Not that I'm one to fuss over every utterance by Martin Indyk, but this morning, my colleague Hollie Ainbinder told me that Indyk on NPR on Sunday made some interesting remarks that touched on the farcical nature of the alleged Obama-Netanyahu standoff. So I check the "
transcript" and didn't really find anything like that. But then I listened to the audio, and there were some such remarks.
The "transcript" provided on the NPR web page begins with Indyk saying "I think that there is the big hanging question of once you've laid this out, what is the next step?" But before that, this occurs (thanks to intern Sam McCann for transcribing):
LIANE HANSEN: What do you think the president is trying to accomplish in setting those terms?
MARTIN INDYK: Well in that clip you just played in part of his speech, he kind of made clear that he doesn’t expect there’s going to be any negotiations anytime soon. In fact the effort to re-launch negotiations, which he’s been pursuing for the last two years, has failed. Instead what’s coming down the track is a unilateral effort by the Palestinians to get the UN General Assembly to recognize a Palestinian state and welcome it into the United Nations and I think the President is much more focused on short-term damage control and longer-term laying down a place marker about what the Palestinian state will need to look like. In the short term, Netanyahu’s fairly extreme reaction has actually helped, I think, in his tactic, which is to show the Europeans that the United States is serious and that they should get behind the United States’ effort rather than the UN General Assembly effort.
LIANE HANSEN: How effective will that strategy be do you think?
MARTIN INDYK: Well, we’ll have to see but the great irony of this situation is that the more that Bibi protests, the more credible the President looks to his European allies, where he’s going later today, when he says to them, ‘Come on, get behind me and let’s see if we can move things forward instead of going down the UN General Assembly which is the exact opposite of negotiations, it’s unilateral actions, which will only put the United States and the Europeans, the British and French, in a very difficult position because it will end up in the Security Council. And the President, in the context of this Arab Awakening which he’s just spoken about in the other part of the speech, the main part of the speech, does not want to be in a situation in which, come September, he has to veto a UN Security Council resolution declaring a Palestinian State because that will put him on completely the wrong side of Arab opinion.
Now, this isn't a matter of missing a word of two, and I don't know how common it is, but that's rather problematic. An even bigger problem is that I'm not sure there's any record, either on the web in audio or in transcript form of the "audio headlines" NPR gives. They are frequently the most bias part of programming and, if I'm correct, there's a real accountability problem with them.