How words color the presentation

Let's set the situation; Iran verges on being a "world outlaw". They are running a controversial nuclear program. They claim it is for energy; their opposition claims it is for bomb-making capabilities. Meanwhile, their leader claims the Holocaust never happened, a position most of the world considers untenable in light of overwhelming evidence...both physical and verbal. So their President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was invited to speak at Columbia University. Under the auspices of that invitation, he expressed his desire to visit Ground Zero and lay a wreath, an action presumably to honor the sacrifices of the men who hijacked the planes and flew them into the Towers. This request was denied on (obvious) political grounds.

So here we have a strongly disliked leader of a nation with close ties to numerous groups our country fears/dislikes/hates who holds unpopular, unlikely views and is himself considered a threat to our freedoms...wait a second, I think I just described Congress...and every President we have had since George Washington....

Be that as it may, there has long been a platform in this country for dissenters. To be certain, at times there has been a price to pay. Eugene Debs comes to mind...but so do Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Nathan Hale, Franklin Delanore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Ted Kazinski (sic), the Weathermen, Malcolm X, Jack Kerouac, Walt Whitman....the list goes on and on and on and on.

Of course, there are always people objecting to the free expression of speech. Heaven protect the Valedictorian so foolish as to say something positive about God because the courts will not. Certain things are just too evil, too vile to be spoken, apparently. We believe in free speech...but let's not take it too far. How dare any leader of our country who has a belief, however warped many of us might consider it to be, in God, how dare that leader speak of something so dear to their heart and far from the hearts of a small number of their public? (Check the polls...the lowest I have seen is 86%, the highest upwards of 95% of people claim belief in God. But you wouldn't know it from the din of voices claiming the opposite)

And now we have one of the papers in our largest city joining the chorus. Let's look at some of the verbiage in a "news" article:

"Hatemonger" "hornet's nest of outrage" "outrageous" "Holocaust-denying....tyrant" "You can't..." "...threw fuel on the fire of protest" "architect of the Holocaust" "offensive" "despot" are all emotionally laden words used in the first portion of the article. This sounds like something out of a tabloid. At the very least, this is editorial type stuff, not a news story.

In a "shocking" development, the New York Daily News sees it differently.

This article is so slanted and flawed you would think they would be embarrassed to have printed it. The incendiary writing style is only part of the problem.They start off with the assertion that Dean John Coatsworth would let Hitler speak...in itself, a true assertion. However, with the way they frame it the unobservant reader might think he refers to Hitler revealed...despite the fact they quote him as saying he would allow the pre-war Hitler when he was "more palatable". Although Coatsworth makes this distinction the triumvirate of writers never does...quite the contrary, they do everything they can to present it as if he would ask...and favor...any version of Hitler. Misrepresentation is the name of the game.

Of 7 quotes related to the decision to allow the Iranian President to speak, 5 are outright attacks on Coatsworth and 2 are at best eye-rolling defenses of his choice...despite the fact there was clearly a segment of the population who appreciated the choice as evidenced by the overwhelmingly positive response the article credits his speech with receiving.

The irony here is I have no interest in hearing anything Mahmoud has to say. I do think there is the possibility their nuclear program is what he says it is...for energy. That aside, I do find him to be deliberately ignorant (to say the Holocaust never happened is to ignore documentation, physical evidence, and verbal admissions), aggressive, militant, reprehensible, and dangerous. To be fair, the same things have been said about Presidents Bush, Clinton, Nixon, Kennedy, etc....and, often enough, accurately.

The great thing about this country is that anyone has the right to speak their mind. This is also the terrible thing about this country. Stupid things get said. When people lose their right to say stupid or yes, even offensive, hurtful things, then we have lost the ability to debate, educate, inform, and discuss many, many things.

It is less and less often than I hear anything from Barack Obama that I agree with...but here is a fine statement that a lot more people should take to heart. ""We should never be afraid to confront the lies and rantings of dictators with the power of truth and the strength of our own values and beliefs." Well said. Too bad the writers from the New York Daily News are not that sharp.