For all the complaining I do about poor journalism, I should note that this AFP article is well-written, factual, objective, and best of all, informative. (via Beutler)
US President George W. Bush charged Monday that Iran has openly declared that it seeks nuclear weapons — an inaccurate accusation at a time of sharp tensions between Washington and Tehran.
“It’s up to Iran to prove to the world that they’re a stabilizing force as opposed to a destabilizing force. After all, this is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon,” he said during a joint press conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
But Iran has repeatedly said that its nuclear program, which is widely believed in the West to be cover for an effort to develop atomic weapons, is for civilian purposes.
Asked to provide examples of Tehran openly declaring that it seeks atomic weapons, White House officials contacted by AFP said that Bush was referring to Iran’s defiance of international calls to freeze sensitive nuclear work.
They explained that he was referring to Tehran’s uranium enrichment — a process that can yield nuclear bomb material — and resulting worries by the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
That’s … right. All of this is really good reporting, which fact-checks the president and tells readers something they may not know.
This has become such a rarity that the AFP article is celebrated as the best … article … ever.
The rave reviews for the AFP piece:
Beutler: “It only took an additional sentence or two, but this AFP report is a one-thousand fold improvement over almost every other dispatch you’ll read about the tensions between Washington and Tehran…. Facts are fun! And if journalists abdicate once again their responsibility to correct powerful people when they lie to us, then the rhetoric shifts, and the perception of reality changes, and suddenly we’re at war.”
Ezra: “[T]his is literally the greatest news story I’ve ever read…. A string of words and punctuation marks in the very first sentence that manage to not only report on the substance of the President’s comments, but on their accuracy as well. It’s as if this news story was trying to leave me informed, rather than conform to some mysterious stylistic standards meant to protect the writer from criticism.”
Atrios: “Journalism! Exciting!”
Yglesias: “[T]he AFP tries a revolutionary experiment in writing their story in such a way as to make readers better informed about the issue at hand rather than more familiar with the president’s propaganda…. Imagine the world we might live in if this were the standard way to open a newspaper story about the president making a false or misleading claim.”
It’s come this. Quality, informative journalism like this is rare enough to make our day when we see it.