Media Errors on Afghanistan and Iraq

The ignorance of the media is disturbing, especially because the errors that it purveys are accepted as accurate even by commentators and politicians. The inaccurate information all of these individuals spread undermines the foundation of knowledge held by the public, which, in turn, causes citizens to be uninformed or falsely informed when they cast their votes in elections for public office.

Inaccuracy also undermines confidence in the media, commentators and policymakers, as well as distracts from any accurate information they attempt to convey. The media cannot even seem to get basic pronunciation or facts right about Afghanistan or Iraq, even though these two countries have been of enormous importance to the world.


Afghanistan

In Afghanistan, I have identified at least three common errors these sources of information get wrong. Sometimes, they use the word "Afghani/s" for things that are of or related to Afghanistan or to refer to its people. However, the correct word is Afghan. Afghani refers strictly to the currency of Afghanistan.

The media refers to certain individuals in Afghanistan as "using only one name," as if to imply that the individual has more than one name, but chooses not to use it. But many Afghans have only one name, so the media should say that certain individual "has only one name." The same error is made in regard to Indonesians and others.

The media often states that Soviet troops were in Afghanistan for ten years. They derive this figure from the years 1979-1989 that the Soviets were in Afghanistan, ignoring the fact that the Soviets invaded December 26, 1979 and left on February 15, 1989 -- after being there only a little over nine years. In other words, the media rounded up the number of years, instead of rounding it down because it probably did not bother to check the dates. Yet, if a person were one minute away from his 100th birthday when he died, the press would round his age down to 99 because the latter figure would represent his legal age.

I will take the opportunity to point out yet another media error here because it involved a recent battle with the Taliban in Afghanistan. In one story, one of the wire services reported that "more than 20" Taliban were killed in one battle and another five Taliban killed in another battle in Afghanistan on a particular day. The media then drew the conclusion that "at least 25" Taliban were killed in battles that day, which demonstrated either its carelessness or its ignorance of basic math and logic. More than 20 people must mean at least 21. Twenty-one plus five equals at least 26, not 25.


Iraq

In regard to Iraq, the media's pronunciation is below professional standard. First, it is necessary to explain that Arabic is a non-alphabetic language. Therefore, Arabic must be rendered into an alphabetic language phonetically. For universal pronunciation, it is rendered specifically into the Latin Alphabet, in which vowels are pronounced consistently. Thus, Arabic words are to be pronounced as they are rendered -- phonetically, in the Latin Alphabet. Yet, the media seems insistent on pronouncing Arabic words and names as if they were English words, or, in other words, randomly.

Here are three common examples of the correct pronunciation versus the most common incorrect one: Iraq (ee ROCK), not (eye RACK); Mosul (mo SOOL), not (MO zul) (if it were supposed to be pronounced with a Z sound, it would have been rendered "Mozul;" Abu Ghraib (AH boo gra EEB), not (AH boo GRAYB) (if two vowels were intended as a diphthong, it would have been rendered that way, such as "Grayb." I have never heard one member of the press or politician yet pronounce the last example correctly. In short, the media cannot even pronounce words phonetically -- even well-known ones.

Another area of media error concerns the different religious and ethnic groups in Iraq, which the media tends to conflate. For example, it almost always refers to the main groups in Iraq as "Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds." Yet Kurds are Sunnis. In other words, this reference would be like saying "Christians, Jews and Blacks," as if Blacks were not Christian. What the media means to say, but seldom ever does, is "Shi'ite and Sunni Arabs, and Kurds."

Shi'ites present another challenge for ignorant members of the press. They suddenly learned the word Shia to refer to the sect itself, which they began to use as an adjective as never before in order to describe things of or related to Shia Islam, instead of saying "Shi'ite." Worse, they invented the word "Shias" to supplant Shi'ites to describe adherents to Shia Islam.

A major area of media confusion and inaccuracy arises from the name of the current war in Iraq. Although it gets it right in Afghanistan by calling that conflict the "Afghan War," and never the "Afghanistan War," it usually refers to the war in Iraq as the "Iraq War," instead of the "Iraqi War." It would be like calling it the "Korea War" instead of the "Korean War." Note: it should be called the "Vietnamese War," not the "Vietnam War."

The issue of the name of the war in Iraq raises a larger problem. The media now refers to what it called the 1991 "Persian Gulf War," -- a name it invented -- as the first Gulf War. The first war in the Persian Gulf was the Iraqi-Iranian War of 1980-1988 (which the media calls the "Iraq-Iran War," which would be like calling it the "Russia-Japan War," instead of the "Russo-Japanese War,") which, as I noted in a recent post, involved attacks on shipping in the waters of the Gulf. However, the Liberation of Kuwait -- the name chosen by the Administration of President George H.W. Bush, was largely not fought over the waters of the Gulf. It makes more sense to distinguish the first and second American-lead campaigns against Iraq as the Liberation of Kuwait and the Liberation of Iraq (the latter being the name chosen by the Administration of President George W. Bush), not only because these were the official names of these wars, but also because they most accurately express the different purposes of those wars.

If the media cannot get even basic pronunciation and facts right about the major issues of the day, we cannot have any confidence in it, nor can we have much confidence in policymakers who repeat the same errors.