Re: Iran’s Youth Movements
On Jun 25, 2007, at 3:40 PM, Jim Straub wrote:
I saw that pic in the NYT of the masked cop making the Iranian hipster kid drink out of the butt-cleaning can there.
The NYT was forced to lick its own butt on that one this morning:
Editor’s Note
A front-page article yesterday described a crackdown in Iran that has
included the jailing of three Iranian-Americans, repression or
intimidation of nongovernment organizations pressing for broader
legal rights, warnings to newspaper editors against articles on
banned topics, arrests of advocates for women=92s rights and of student
leaders, and the detention of 150,000 people for wearing clothing
considered not Islamic.
The headline over the article said that Iran was cracking down on
dissent and =93parading examples=94 in the streets, and one paragraph in
the article also said that young men detained for wearing tight T-
shirts or western-style haircuts had been =93paraded bleeding through
Tehran=92s streets by uniformed police officers.=94 The Times caption on
an official Iranian news agency photograph that ran with the article
said that it showed a police officer punishing a young man in public
for wearing un-Islamic clothing by forcing him to suck on a plastic
container normally used for intimate hygiene, a punishment the
article also asserted was for that offense.
But the man in the photograph, according to widespread Iranian news
reports, was one of more than 100 people arrested recently on charges
of being part of a gang that had committed rapes, robberies,
forgeries and other crimes. The caption published on the Web site of
the news agency, Fars, had said only that the man was being punished
as part of a roundup of =93thugs=94 in a Tehran neighborhood.
The current repression has made reporting in Iran difficult. In this
case, The Times relied on an interview with a researcher for a
nongovernment agency that no longer operates within Iran who said the
photograph was evidence of a more visible police role in public
crackdowns on what the authorities consider immoral behavior. The
reporter then wrongly interpreted what the researcher said as
applying to a crackdown on dress, and incorporated the erroneous
interpretation into the body of the article, without giving any
indication of the source for it.
These errors could have been avoided with more rigorous editing. The
article should not have said that young men had been paraded through
the streets for wearing un-Islamic dress, and the headline over it
should not have said that dissenters were being paraded as part of
the crackdown. (Go to Article)