#9 | June 5 - 18, 1997  

by Abram Kalashnikov

There is something wire service editors know and most other people don't. News-gathering is a mystical process that often yields unexpected, bizarre results. These results should be put on the ticker no matter what they are. The news is made in heaven. It is not for more mortals to tamper with.

The other day, the English-language service of Agence France Presse moved a story entitled "Tsar's descendant to swear in Russian cathedral on June 21."

The story was not really about swearing. It's just a little news story about how Prince Georgy, heir to the non-existent Russian throne, intends to take an oath of allegiance to Russia and the Orthodox Church in a cathedral in Kostroma. So who cares? But the Great Wire God intervened on behalf of the hapless writer, who did not even get a byline for his/her efforts. With the deadline GWG put in the writer's head, the story takes on a twist worthy of Samuel Beckett.

See pudgy little Georgy drive up to the cathedral in a black Mercedes? See him disembark and take his mother, Grand Duchess Leonida, by the hand? See them walk into the ancient cathedral, surrounded by bodyguards and fawning Russian noblemen in moth-eaten suits? And then picture the entourage stepping back as the prince screams at the top of his adolescent voice, "@#!$ Russia! @#$! the Orthodox Church! To @#$! hell with the monarchy!"

"However, the ceremony could be delayed several days to allow the prince to finish his exams," AFP writes. Evidently, the prince, who goes to school in Madrid, has to take a few lessons to be able to swear adequately in the language of Lenin and Nicholas II, and then face rigorous tests before strict keepers of imperial traditions will allow him to let loose in a Ruusian church.

Bloopers? Mix-ups? No, merely manifestations of the wires' direct contact with extraterrestrial forces.

There is more existential truth in some wire service "mistakes" than in ordinary, unexciting news stories. Remember the Reuters story entitled "Yeltsin goes to Paris for Yeltsin's funeral"? It was, in fact, Francois Mitterand who was being buried, but the West was at the time so concerned about Yeltsin's fragile state of health that the Great Wire God had Yeltsin watch fimself being buriedÑ as an illustration of the endless circle of life.

Or consider the AP story from Moscow (filed quite a while ago) in which a Russian nationalist fanatic was quoted as saying, "The conspiracy [Western, Jewish or whatever] spread its terrifying testicles through the pores of society," Mistakes like that don't happen by accident. Only a higher power is capable of spreading terrifying anti-Russian testicles all over the world with the instantaneousness of wire reports.

Among all of these goof-ups, of course, there are the timeless gaffes from the English-language service of ITAR-TASS. For instance, they discovered "the ingenious minorities of the Far North" (which really need a lot of ingenuity to survive) or, in the usual TASS manner of using upper-case characters only, "THE FEDERAL LAW ON AIDS FOR DEPUTIES"...

Sure, one can write that stuff off to the bad English of TASS translators, but that would mean disregarding the deeper meaning of the form in which the stories appeared on the ticker. I suspect that even Soviet-era censors, noticing the slight difference between the Russian and the English text of a dispatch, sometimes decided to let it go out of reverence for the Great Wire God.

It is human nature to make mistakes. And when wire service editors see a genuine mistake, they hasten to correct it. But when a bizarre element in a story goes beyond the human capacity for errors, even the most conscientious editor is obliged to pass it over.

Just last week, AP filed a story from Oslo on State Duma speaker Gennady Seleznyov's talks with Norwegian officials on some aspect of NATO expansion. Since the Oslo-based reporter does not, in his normal line of work, need to know anything about countries other than Norway, the story had moved, AP editors belatedly realized that the German leader is not related to Nat 'King' Cole and corrected the last name (a refile of the story actually said at the top, "CORRECTS COLE TO KOHL IN NEXT TO LAST GRAPH").

But the Great Wire God had them keep the "Helmet". It's better this way, you will agree.

The Associated Press, in fact, will sometimes create true epics, complete with Hiawatha-style hyperbole, out of certain everyday occasions. Take a recent story (datelined Moscow) on a bombing in a Russian conscription center. "An unidentified man hurled a home-make bomb into the center in the city of Volgograd, some 900 kilometers (550 miles) southeast of Moscow, injuring two women workers, who had to be hospitalized," an unamed reporter writes.

Apparently, Russian police suspect the same guy who was designated by the Red Army to hurl intercontinental ballistic missiles at the Astrodome. 550 miles? With an arm like that, he should be playing for the Astros.