Reuters sticks foot in media mouth

Captain's Quarters has done a nice job with this story, but I can't pass up commentary because this type of media coverage is exactly what chiefly motivates me to blog.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Nelson Mandela is still very much alive despite an embarrassing gaffe by U.S. President George W. Bush, who alluded to the former South African leader's death in an attempt to explain sectarian violence in Iraq.

"It's out there. All we can do is reassure people, especially South Africans, that President Mandela is alive," Achmat Dangor, chief executive officer of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, said as Bush's comments received worldwide coverage.
(Reuters)

Even without the background information provided by Cap'n Ed, isn't it perfectly obvious even in the immediate context what Bush meant?

"I heard somebody say, Where's Mandela?' Well, Mandela's dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas," Bush, who has a reputation for verbal faux pas, said in a press conference in Washington on Thursday.

They seriously thought that Bush believed that Hussein killed Nelson Mandela?

This serves as yet another example of the way a set pattern of thinking leads to editorializing in "objective" news stories. There is no faux pas here by Bush. It's a faux pas by the person who wrote the story for Reuters, and it's a black eye to every editor who passed the story on to its readership.

Why there's no correction or apology attached to the story already is beyond me (barring a brazen attitude in the press regarding such matters).

Compounding the problem, they couldn't even get the wrong punctuation right. There's a single quotation mark after the question mark with no mate to be found in the rest of the paragraph. They probably meant to have it this way:

"I heard somebody say, 'Where's Mandela?' Well, Mandela's dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas," Bush, who has a reputation for verbal faux pas, said in a press conference in Washington on Thursday.

But it should have been like this:

"I heard somebody say, 'Where's Mandela? Well, Mandela's dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas,'" Bush, who has a reputation for verbal faux pas, said in a press conference in Washington on Thursday.

Here's egg on your face, Reuters.

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