Oh CNN...

I was watching CNN when one of their silly “human interest” stories by Jeanie Moos (their mistress of fluff) came on. I have nothing against these stories – they can be a nice break from the heavy news of the day, but there was a little problem with this one.

The story itself was simple enough. It was about a man who was so taken with the Democratic presidential primary that he got a portrait of Hillary Clinton tattooed on his thigh. There were a few jokes, a few comments, a brief interview with the man with the tattoo, and then the suggestion that rather than being a democrat, he was a dermocrat (a play off the word epidermis – the layer of skin used in tattooing). And there’s the problem.

I am guessing that the ears of the Russian-speakers in the audience pricked up since “dermo” is the Russian word for shit.

In addition to being a profanity, the term “dermocrats” also has a political connotation in Russian. During the economic crisis of 1998 it was the title applied to the liberal market reformers in the Russian government – in other words that the country had gone to shit under their rule. Part of the reason that liberal parties have all but disappeared from the Russian political scene today is that they were blamed for the economic collapse in 1998.

I’m not expecting everyone at CNN to be an expert at everything, but Russian isn’t an arcane language, and the economic collapse Russia went through wasn’t a small event (I even seem to remember CNN covering it at the time). For a network that touts itself as a global news source though it was kind of an obvious thing to let slip through the cracks.