Hi, this thread follows this one which was closed before I ever had a chance to write about it.
To summarize:
A swiss daily newspaper, written in french, published an Amnesty-inspired and Reuters-created map of the world where the US looks like the “worst human rights offender”.
Although the previous sentence is never written, the whole map heavily hints this conclusion. Guess which country (with six sins, versus at the most four for all other countries) is the worst human rights offender on the planet?
The info is revealed in this blog.
I am the blogger of this site.
Since my reputation was attacked (“I’m not at all happy, to put it mildly, about the authenticity of the map…”) before I had any chance to respond, here are some additional infos:
- The newspaper Le Matin Bleu is the largest free daily newspaper of the swiss region.
- There’s a Reuter graphics daily, and from experience I doubt the newspaper can choose the topic of the day, let alone edit it: tight deadlines, mostly
- Instead of smearing my reputation, a board member (Kellner) just followed the link to the newspaper and could check data by himself. He didn’t report any difference between the blog info and the originally published info.
- Indeed, the map doesn’t show ALL countries in the world. Just USA, North Korea, China, Afghanistan, Iran, Irak, Haiti, Angola, Syria, among others. And the USA are clearly seen as the worse of the lot, with six symbols when the next has four. If you take the actual symbols into account and don’t just count them, USA are still worse than Uzbekistan or China.
Aquila Be finally asked
“I’m inclined to think many Dopers would be strong supporters of Amnesty International, but would the propagation of this kind of information be sufficient to damage or destroy the credibility of Amnesty International?”
Good question, but it should be asked to Reuters or Amnesty itself, not me. I can’t tell if this “rating” is more caused by Amnesty data, Reuters graphic, or both. I never implied that only Amnesty was responsible here - since I can’t tell Amnesty and Reuters apart. But either way it’s a serious communication issue. And perhaps even AI should inquire on the matter - unless they are satisfied with such a view of the world.