Our "press corps" learned something from the Iraq War, right?

Yesterday, I posted on the weekend speech by Ayatollah Khamenei of Iran. I looked at several of the news articles on the speech. So I was surprised - though I probably shouldn't have been - to see this post of Juan Cole's, which includes some long translated excerpts from the speech:

The US media presented only a snippet from the speech of Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei of Iran on Sunday, in which he threatened to damage oil supplies to the West if the US militarily attacked Iran. He did say that, but he also announced that Iran had no intention of striking first, had not attacked and would not attack another country, and that it has no nuclear weapons program and does not want a nuclear bomb. I didn't hear any of those statements reported on television.

For some strange reason, a relatively full text of important speeches given by world leaders is almost never provided to the public by any US media in English. I doubt there are even a handful of speeches easily accessible in English by Spanish President Zapatero, e.g. I cannot entirely explain this strange phenomenon, of the coccooned and almost deliberately ignorant approach to the world of the US corporate media and their audience.

The odd thing is that the American public pays tax dollars so that the Open Source Center of the USG can translate such primary texts. They are, however, not made freely available, though you can get them via university and maybe other good libraries.

Cole also felt constrained to add:

I should think it is obvious that I loathe Khamenei and his regime, but I suppose I have to say so yet again in today's wretched intellectual environment. I find Khamenei's claims that Iran does not abuse human rights to be particularly offensive.

Still, I do think that if the public is going to hear part of Khamenei's speech, it should hear some of the other parts, too.

| +Save/Share | |