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Unpopular Ideas

Ramblings and Digressions from out of left field, and beyond....

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Location: Piedmont of Virginia, United States

All human history, and just about everything else as well, consists of a never-ending struggle against ignorance.

Monday, June 28, 2010

Uninformative from Istanbul

In a symphony the opening passage usually states the theme of at least the first movement if not of the whole piece, and then what comes afterward explores and elaborates on that theme.   The same process is also good practice in journalism.

But this morning the BBC is running an article from I presume one of its chief reporters in Istanbul, in which the first paragraph reads:

 The Israeli commando raid on a Turkish ship carrying aid to Gaza has seen Turkey in the role of mouthpiece for the fury of the Muslim world. But once this week's passions have cooled, it may be in Turkey's interests to repair relations with Israel.

 And he says the very same thing in the very ending of the article.  Yet between those two key points of any written account, nowhere in the body of the article does he say one thing about why those relations need to be repaired.   The view that he gives instead of how Turkey's former secular tendencies are now being slowly pushed aside by religion-oriented forces is interesting and informative, but it doesn't in any way expand on the theme that he had stated.

I'm guessing that this guy has never heard a classical symphony, or that if he did, he wasn't paying attention to how a symphony, or an article that is supposed to be informative, is structured -- unless he was just clumsily flinging a couple of obligatory salutes in certain directions that are not easy to determine from here. 

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