Thursday, November 03, 2016

My hovercraft is full of eels

How are those Rosetta Stone lessons going, Nation's Newspaper of Record?

An article on Oct. 3 about the defeat of a referendum in Colombia on a peace deal between the government and its largest rebel group mistranslated a comment on Twitter by former President Álvaro Uribe. He wrote, “Peace is exciting, the Havana agreement disappointing,” not “Peace is an illusion, the Havana agreement deceptive.” The article also misstated, in some editions, the surname of a Colombian novelist who voted for the deal and the surname of a music teacher who voted against the deal. The novelist is Juan Gabriel Vásquez, not Velásquez, and the music teacher is Roosevelt Pulgarin, not Pulgarib.

Everybody who's run across the basic agenda-setting proposition has heard the summary that McCombs and Shaw borrowed from Bernard Cohen's The Press and Foreign Policy: "The press ... may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about." Cohen's next line is worth attention as well: "And it follows from this that the world looks different to different people, depending not only on their personal interests, but also on the map that is drawn for them by the writers, editors, and publishers of the papers they read."

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