war drum

On Saturday, Ahmedinejad made a speech about the western media distorting and fabricating news, and the BBC promptly misreported it (look at Version 1 on that page). Here's the correspondence I've had so far with them.

Dear Steve Hermann

The online story you have at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8288121.stm (Iran visit for UN nuclear chief) includes the following:

The IAEA chief arrived as Iran's president accused Mr Obama of making a "historic mistake" revealing the plant.

"The US president made a big and historic mistake," Iranian state TV quoted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying during a speech on Saturday.

I have looked at the report of the speech on Press TV and what it says is the following:

“[US President Barack Obama] made a huge mistake when he accused Iran of secrecy and gave rise to the recent torrent of false reports,” said President Ahmadinejad.
(http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=107711&sectionid=351020101)

Is this the part of the speech to which you are referring in your report? It is clear that Ahmedinejad is not accusing President Obama of 'making a "historic mistake" revealing the plant, he is accusing Obama of making a mistake when accusing Iran of secrecy. Please could you let me know if there is another section of the speech - not reported on Press TV - which makes the claim you have on the BBC website. It would, incidentally, be a strange claim for Ahmedinejad to make, given that Obama did not reveal the plant (even if he knew about it beforehand): the plant was 'revealed' in a letter to the IAEA by Iran's president himself.

I can also find no record of Ahmedinejad saying, as you quote him, that:

"Later it became clear that [Mr Obama's] information was wrong and that we had no secrecy."

In view of what appears to be a serious case of misquoting Ahmedinejad in the first case, please could you also confirm the context for this second quote, and that this is indeed the claim he was making. As you have presented it, the claim makes little sense, because we are not told which information was wrong. We are simply led to believe that Ahmedinejad makes strange statements. Perhaps that is your intention.

I note that you made no mention of the essence of Ahmedinejad's speech.

Thank you for your attention.

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