26 fevereiro 2003

VITAMEDIAS
Dan, Saddam et all:
[Dan] Rather's Saddam interview draws skeptics:
The newsman said it was all because of "hard work and luck," though an Associated Press report said Mr. Rather had the help of former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, now an anti-war activist who met with Saddam on Sunday.
Mr. Clark has his own agenda. [...]
The Media Research Center took Mr. Rather to task yesterday for saying he had a startling scoop: Saddam had "challenged" President Bush to a televised debate. No such scoop, the center pointed out. Saddam had proposed the same thing in a 1990 interview with Mr. Rather.
Saddam Hussein, Reporter: After an interview that ran three times as long as scheduled, Hussein took Rather into his office and quizzed him extensively about "American public opinion and President Bush."
Trust CBS? I'd Rather not: I phoned my son, an active duty soldier, and asked him if he had seen the broadcast. With a degree in communications, and having worked for NBC News in London as an intern, he's a pretty sharp young media observer in his own right. "Wow, if nothing else, Dan Rather's got the interview of a lifetime!" was his response.
Well, the "interview of a lifetime" became more dubious when I delayed my usual departure time for the office, to watch Harry Smith on the CBS Morning News program. Smith, who I always viewed as a solid news citizen, sheepishly said something like this: "We're going to bring you some more summaries of Dan Rather's exclusive interview with Saddam Hussein, but we are have some technical problems with the actual tapes.
"The interviews were translated by government translators, and CBS needed time to re-translate the interviews, but the Iraqi government broadcast agency has still not provided CBS with the unedited tapes from the three-hour broadcast. When they do, we'll bring them to you, but in any case, Dan Rather will update on some other revelations from his remarkable interview."
This sparked my memory, of a brief mention Rather made in the Monday evening broadcast about the need for "double translation" of the interview.
It will take awhile for non-newshounds to work this out, but look at it this way. Either as part of the terms of this "exclusive" interview, or as a backstop to arrangements CBS felt were suspicious all along, the interview was not only government arranged and controlled, but when Rather posed a question, it was translated by an aide to Saddam, and his responses filtered for U.S. viewers by an aide to Saddam.