The things I do for you people.

I copied down by hand one of today’s Ceefax stories, currently running in the world news digest page 142 (page 2 out of 6). I had to wait for it to cycle round to the right page twice because I couldn’t write fast enough. After all that I found that the entire Ceefax story was merely the first four paragraphs of this web page.

Dispute hits UN rights watchdog

A session of the United Nations Human Rights Commission has been suspended for a week amid disagreement over plans to reform the Geneva-based body.

The commission meets annually to examine global human rights standards.

The US has condemned the reform plan, but it has broad support from European, Asian and African countries.

Members with poor human rights records have recently discredited the commission’s work, the BBC’s Imogen Foulkes reports from Geneva.

That’s where the Ceefax story stops. The impression is given that the reactionary US wishes to block reform of the UN Human Rights Commission; that it wishes to perpetuate the present situation whereby countries with poor human rights records discredit the commission’s work. A reader who did not already know would never guess that the substance of the US objection is the opposite of this. The US contends that the proposed rules of entry for the new Human Rights Council, the body that is meant to replace the current Human Rights Commission, are too weak. It argues that countries with poor human rights records will be able to get seats on the new body as they did on the old and subvert the Council as they subverted the Commission.

But perhaps this wrong impression is merely an unfortunate result of the strict word limits on Ceefax stories, and the full picture is given in the story as it appears in the web page?

No. The full, website version of this story only says that “the US says the plan has major deficiencies.” What the US thinks these deficiencies are is not said.

Never mind, I expect the story linked to on the sidebar under the heading “See Also”, “US rejects UN rights council plan” explains why the US is being so obdurate?

It does, eventually. But first we must hear that the US thinks the new plan is unacceptable, that Bolton thinks it has manifold deficiencies, that the US would vote No if the vote was put now, that Bolton is disappointed, again that Bolton says, “we don’t think it is acceptable”, and again that Bolton thinks it has manifold deficiencies.

Only after this hammering of negativity do we learn that “the US ambassador questioned whether the proposal would keep human rights abusers off the new council.” I wonder why the writer thought we had to be told six times that the US did not like the plan before we got one sentence as to why.