Was Hillary Clinton’s Answer in Congo the Right One?

Metric System

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Thu Aug-13-09 03:18 PM
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Was Hillary Clinton’s Answer in Congo the Right One?

Edited on Thu Aug-13-09 03:19 PM by Metric System

Here's an interesting new twist. From the New York Times:

The Highlight: "the much-reported idea that the French-speaking student’s question had been mistranslated is incorrect."

***By the time this video made its way to the attention of most viewers in the United States, though, it was packaged in reports, like one from Kirit Radia of ABC News, stating that “apparently the translator made a mistake.” On Tuesday Mr. Radia reported: “A State Department official tells ABC News the student went up to Clinton after the event and told her he was misquoted,” and said that he had actually asked her to share President Obama’s views on Congo’s relations with China.

It always seemed unlikely to The Lede that a translator working for Mrs. Clinton would make such a large error with a question asked in French — or that an African university student would say “Mr. Clinton” when he meant “Mr. Obama” — and my colleague Jeffrey Gettleman reports in Thursday’s New York Times that “further inspection of the audio recording of the event indicated that the translation was fine; the student had indeed said ‘Mr. Clinton.’ ” A second reporter traveling with Mrs. Clinton, a friend of your Lede blogger’s who is a magazine journalist, said the same thing in an e-mail exchange on Wednesday night, that a French-speaking colleague who was in the room confirmed that the student “did ask the question that way: ‘the mind of Mr. From the lips of Mrs.’ ”

Given that it now appears that the question was translated correctly — and that the male student wanted to know not just what Bill Clinton thought of Chinese relations with Congo but also what the former N.B.A. star Dikembe Mutumbo, who was present at the event, thought, too, but expressed no interest in the perspective of America’s female secretary of state — is it possible that Mrs. Clinton has gotten a raw deal from commentators in the United States for her angry reply?

More to the point, while most of the derisive commentary on Mrs. Clinton’s flash of temper contextualized it by noting that her husband had just been lauded for his trip to North Korea, few noted that she was in the middle of a trip to Congo, where the plight of women, many of whom suffered violent sexual abuse during recent fighting, is a major issue.***

More at the link: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/was-hillary-clintons-answer-in-congo-the-right-one/?hp

Shouldn't the media have fact-checked whether the question was translated correctly before passing this story on to the public?

And THIS passage from the article is something that has been on my mind since first hearing about the incident:

"the male student wanted to know not just what Bill Clinton thought of Chinese relations with Congo but also what the former N.B.A. star Dikembe Mutumbo, who was present at the event, thought, too"

I think that's worth noting.