Advocacy Journalism Means Never Having to Report What You Don’t Want to Report
We thought AFP’s headline about Iran “saving” a ship from pirates was rather bad. Then we saw CNN’s report.
AFP titled their story “Iran navy saves US freighter from pirates: report.” The problem isn’t so much that the report was published by a propaganda arm of the Iranian government, the state-run IRNA news agency. It’s that the Iranian navy, according to this same article, might not have saved the ship at all.
Just after the AFP reporter announces that the incident was “the first time the Iranian navy protected a US ship from pirates,” readers learn that the owners of the ship tell a very different story.
Maersk Line told AFP that its vessel, Maersk Texas, had “thwarted an attack by multiple pirate skiffs at noon local while transiting the Gulf of Oman, northeast of Fujairah” but denied it had been helped by the Iranian navy.
“Maersk Texas heard from the Iranian navy over radio to the initial distress call, but our vessel received no assistance from the Iranian navy,” spokesman Kevin Steers said in an email sent to AFP in Washington.
That’s some bad reporting and headline writing by AFP. But at least the French news agency bothered to mention the denial. The same can’t be said for CNN.
Unlike AFP, CNN’s headline didn’t make clear that it’s citing a report. Instead, it accepted as fact that Iran “chased off” the pirates. And in the CNN report itself, not a word is said about the denial by the shipper that Iran was involved in repelling the ship.
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