Spinning Ban Ki-Moon

While there may be some changes to Telesur’s coverage of the U.S., when it comes to stories about the Middle East, particularly involving Israel, it’s more of the same. On Monday Telesur aired a story about Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s inflammatory comments at a UN conference in Switzerland. The headline of Telesur’s story is “Ahmadinejad Denounces Creation of Racist Government in Israel”. The NY Times headline for the same story was, “Speech Prompts Walkout at Racism Conference”.

In its version of the story, Telesur cherry-picks comments from a statement made by UN Sec. General Ban Ki-moon which was actually highly critical of Ahmadinejad’s remarks. Telesur quotes Ban Ki-moon expressing frustration with the 9 nations that walked out of the conference in protest, but made no mention of his condemnation of the Iranian president’s speech, including this statement: “I deplore the use of this platform by the Iranian President to accuse, divide and even incite. This is the opposite of what this Conference seeks to achieve...It is deeply regrettable that my plea to look to the future of unity was not heeded by the Iranian President.”

By comparison, Al Jazeera English did report the critical comments made by Moon and other Western officials, and generally had much more thorough coverage of the incident, including how it divided opinion in Iran between Ahmadinejad’s critics and supporters.