Dan Rather's recent interview with Saddam Hussein wasn't just ratings gold; it's fertile ground for controversy. Sure, there were complaints that the questions weren't quite as hard-hitting as they might of been, thus allowing the Iraqi dictator a chance to sell himself to the American public, but there's something else that we can all take issue with -- turns out the voice actor who read Saddam's translated responses doesn't actually have an Arabic accent.

Is this offensive? Maybe. It certainly feels wrong, but why? Perhaps it's the fact that the fake accent was totally unnecessary. It's understandable that the questions might not have been as in depth as a classic Mike Wallace interview, but how many of us would risk pissing off a notoriously violent dictator in his own country? Ask Lou Reed some uncomfortable questions and he might just walk off, but Saddam might take slightly more drastic measures. Sure, it'd be a bad idea for him to kill Dan Rather, but we've all thought about it before haven't we? What I mean is, people sometimes throw tantrums which, in hindsight, they knew would get them in serious trouble. Rather's murder may eventually be avenged, but it wouldn't do him any good -- he'd be dead. In our society, rabid self interest isn't just tolerated -- it's a virtue. I'm not going to tell Dan Rather that he should have risked his life for our entertainment. Especially since there's no chance that Saddam would have a teary breakdown and realize that he's totally evil. Nor would he come out and admit to having weapons of mass destruction, or to brutalizing his own people.

But try as I might, I can't see how hiring a guy to read Saddam's lines with a fake accent benefits anybody. It's possible that CBS might have been criticized for giving the translated Hussein a southern accent, but surely they could have found someone who actually has the kind of accent that they were looking for. Maybe then CBS would have been taken to task for contriving to have an Arab speaker do the voice over, but that would be a much less offensive scenario.

Subtitles would be better still, but much less dramatic; and that's really the heart of this issue. This minor deception serves to remind us of the thousands of potential ways that news organizations have to distort the facts. Certainly, as long as the content of Hussein's words wasn't altered there's no real problem. But the conscious choice to have a non Arab-speaker read them in a fake accent was a deliberate attempt to manipulate us emotionally -- something that only fiction is allowed to do.

I prefer to have an emotional response to a news story on my own terms: If something I hear or read conflicts with or confirms my values, I want the way I feel about it to be generated by my own beliefs. Ironically, I want my heated emotional reaction to be prompted by cold, hard facts. That way I can be sure that my reactions are a product of my character, rather than someone else's clever tricks to make me feel the way that they want me to. Paranoid? Not really. I'd be more paranoid if they gave him a German accent.

-B. C. Silvia