilate the Jews!" and another ran the translation as "The Israelis are killing us!" CNN ran both.
After discussing the topic with a friend, I did a little looking on my own and found all the network websites had nearly identical stories, mere paraphrasings of the AP and Reuters news feeds. What's going on?
As I watched the story of the scandal caused by Farfur, the Mickey Mouse clone from the Hamas children's show "Tomorrow's Pioneers", teaching the "ABC's of Terror," I began to wonder why no two channel's were running quite the same story. They all agreed that Palestinian broadcasters were upset that a children's show was being used for political indoctrination as well as agreeing that Disney hadn't yet commented on Farfur's uncanny resemblance to America's favorite rodent, but translations of the brief clips used varying degrees of inflammatory language. I even laughed as I saw one CNN broadcast where the newscaster commented on the show's message of hate, but the subtitles were blocked by the news story's title bar.
I began to wonder why there was no consistency. I am a Korean linguist by trade, and I understand almost any translation will have room for slop as you try to find words that have both the same literal meaning and the same cultural significance, but reading translations of Farfur's squeaky speech saying "We must annihilate the Jews!" on one channel and as "The Isrealis are killing us!" on another screams translator negligence to a trained linguist. It brings to mind a story I saw several months ago where a statement from a Hezbollah leader had been dubbed over with English. For a moment, before the dubbing started, you could hear his undubbed speech. His tone was calm and level. Then the dubbing began, and a heavily accented voice yelled a translation calling for the demise of Israel, the U.S., and their allies. Even if the words were accurate, the tone of the speech was not.
So where does that leave me, the humble news viewer, the man who, as a child, idolized the calm, confident newsreaders as they smiled and told me what was happening all around the world? I hoped to allay my concerns of the inconsistencies in the news, but as I tried to track down the varying versions of the story for comparison, all I found were verbatim, or slightly paraphrased, versions of the AP and Reuters feeds. CNN had nothing at all. Even BBC, a source I have always respected for being unbiased, had no information I hadn't read on other sources.
I have always trusted the news, but now I feel I must tentatively revoke that bond I have always felt with the smiling newscasters as I reevaluate my trust.