The Los Angeles Times ran an editorial last week (registration may be required) in which they inveigh against the current crop of reality shows for scripting events and presenting them as supposedly “real.” Fair enough - that’s a valid complaint, although who actually believed that “The Simple Life” was untouched by producers’ hands is a mystery to me.
But in the lead paragraph for this rant, the LA Times righteously thunders that it has proof that the “reality” is fake, and says:
Now, obviously the “fake Thanksgiving turkey in Iraq” is not critical to the point they are making – it’s just a throwaway example of something else that’s… well… fake.
But the New York Times, which reported on the fake turkey story, admitted later that it wasn’t fake after all.
Thus are urban legends perpetuated.
Say what you will about Bush. The turkey wasn’t fake, and the LA Times is helping the cause of ignorance by repeating the untrue story.
Hm, I hadn’t heard that before; from what I heard then the turkey was created for the photo op and the servicemen were eating from steam trays (though I’m sure if the bird was properly cooked it got eaten by somebody). But I don’t remember anyone saying it was plastic or anything. I suspect newspapers just don’t fact-check editorials much (I’ve certainly seen bullshit in some of them that a competent fact-checker should have caught) , though there’s a very small chance that the guy used poor phrasing and meant to say “staged”. But if there’s a legend of a plastic bird around, yeah, he’s most likely spreading it.
Should you say the “LA Times” is “righteously thundering”, when it’s some entertainment guy’s editorial?
I’ve noticed the L.A. Times has a penchant for one urban legend in particular…which is that nobody rides the Metro trains, except a few rich white people.
I guess I’m with Bricker here. Even though the circumstances surrounding the turkey aren’t what they were made to look like, calling it a fake plastic turkey makes it seem even worse than that.
I’m guessing they just don’t know, but that’s really not an excuse. It’s the same type of thing that Fox News is accused of, repeating misstatements. It makes it appear true.
Personally, using a fake turkey would be a lot worse than what actually happened.
Bricker, are you by any chance a Tim Blair reader?
From what I’ve heard it’s like Beagledave says- its standard to have a fully-cooked turkey at the tables as a centerpiece but the troops actually get served mess hall style as usual for logistical purposes. Dunno if the centerpieces get eaten or not.
[sub](hope this gets in before the “yeah, well Bushco’s WMD lie led to 1,000,000 dead Iraqi babies!!!1!1!” crowd shows up)[/sub]
Bricker, I read the OP differently. I read the sentence as, “not the Pentagon Papers (a real smoking gun), but something which sure sounds convincing, like the fake turkey story did.”
Absolutley SOP. I can’t say if the Bush turkey was real or not, I wasn’t there. But I can say, in 20 years of Naval service, I always had real turkey on turkey day. Every year. Every mess hall. No mater where I was deployed. Sure, we ate it off of steel or fiberglass mess trays, but the food was real. The cooks would carve it up in front of you most times. The times they didn’t, you could tell it was freshly carved.
The way it was explained to me was, you have (real) turkey prepared in the kitchen and served from steam trays, to comply with hygiene regulations; and then, to make it look more festive, you get a cheap little turkey and cook it superficially and use it as a sort of centrepiece.
Makes a lot more sense this way really. After all, whats both cheaper to obtain and easier to find then a photorealistic fake plastic turkey?: a real turkey. It’s not like their an ultra-rare, hard to find item that would need to be faked.
But I do understand how this story might have started. When I saw the pic on CNN, the turkey looked plastic. It was Martha Stewart-perfect. That, combined with the total unexpectedness of Bush being in Iraq at all, led me to momentarily suspect that CNN had been hacked or was playing some kind of weird gag.
Actually, I was in Iraq last year at thanksgiving. Bush came to the base I was at(Baghdad international airport), but not my camp on base. We were only given the presence of the Secretary of the Air Force, Dr. Roche, who is probably the fattest man that I have ever seen in person. I also happen to be a military cook and I know how thanksgiving gets done overseas. They would probably have a combination of “real” turkeys and turkey rolls, which are rolls of light and dark meat, in addition to many other meats, starches, veggies, etc. I am definitely a Bush hater, but I can’t say how much I respected him for showing up on Turkey Day in the middle of a warzone.
I just don’t see why people would care. It’s a photo op, all presidents do 'em, they’re all a little fake, and if the troops enjoyed eating with the president, which most probably did, what the fuck is the harm if they make it slightly prettier for TV?
So the fact that they didn’t even really do that makes it all the less important.
